great writer.


This conception of matrimony and of the family may seem unromantic,
prosaic, materialistic; but we must not suppose that because of it the
Romans failed to experience the tenderest and sweetest affections of
the human heart. The letters of Cicero himself show how tenderly even
Romans could love wife and children. Although they distrusted and
combatted as dangerous to the prosperity and well-being of the state
those dearest and gentlest personal affections that in our times
literature, music, religion, philosophy, and custom have educated,
encouraged, and exalted, as one of the supreme fountains of civil life,
should we therefore reckon them barbarians? We must not forget the
great diversity between our times and theirs. The confidence which
modern men repose in love as a principle, in its ultimate wisdom, in
its beneficial influence or the affairs of the world; in the idea that
every man has the right to choose for himself the person of the
opposite sex toward whom the liveliest and strongest personal
attraction impels him--these are the supreme blossoms of modern
individualism, the roots of which have been able to fasten only in the
rich soil of modern civilization.

The great ease of living that we now enjoy, the lofty intellectual
development of our day, permit us to relax the severe discipline that
poorer times and peoples, constrained to lead a harder life, had to
impose upon themselves. Although the habit may seem hard and
barbarous, certainly almost all the great peoples of the past, and the
majority of those contemporary who live outside our civilization, have
conceived and practised matrimony not as a right of sentiment, but as a
duty of reason. To fulfil it, the young have turned to the sagacity of