A Compact Mass

From the conclusion of Brooks Adams' book published in 1895 The Law of Civilization and Decay:

'As the pressure of economic competition intensifies with social consolidation, the family regularly disintegrates, the children rejecting the parental authority at a steadily decreasing age: until finally the population fuses into a compact mass, in which all individuals are equal before the law, and all are forced to compete with each other for the means of subsistence. When at length wealth has accumulated sufficiently to find vent through capitalistic methods of farming and manufacture, children lose all value, for then hiring labour is always cheaper than breeding. Thenceforward, among the more extravagant races, the family dwindles, as in ancient Rome or modern France, and marriage, having become a luxury, decreases. Moreover the economic instinct impels parents to reduce the possible number of inheritors of their property, that its bulk might not shrink.
Upon women the effect of these changes is prodigious. Their whole relation to society is altered. From a religious sacrament marriage is metamorphosed into a civil contract, by mutual consent; and, as the obligations of maternity diminish, the relation of husband and wife resolves itself into a sort of business partnership, tending always to become more ephemeral. Frequent as divorce now is, it was even more so under the Antonines.'