into disfavor in England because they ceased to be lived upon and worked by the families owning them, and so they caused a hereditary tenant to rent and occupy the land. There are ways by which property can be kept in the family, however, and be kept under cultivation.

It makes economic sense to gather people of widely differing ages into one family unit for their mutual help. Of old, the family afforded its members mutual protections, some of which compare roughly with the protection which a person now gets through an insurance company. As families have shriveled the insurance companies have burgeoned-have become huge pools of money and taken on tremendous wealth and power. This fact hints at the potentialities inherent in the formation of semiartificial families and of confederations of such families.

A grave misconception about families' formation is that a man and a woman marry because they wish to produce children; and this is the common-law view and the courts'. Undoubtedly some people do marry for that reason; but a marriage is incomparably oftener negotiated because people wish to engage in sex relations, because if heterosexual such relations are liable to result in children being born and because when children are born out of wedlock the attendant inconveniences are worse than they are for a married couple.

even

Marriage seems to its participants a making of the best of a bad bargain. As things are (and will almost certainly remain) a woman would be a fool to invite pregnancy without first obtaining a legal status which will assure her (to the extent that anything can) the practical help that she and her child are going to need. More commonly than is otherwise

one

the case, a man and a woman marry with the clear understanding that they shall not breed too many brats

and to hell with the law's idiocies. Only rarely does a court grant a divorce because a man demands of his wife that she bear more children than she wants to-only once in a blue moon is a husband that big a fool. Legal approval of a contract which shall set reasonable bounds upon proliferation is needed.

We may solve our problem of a consented-to or contracted-for family in this way: let the House of Smith (or the House of Jones or the House of Brown or whatever) organize itself as a corporation or association composed of kinsmen acknowledged. Other kinsmen, however close and obvious they may be, are to be excluded from the club; and acknowledgment is to be at the members' option. Property is to be owned and managed by the House thus organized, not, as a rule, by the natural family.

Besides the natural relations there shall be acknowledged cousins, and such consinship can be purely theoretic. We may take it for granted that every person in the world is a cousin in some degree (if not more closely related) of every other member of our species: for our House's purposes, however, the acknowledgment of that relationship, in each individual case, is the primary consideration. We can withhold acknowledgment on any ground we like; but probably we shall contract that if a kinsman acknowledged begets or bears more than a stipulated number of children those children shall not thereby have any claim to House property. Surplus children shall have, as a matter of right, only the claims upon their natural families that civil laws recognize and courts enforce. An unauthorized child may, however, if