SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS, both of theoretical and practical bearing, may
here be pointed out. We have seen that the biological processes of life
have created the family, and that the family, as an institution, rests
upon these biological conditions. Hence it is not too much to say,
first, that the family is not a man-made institution; and, secondly,
that it rests upon certain fundamental instincts of human nature. Now,
both of these statements are also true to a certain extent as to human
society in general. There is a sense in which social organization is not
wholly man-made, and it is true that all human institutions rest to some
extent upon human instincts. This is not saying, of course, that man has
not modified and may not modify social organization and human
institutions through his reason, but it is saying that the essential
elements in human institutions and in the social order must correspond
to the conditions of life generally and to the instincts which natural
selection has implanted in the species. To attempt to reorganize human
society or to reconstruct institutions regardless of the biological
conditions of life, or regardless of human instincts, is to meet with
certain failure.

A practical conclusion which may be drawn also is that those people who
advocate sexual promiscuity in present society, or free love, as they
please to style it, are advocating a condition which would result in the
elimination of any group that practiced it. Promiscuity, or even great
instability in the family life, as we have already seen, would lead to
the undermining of everything upon which a higher civilization rests.
The people in modern society who advocate such theories as free love,
therefore, are more dangerous than the worst anarchist or the most
revolutionary socialist. In other words, the modern attack upon the
family is more of a menace to all that is worth while in human life than