Family life as we know it cries. aloud for reformation.

Religion pretends to foster family life. Truly, though, the church battens off the family-uses the family as its dupe, its tool and its victim. The church, as does a commercial corporation, possesses long life, virtual immortality. Its human members and agents may die or fall away, but the organization survives. Church and state have worked in concert to rig matters in such a way that the family is kept a comparatively temporary and weak form of social life.

Small families are bound to be poor or of precarious wealth, desperately hard as their wage-winning members work and brave as are the fronts kept up. Divorces occasionally occur for reasons as trivial as the marriages were entered into for in the first place, but in millions of cases divorces come because of the sheer impossibility of the married persons' keeping their attempted establishment going.

As a rule, parents are unable to give their children the enormously costly bringing up that modern life calls for. Usually, scholarship is so unlikely to pay off promptly in cash that the little family's intellectual life is sickly or moribund. Not one home in twenty has a decent library. People are subject to many new and irresponsible influences, many of them pernicious, reaching into the home from outside and perverting the family's more suggestible members.

One of the first corrections to introduce, if we shall reform the family, is a strict adherence to the principle of government by the consent of the governed. The old-fashioned family is a monarchy: legally and in theory at least, an autocracy. Inevitably many of such a family's subject elements are irked beyond

endurance by their master's dictation. Straitened as he is, the family tyrant is not to be expected to rule wisely or tactfully.

Commonly those members of the family who break away are the family's most valuable components, economically judged. They are entering the period of life in which their earning power is likeliest to increase. Left in the weakened household are the elderly, the very young and those who suffer from handicaps. The relic family lives on only miserably, and its complete extinction is only a matter of time.

Customarily the departing scion fails to make the best use of his freedom. He lacks time, strength, information and intelligence to achieve simultaneously the making of a living and the living of a good life. He is liable to marry and start the dreary routine anew. In any case, he and his familiars are too few and weak to flourish.

Consent government subsumes a written house law. Those who are to be attracted to the family and those to be kept in good affection to it must know what they are contracting for. People have a right to form an artificial family or to supplement a natural family by contractual agumentation. There are good reasons why they will wish to. The comforts and advantages of family life are manyif only the faults and hazards of the conventional family can be obviated, counteracted or coped with.

Ownership of some means of production will have to be vested in the family if it is to live many generations: the family's equity in fruitful property must be made inalienable. One of the best means of production is farm land.

At first glance we may seem to be proposing something legally difficult or impossible. Entailed estates got