supplemented, it may be, by State meals, and the child, already drilled by the State, passing out from school into the State workshop. To whatever extent all this takes place, it will increase the parent's freedom, will relieve the mother from the incessant watchfulness which a household now entails, and will set the father free to work less or to choose more congenial work. Here again it is easy to see that there may be good and evil in the change. Mrs. Grote has hinted at a common opinion, most often left unexpressed, that a man of genius is wise to take a mistress rather than a wife, in order that he may live for his art and not for his family ;[1] and Mr. Hamerton in a more temperate argument has pointed out that "the married man never goes, or hardly ever goes, on the same intellectual lines which he would have followed if he had remained a bachelor."[2] Now, some of the cases Mr. Hamerton puts—where a man having married a rich wife, sacrifices his career to her wishes, or where, having married an extravagant wife, he toils for her luxury—are cases that only concern a few persons. But the need of providing for children is a constant source of excessive toil and impoverishment. If fathers generally come to feel this obligation less and less, it will certainly leave them freer to consider their own pleasures, or, it may be, their own capacity for good work. They will lose what is sometimes a wholesome discipline; they will be relieved from what is often a burden heavy to bear.
Now, when we have discarded all that was temporary in the old system of family relations the need of defence against enemies, the obligation of a common
- ↑ Grote's Life of Ary Scheffer, p. 49. Cf. p. 91.
- ↑ Hamerton, The Intellectual Life. Part vii. letter v.
