change their forms and lines of operation as changes occur in the industrial system and in the organization of society. To check the development of society in order to prevent selfishness and greed would certainly be preposterous.
Passing by others who dabble in social discussions, I will notice, finally, the poets and the novelists. The influence of the latter, in our day, is very great. About all the information which certain people possess on social questions comes from the novelists. They give us pictures of society either as they see it or as they want to see it. Their presentations are as fragmentary and disconnected as paintings hung in a gallery. At best they are kaleidoscopic and have no cohesion but that of an arbitrary symmetry. They deal by preference with that sociological subject which stands first in importance, the family, including marriage, paternity, and divorce, and also the relations of love and courtship. It is significant of the effect which the novel has produced by its treatment of these things that they are all regarded with a certain levity; we know, however, that they surpass all others in weight and importance. Consider the notions about love which are spread abroad amongst our young people by the novels of to-day. Those notions are purely conventional and artificial. I do not, of course, mean to argue that the old-fashioned plan under which the parents selected husbands or wives for their children was wiser than our methods of to-day, though we might well ask whether the old plan made any more unhappy marriages than are made to-day. But if young people are taught that love is a kind of disease which may be caught or may not, like the measles, that it comes only once in a life-time, that it is a passion which ought not to be controlled by reason or
