leave much untold; but what I have set down here haphazard is
enough to condemn the system that produced us. The corner stone of
that system was the family and the institution of marriage as we
have it to-day in England.


HEARTH AND HOME

There is no shirking it: if marriage cannot be made to produce
something better than we are, marriage will have to go, or else
the nation will have to go. It is no use talking of honor, virtue,
purity, and wholesome, sweet, clean, English home lives when what
is meant is simply the habits I have described. The flat fact is
that English home life to-day is neither honorable, virtuous,
wholesome, sweet, clean, nor in any creditable way distinctively
English. It is in many respects conspicuously the reverse; and the
result of withdrawing children from it completely at an early age,
and sending them to a public school and then to a university,
does, in spite of the fact that these institutions are class
warped and in some respects quite abominably corrupt, produce
sociabler men. Women, too, are improved by the escape from home
provided by women's colleges; but as very few of them are
fortunate enough to enjoy this advantage, most women are so
thoroughly home-bred as to be unfit for human society. So little
is expected of them that in Sheridan's School for Scandal we
hardly notice that the heroine is a female cad, as detestable and
dishonorable in her repentance as she is vulgar and silly in her
naughtiness. It was left to an abnormal critic like George Gissing
to point out the glaring fact that in the remarkable set of life
studies of XIXth century women to be found in the novels of