This task, it may finally be added, is always an adventure. However well
organised the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of
risks. We may smile, therefore, when it is remarked that the future
developments of the home are risky. Birds in the air and fishes in the
sea, quite as much as our own ancestors on the earth, have always found
life full of risks. It was the greatest risk of all when they insisted on
continuing on the old outworn ways and so became extinct. If the home is
an experiment and a risky experiment, one can only say that life is always
like that. We have to see to it that in this central experiment, on which
our happiness so largely depends, all our finest qualities are mobilised.
Even the smallest homes under the new conditions cannot be built to last
with small minds and small hearts. Indeed the discipline of the home
demands not only the best intellectual qualities that are available, but
often involves--and in men as well as in women--a spiritual training fit
to make sweeter and more generous saints than any cloister. The greater
the freedom, the more complete the equality of husband and wife, the
greater the possibilities of discipline and development. In view of the
rigidities and injustices of the law, many couples nowadays dispense with
legal marriage, and form their own private contract; that method has
sometimes proved more favourable to the fidelity and permanence of love
than external compulsion; it assists the husband to remain the lover, and
it is often the lover more than the husband that the modern woman needs;
but it has always to be remembered that in the present condition of law
and social opinion a slur is cast on the children of such unions. No
doubt, however, marriage and the home will undergo modifications, which
will tend to make these ancient institutions a little more flexible and to
permit a greater degree of variation to meet special circumstances. We can
occupy ourselves with no more essential task, whether as regards ourselves
or the race, than to make more beautiful the House of Life for the