relations of our race.

I assume it to be generally admitted, that possibly man's first and
probably his greatest advance toward order--and, therefore, toward
civilization--was the creation of the family as the social nucleus. As
Napoleon said, when the lawyers were drafting his Civil Code, "Make the
family responsible to its head, and the head to me, and I will keep order
in France." And yet although our dependence on the family system has been
recognized in every age and in every land, there has been no restraint on
personal liberty which has been more resented, by both men and women
alike, than has been this bond which, when perfect, constrains one man and
one woman to live a joint life until death shall them part, for the
propagation, care, and defence of their children.

The result is that no civilization has, as yet, ever succeeded, and none
promises in the immediate future to succeed, in enforcing this primary
obligation, and we are thus led to consider the cause, inherent in our
complex nature, which makes it impossible for us to establish an
equilibrium between mind and matter. A difficulty which never has been
even partially overcome, which wrecked the Roman Empire and the Christian
Church, which has wrecked all systems of law, and which has never been
more lucidly defined than by Saint Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans,
"For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.
For that which I do, I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but
what I hate, that do I.... Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin
that dwelleth in me.... For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil
which I would not, that I do.... For I delight in the law of God after the
inward man: ... But I see another law in my members, warring against the
law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is
in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the