Sever 11 was well filled again last evening at the third of Professor Peabody's lectures on Social Ethics. He spoke on the question of marriage and divorce, their history, relation, and significance. Divorce is the negative side of the question; it is the symbol of inconstant family life. It has increased within the last thirty years almost three times as fast as the population, and it has come to be granted for trivial and even nonsensical reasons. The looseness that pervades the whole system has brought with it a moral shock and a consequent great social evil.

To remedy this evil, we must first understand the positive side of the question and this involves a knowledge of the real function of marriage. Marriage, as a modern institution is the result of a gradual evolution from many forms of living. First there was the patriarchal in which man asserted absolute superiority over woman, and captured as many wives as he could. Next came the matriarchal, an inevitable reaction from the former, in which marriage by capture was succeeded by marriage through captivation. Then came the union of one man with one woman for life, but against this the great forces of individualism has begun to act, and threaten to sweep everything before them. Individualism, carried to an extreme, means isolation, and isolation and marriage can be connected only by accident. Marriage, dominated by individualism, becomes the mere sport of personal caprice, and loses every whit of stability.

We see today, however, the first signs of the reaction against individualism. Man is waking up to the realization that each person is only an atom in society and must find his place in its organism. With this thought noted in the minds of the people, mariage is secure, for it rests, not so much on the strictness of law, as on the tradition of reverence and instinct of respect with which people regard it. Such feeling is destroyed no more surely by city-living, with its drifting home-life or even absolute homelessness, than on the ostentation of the luxurious rich, in their studied contempt of simple home duties and their craving for a society life founded on indolence and selfishness.

People must come to see that marriage is something more than a temporary compact between two people: they must realize that it is, through the family, the unit of civilization and the basis of lasting progress, and that the struggle between marriage and divorce is really the struggle of a social self, which leads to universal well-being, against a selfish self, which leads to chaos.

Professor Peabody not only discoursed on the serious and profound aspects of the question, but also touched not infrequently on the more humorous and popular side. He was warmly applauded at the close of the lecture. Next week he will give his fourth lecture in the course, on the broader question of charity.