Professor Muensterberg, the distinguished psychologist, in his frank but appreciative study of American institutions, The Americans, taking a broader outlook, points out that the influence of women on morals in America has not been in every respect satisfactory, in so far as it has tended to encourage shallowness and superficiality. "The American woman who has scarcely a shred of education," he remarks (p. 587), "looks in vain for any subject on which she has not firm convictions already at hand.... The arrogance of this feminine lack of knowledge is the symptom of a profound trait in the feminine soul, and points to dangers springing from the domination of women in the intellectual life.... And in no other civilized land are ethical conceptions so worm-eaten by superstitions."

We have seen that the modern tendency as regards marriage is towards its recognition as a voluntary union entered into by two free, equal, and morally responsible persons, and that that union is rather of the nature of an ethical sacrament than of a contract, so that in its essence as a physical and spiritual bond it is outside the sphere of the State's action. It has been necessary to labor that point before we approach what may seem to many not only a different but even a totally opposed aspect of marriage. If the marriage union itself cannot be a matter for contract, it naturally leads to a fact which must necessarily be a matter for implicit or explicit contract, a matter, moreover, in which the community at large has a real and proper interest: that is the fact of procreation.[366]

The ancient Egyptians—among whom matrimonial institutions were so elastic and the position of woman so high—recognized a provisional and slight marriage bond for the purpose of testing fecundity.[367] Among ourselves the law makes no such paternal provision, leaving to young couples themselves the responsibility of making any tests, a permission, we know, they largely avail themselves of, usually entering the legal bonds of marriage, however, before the birth of their child. That legal bond is a recognition that the introduction of a new individual into the community is not, like sexual union, a mere personal fact, but a social fact, a fact in which the State cannot fail to be concerned. And the more we investigate the tendency of the modern marriage movement the more we shall realize that its attitude of freedom, of individual moral responsibility, in the formation of sexual relationships, is compensated by an attitude of stringency, of strict social oversight, in the matter of procreation. Two people who form an erotic relationship are bound, when they reach the conviction that their relationship is a real marriage, having its natural end in procreation, to subscribe to a contract which, though it may leave themselves personally free, must yet bind them both to their duties towards their children.[368]

The necessity for such an undertaking is double, even apart from the fact that it is in the highest interests of the parents themselves. It is required in the interests of the child. It is required in the interests of the State. A child can be bred, and well-bred, by one effective parent. But to equip a child adequately for its entrance into life both parents are usually needed. The State on its side—that is to say, the community of which parents and child alike form part—is bound to know who these persons are who have become sponsors for a new individual now introduced into its midst. The most Individualistic State, the most Socialistic State, are alike bound, if faithful to the interests, both biological and economic, of their constituent members generally, to insist on the full legal and recognized parentage of the father and mother of every child. That is clearly demanded in the interests of the child; it is clearly demanded also in the interests of the State.

The barrier which in Christendom has opposed itself to the natural recognition of this fact, so injuring alike the child and the State, has clearly been the rigidity of the marriage system, more especially as moulded by the Canon law. The Canonists attributed a truly immense importance to the copula carnalis, as they technically termed it. They centred marriage strictly in the vagina; they were not greatly concerned about either the presence or the absence of the child. The vagina, as we know, has not always proved a very firm centre for the support of marriage, and that centre is now being gradually transferred to the child. If we turn from the Canonists to the writings of a modern like Ellen Key, who so accurately represents much that is most characteristic and essential in the late tendencies of marriage development, we seem to have entered a new world, even a newly illuminated world. For "in the new sexual morality, as in Corregio's Notte, the light emanates from the child."[369]

No doubt this change is largely a matter of sentiment, of, as we sometimes say, mere sentiment, although there is nothing so powerful in human affairs as sentiment, and the revolution effected by Jesus, the later revolution effected by Rousseau, were mainly revolutions in sentiment. But the change is also a matter of the growing recognition of interests and rights, and as such it manifests itself in law. We can scarcely doubt that we are approaching a time when it will be generally understood that the entrance into the world of every child, without exception, should be preceded by the formation of a marriage contract which, while in no way binding the father and mother to any duties, or any privileges, towards each other, binds them both towards their child and at the same time ensures their responsibility towards the State. It is impossible for the State to obtain more than this, but it should be impossible for it to demand less. A contract of such a kind "marries" the father and mother so far as the parentage of the individual child is concerned, and in no other respect; it is a contract which leaves entirely unaffected their past, present, or future relations towards other persons, otherwise it would be impossible to enforce it. In all parts of the world this elementary demand of social morality is slowly beginning to be recognized, and as it affects hundreds of thousands of infants[370] who are yearly branded as "illegitimate" through no act of their own, no one can say that the recognition has come too soon. As yet, indeed, it seems nowhere to be complete.

Most attempts or proposals for the avoidance of illegitimate births are concerned with the legalizing of unions of a less binding degree than the present legal marriage. Such unions would serve to counteract other evils. Thus an English writer, who has devoted much study to sex questions, writes in a private letter: "The best remedy for the licentiousness of celibate men and the mental and physical troubles of continence in woman would be found in a recognized honorable system of free unions and trial-marriages, in which preventive intercourse is practiced until the lovers were old enough to become parents, and possessed of sufficient means to support a family. The prospect of a loveless existence for young men and women of ardent natures is intolerable and as terrible as the prospect of painful illness and death. But I think the old order must change ere long."

In Teutonic countries there is a strongly marked current of feeling in the direction of establishing legal unions of a lower degree than marriage. They exist in Sweden, as also in Norway where by a recent law the illegitimate child is entitled to the same rights in relation to both parents as the legitimate child, bearing the father's name and inheriting his property (Die Neue Generation, July, 1909, p. 303). In France the well-known judge, Magnard, so honorably distinguished for his attitude towards cases of infanticide by young mothers, has said: "I heartily wish that alongside the institution of marriage as it now exists we had a free union constituted by simple declaration before a magistrate and conferring almost the same family rights as ordinary marriage." This wish has been widely echoed.

In China, although polygamy in the strict sense cannot properly be said to exist, the interests of the child, the woman, and the State are alike safeguarded by enabling a man to enter into a kind of secondary marriage with the mother of his child. "Thanks to this system," Paul d'Enjoy states (La Revue, Sept., 1905), "which allows the husband to marry the woman he desires, without being prevented by previous and undissolved unions, it is only right to remark that there are no seduced and abandoned girls, except such as no law could save from what is really innate depravity; and that there are no illegitimate children except those whose mothers are unhappily nearer to animals by their senses than to human beings by their reason and dignity."

The new civil code of Japan, which is in many respects so advanced, allows an illegitimate child to be "recognized" by giving notice to the registrar; when a married man so recognizes a child, it appears, the child may be adopted by the wife as her own, though not actually rendered legitimate. This state of things represents a transition stage; it can scarcely be said to recognize the rights of the "recognized" child's mother. Japan, it may be added, has adopted the principle of the automatic legitimation by marriage of the children born to the couple before marriage.

In Australia, where women possess a larger share than elsewhere in making and administering the laws, some attention is beginning to be given to the rights of illegitimate children. Thus in South Australia, paternity may be proved before birth, and the father (by magistrate's order) provides lodging for one month before and after birth, as well as nurse, doctor, and clothing, furnishing security that he will do so; after birth, at the magistrate's decision, he pays a weekly sum for the child's maintenance. An "illegitimate" mother may also be kept in a public institution at the public expense for six months to enable her to become attached to her child.

Such provisions are developed from the widely recognized right of the unmarried woman to claim support for her child from its father. In France, indeed, and in the legal codes which follow the French example, it is not legally permitted to inquire into the paternity of an illegitimate child. Such a law is, needless to say, alike unjust to the mother, to the child, and to the State. In Austria, the law goes to the opposite, though certainly more reasonable, extreme, and permits even the mother who has had several lovers to select for herself which she chooses to make responsible for her child. The German code adopts an intermediate course, and comes only to the aid of the unmarried mother who has one lover. In all such cases, however, the aid given is pecuniary only; it insures the mother no recognition or respect, and (as Wahrmund has truly said in his Ehe und Eherecht) it is still necessary to insist on "the unconditional sanctity of motherhood, which is entitled, under whatever circumstances it arises, to the respect and protection of society."

It must be added that, from the social point of view, it is not the sexual union which requires legal recognition, but the child which is the product of that union. It would, moreover, be hopeless to attempt to legalize all sexual connection, but it is comparatively easy to legalize all children.

There has been much discussion in the past concerning the particular form which marriage ought to take. Many theorists have exercised their ingenuity in inventing and preaching new and unusual marriage-arrangements as panaceas for social ills; while others have exerted even greater energy in denouncing all such proposals as subversive of the foundations of human society. We may regard all such discussions, on the one side or the other, as idle.

In the first place marriage customs are far too fundamental, far too intimately blended with the primary substance of human and indeed animal society, to be in the slightest degree shaken by the theories or the practices of mere individuals, or even groups of individuals. Monogamy—the more or less prolonged cohabitation of two individuals of opposite sex—has been the prevailing type of sexual relationship among the higher vertebrates and through the greater part of human history. This is admitted even by those who believe (without any sound evidence) that man has passed through a stage of sexual promiscuity. There have been tendencies to variation in one direction or another, but at the lowest stages and the highest stages, so far as can be seen, monogamy represents the prevailing rule.

It must be said also, in the second place, that the natural prevalence of monogamy as the normal type of sexual relationship by no means excludes variations. Indeed it assumes them. "There is nothing precise in Nature," according to Diderot's saying. The line of Nature is a curve that oscillates from side to side of the norm. Such oscillations inevitably occur in harmony with changes in environmental conditions, and, no doubt, with peculiarities of personal disposition. So long as no arbitrary and merely external attempt is made to force Nature, the vital order is harmoniously maintained. Among certain species of ducks when males are in excess polyandric families are constituted, the two males attending their female partner without jealousy, but when the sexes again become equal in number the monogamic order is restored. The natural human deviations from the monogamic order seem to be generally of this character, and largely conditioned by the social and economic environment. The most common variation, and that which most clearly possesses a biological foundation, is the tendency to polygyny, which is found at all stages of culture, even, in an unrecognized and more or less promiscuous shape, in the highest civilization.[371] It must be remembered, however, that recognized polygyny is not the rule even where it prevails; it is merely permissive; there is never a sufficient excess of women to allow more than a few of the richer and more influential persons to have more than one wife.[372]

It has further to be borne in mind that a certain elasticity of the formal side of marriage while, on the one side, it permits variations from the general monogamic order, where such are healthful or needed to restore a balance in natural conditions, on the other hand restrains such variations in so far as they are due to the disturbing influence of artificial constraint. Much of the polygyny, and polyandry also, which prevails among us to-day is an altogether artificial and unnatural form of polygamy. Marriages which on a more natural basis would be dissolved cannot legally be dissolved, and consequently the parties to them, instead of changing their partners and so preserving the natural monogamic order, take on other additional partners and so introduce an unnatural polygamy. There will always be variations from the monogamic order and civilization is certainly not hostile to sexual variation. Whether we reckon these variations as legitimate or illegitimate, they will still take place; of that we may be certain. The path of social wisdom seems to lie on the one hand in making the marriage relationship flexible enough to reduce to a minimum these deviations—not because such deviations are intrinsically bad but because they ought not to be forced into existence—and on the other hand in according to these deviations when they occur such a measure of recognition as will deprive them of injurious influence and enable justice to be done to all the parties concerned. We too often forget that our failure to recognize such variations merely means that we accord in such cases an illegitimate permission to perpetrate injustice. In those parts of the world in which polygyny is recognized as a permissible variation a man is legally held to his natural obligations towards all his sexual mates and towards the children he has by those mates. In no part of the world is polygyny so prevalent as in Christendom; in no part of the world is it so easy for a man to escape the obligations incurred by polygyny. We imagine that if we refuse to recognize the fact of polygyny, we may refuse to recognize any obligations incurred by polygyny. By enabling a man to escape so easily from the obligations of his polygamous relationships we encourage him, if he is unscrupulous, to enter into them; we place a premium on the immorality we loftily condemn.[373] Our polygyny has no legal existence, and therefore its obligations can have no legal existence. The ostrich, it was once imagined, hides its head in the sand and attempts to annihilate facts by refusing to look at them; but there is only one known animal which adopts this course of action, and it is called Man.

Monogamy, in the fundamental biological sense, represents the natural order into which the majority of sexual facts will always naturally fall because it is the relationship which most adequately corresponds to all the physical and spiritual facts involved. But if we realize that sexual relationships primarily concern only the persons who enter into those relationships, and if we further realize that the interest of society in such relationships is confined to the children which they produce, we shall also realize that to fix by law the number of women with whom a man shall have sexual relationships, and the number of men with whom a woman shall unite herself, is more unreasonable than it would be to fix by law the number of children they shall produce. The State has a right to declare whether it needs few citizens or many; but in attempting to regulate the sexual relationships of its members the State attempts an impossible task and is at the same time guilty of an impertinence.

There is always a tendency, at certain stages of civilization, to insist on a merely formal and external uniformity, and a corresponding failure to see not only that such uniformity is unreal, but also that it has an injurious effect, in so far as it checks beneficial variations. The tendency is by no means confined to the sexual sphere. In England there is, for instance, a tendency to make building laws which enjoin, in regard to places of human habitation, all sorts of provisions that on the whole are fairly beneficial, but which in practice act injuriously, because they render many simple and excellent human habitations absolutely illegal, merely because such habitations fail to conform to regulations which, under some circumstances, are not only unnecessary, but mischievous.

Variation is a fact that will exist whether we will or no; it can only become healthful if we recognize and allow for it. We may even have to recognize that it is a more marked tendency in civilization than in more primitive social stages. Thus Gerson argues (Sexual-Probleme, Sept., 1908, p. 538) that just as the civilized man cannot be content with the coarse and monotonous food which satisfies the peasant, so it is in sexual matters; the peasant youth and girl in their sexual relationships are nearly always monogamous, but civilized people, with their more versatile and sensitive tastes, are apt to crave for variety. Senancour (De l'Amour, vol. ii, "Du Partage," p. 127) seems to admit the possibility of marriage variations, as of sharing a wife, provided nothing is done to cause rivalry, or to impair the soul's candor. Lecky, near the end of his History of European Morals, declared his belief that, while the permanent union of two persons is the normal and prevailing type of marriage, it by no means follows that, in the interests of society, it should be the only form. Remy de Gourmont similarly (Physique de l'Amour, p. 186), while stating that the couple is the natural form of marriage and its prolonged continuance a condition of human superiority, adds that the permanence of the union can only be achieved with difficulty. So, also, Professor W. Thomas (Sex and Society, 1907, p. 193), while regarding monogamy as subserving social needs, adds: "Speaking from the biological standpoint monogamy does not, as a rule, answer to the conditions of highest stimulation, since here the problematical and elusive elements disappear to some extent, and the object of attention has grown so familiar in consciousness that the emotional reactions are qualified. This is the fundamental explanation of the fact that married men and women frequently become interested in others than their partners in matrimony."

Pepys, whose unconscious self-dissection admirably illustrates so many psychological tendencies, clearly shows how—by a logic of feeling deeper than any intellectual logic—the devotion to monogamy subsists side by side with an irresistible passion for sexual variety. With his constantly recurring wayward attraction to a long series of women he retains throughout a deep and unchanging affection for his charming young wife. In the privacy of his Diary he frequently refers to her in terms of endearment which cannot be feigned; he enjoys her society; he is very particular about her dress; he delights in her progress in music, and spends much money on her training; he is absurdly jealous when he finds her in the society of a man. His subsidiary relationships with other women recur irresistibly, but he has no wish either to make them very permanent or to allow them to engross him unduly. Pepys represents a common type of civilized "monogamist" who is perfectly sincere and extremely convinced in his advocacy of monogamy, as he understands it, but at the same time believes and acts on the belief that monogamy by no means excludes the need for sexual variation. Lord Morley's statement (Diderot, vol. ii, p. 20) that "man is instinctively polygamous," can by no means be accepted, but if we interpret it as meaning that man is an instinctively monogamous animal with a concomitant desire for sexual variation, there is much evidence in its favor.

Women must be as free as men to mould their own amatory life. Many consider, however, that such freedom on the part of women will be, and ought to be, exercised within narrower limits (see, e.g., Bloch, Sexual Life of Our Time, Ch. X). In part this limitation is considered due to the greater absorption of a woman in the task of breeding and rearing her child, and in part to a less range of psychic activities. A man, as G. Hirth puts it, expressing this view of the matter (Wege zur Liebe, p. 342), "has not only room in his intellectual horizon for very various interests, but his power of erotic expansion is much greater and more differentiated than that of women, although he may lack the intimacy and depth of a woman's devotion."

It may be argued that, since variations in the sexual order will inevitably take place, whether or not they are recognized or authorized, no harm is likely to be done by using the weight of social and legal authority on the side of that form which is generally regarded as the best, and, so far as possible, covering the other forms with infamy. There are many obvious defects in such an attitude, apart from the supremely important fact that to cast infamy on sexual relationships is to exert a despicable cruelty on women, who are inevitably the chief sufferers. Not the least is the injustice and the hampering of vital energy which it inflicts on the better and more scrupulous people to the advantage of the worse and less scrupulous. This always happens when authority exerts its power in favor of a form. When, in the thirteenth century, Alexander III—one of the greatest and most effective potentates who ever ruled Christendom—was consulted by the Bishop of Exeter concerning subdeacons who persisted in marrying, the Pope directed him to inquire into the lives and characters of the offenders; if they were of regular habits and staid morality, they were to be forcibly separated and the wives driven out; if they were men of notoriously disorderly character, they were to be permitted to retain their wives, if they so desired (Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy, third edition, vol. i, p. 396). It was an astute policy, and was carried out by the same Pope elsewhere, but it is easy to see that it was altogether opposed to morality in every sense of the term. It destroyed the happiness and the efficiency of the best men; it left the worst men absolutely free. To-day we are quite willing to recognize the evil result of this policy; it was dictated by a Pope and carried out seven hundred years ago. Yet in England we carry out exactly the same policy to-day by means of our separation orders, which are scattered broadcast among the population. None of the couples thus separated—and never disciplined to celibacy as are the Catholic clergy of to-day—may marry again; we, in effect, bid the more scrupulous among them to become celibates, and to the less scrupulous we grant permission to do as they like. This process is carried on by virtue of the collective inertia of the community, and when it is supported by arguments, if that ever happens, they are of an antiquarian character which can only call forth a pitying smile.

It may be added that there is a further reason why the custom of branding sexual variations from the norm as "immoral" is not so harmless as some affect to believe: such variations appear to be not uncommon among men and women of superlative ability whose powers are needed unimpeded in the service of mankind. To attempt to fit such persons into the narrow moulds which suit the majority is not only an injustice to them as individuals, but it is an offence against society, which may fairly claim that its best members shall not be hampered in its service. The notion that the person whose sexual needs differ from those of the average is necessarily a socially bad person, is a notion unsupported by facts. Every case must be judged on its own merits.

Undoubtedly the most common variation from normal monogamy has in all stages of human culture been polygyny or the sexual union of one man with more than one woman. It has sometimes been socially and legally recognized, and sometimes unrecognized, but in either case it has not failed to occur. Polyandry, or the union of a woman with more than one man, has been comparatively rare and for intelligible reasons: men have most usually been in a better position, economically and legally, to organize a household with themselves as the centre; a woman is, unlike a man, by nature and often by custom unfitted for intercourse for considerable periods at a time; a woman, moreover, has her thoughts and affections more concentrated on her children. Apart from this the biological masculine traditions point to polygyny much more than the feminine traditions point to polyandry. Although it is true that a woman can undergo a much greater amount of sexual intercourse than a man, it also remains true that the phenomena of courtship in nature have made it the duty of the male to be alert in offering his sexual attention to the female, whose part it has been to suspend her choice coyly until she is sure of her preference. Polygynic conditions have also proved advantageous, as they have permitted the most vigorous and successful members of a community to have the largest number of mates and so to transmit their own superior qualities.

"Polygamy," writes Woods Hutchinson (Contemporary Review, Oct., 1904), though he recognizes the advantages of monogamy, "as a racial institution, among animals as among men, has many solid and weighty considerations in its favor, and has resulted in both human and pre-human times, in the production of a very high type of both individual and social development." He points out that it promotes intelligence, cooeperation, and division of labor, while the keen competition for women weeds out the weaker and less attractive males.

Among our European ancestors, alike among Germans and Celts, polygyny and other sexual forms existed as occasional variations. Tacitus noted polygyny in Germany, and Caesar found in Britain that brothers would hold their wives in common, the children being reckoned to the man to whom the woman had been first given in marriage (see, e.g., Traill's Social England, vol. i, p. 103, for a discussion of this point). The husband's assistant, also, who might be called in to impregnate the wife when the husband was impotent, existed in Germany, and was indeed a general Indo-Germanic institution (Schrader, Reallexicon, art. "Zeugungshelfer"). The corresponding institution of the concubine has been still more deeply rooted and widespread. Up to comparatively modern times, indeed, in accordance with the traditions of Roman law, the concubine held a recognized and honorable position, below that of a wife but with definite legal rights, though it was not always, or indeed usually, legal for a married man to have a concubine. In ancient Wales, as well as in Rome, the concubine was accepted and never despised (R.B. Holt, "Marriage Laws of the Cymri," Journal Anthropological Institute, Aug. and Nov., 1898, p. 155). The fact that when a concubine entered the house of a married man her dignity and legal position were less than those of the wife preserved domestic peace and safeguarded the wife's interests. (A Korean husband cannot take a concubine under his roof without his wife's permission, but she rarely objects, and seems to enjoy the companionship, says Louise Jordan Miln, Quaint Korea, 1895, p. 92.) In old Europe, we must remember, as Dufour points out in speaking of the time of Charlemagne (Histoire de la Prostitution, vol. iii, p. 226), "concubine" was an honorable term; the concubine was by no means a mistress, and she could be accused of adultery just the same as a wife. In England, late in the thirteenth century, Bracton speaks of the concubina legitima as entitled to certain rights and considerations, and it was the same in other parts of Europe, sometimes for several centuries later (see Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy, vol. i, p. 230). The early Christian Church was frequently inclined to recognize the concubine, at all events if attached to an unmarried man, for we may trace in the Church "the wish to look upon every permanent union of man or woman as possessing the character of a marriage in the eyes of God, and, therefore, in the judgment of the Church" (art. "Concubinage," Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities). This was the feeling of St. Augustine (who had himself, before his conversion, had a concubine who was apparently a Christian), and the Council of Toledo admitted an unmarried man who was faithful to a concubine. As the law of the Catholic Church grew more and more rigid, it necessarily lost touch with human needs. It was not so in the early Church during the great ages of its vital growth. In those ages even the strenuous general rule of monogamy was relaxed when such relaxation seemed reasonable. This was so, for instance, in the case of sexual impotency. Thus early in the eighth century Gregory II, writing to Boniface, the apostle of Germany, in answer to a question by the latter, replies that when a wife is incapable from physical infirmity from fulfilling her marital duties it is permissible for the husband to take a second wife, though he must not withdraw maintenance from the first. A little later Archbishop Egbert of York, in his Dialogus de Institutione Ecclesiastica, though more cautiously, admits that when one of two married persons is infirm the other, with the permission of the infirm one, may marry again, but the infirm one is not allowed to marry again during the other's life. Impotency at the time of marriage, of course, made the marriage void without the intervention of any ecclesiastical law. But Aquinas, and later theologians, allow that an excessive disgust for a wife justifies a man in regarding himself as impotent in relation to her. These rules are, of course, quite distinct from the permissions to break the marriage laws granted to kings and princes; such permissions do not count as evidence of the Church's rules, for, as the Council of Constantinople prudently decided in 809, "Divine law can do nothing against Kings" (art. "Bigamy," Dictionary of Christian Antiquities). The law of monogamy was also relaxed in cases of enforced or voluntary desertion. Thus the Council of Vermerie (752) enacted that if a wife will not accompany her husband when he is compelled to follow his lord into another land, he may marry again, provided he sees no hope of returning. Theodore of Canterbury (688), again, pronounces that if a wife is carried away by the enemy and her husband cannot redeem her, he may marry again after an interval of a year, or, if there is a chance of redeeming her, after an interval of five years; the wife may do the same. Such rules, though not general, show, as Meyrick points out (art. "Marriage," Dictionary of Christian Antiquities), a willingness "to meet particular cases as they arise."

As the Canon law grew rigid and the Catholic Church lost its vital adaptibility, sexual variations ceased to be recognized within its sphere. We have to wait for the Reformation for any further movement. Many of the early Protestant Reformers, especially in Germany, were prepared to admit a considerable degree of vital flexibility in sexual relationships. Thus Luther advised married women with impotent husbands, in cases where there was no wish or opportunity for divorce, to have sexual relations with another man, by preference the husband's brother; the children were to be reckoned to the husband ("Die Sexuelle Frage bei Luther," Mutterschutz, Sept., 1908).

In England the Puritan spirit, which so largely occupied itself with the reform of marriage, could not fail to be concerned with the question of sexual variations, and from time to time we find the proposal to legalize polygyny. Thus, in 1658, "A Person of Quality" published in London a small pamphlet dedicated to the Lord Protector, entitled A Remedy for Uncleanness. It was in the form of a number of queries, asking why we should not admit polygamy for the avoidance of adultery and infanticide. The writer inquires whether it may not "stand with a gracious spirit, and be every way consistent with the principles of a man fearing God and loving holiness, to have more women than one to his proper use.... He that takes another man's ox or ass is doubtless a transgressor; but he that puts himself out of the occasion of that temptation by keeping of his own seems to be a right honest and well-meaning man."

More than a century later (1780), an able, learned, and distinguished London clergyman of high character (who had been a lawyer before entering the Church), the Rev. Martin Madan, also advocated polygamy in a book called Thelyphthora; or, a Treatise on Female Ruin. Madan had been brought into close contact with prostitution through a chaplaincy at the Lock Hospital, and, like the Puritan advocate of polygamy, he came to the conclusion that only by the reform of marriage is it possible to work against prostitution and the evils of sexual intercourse outside marriage. His remarkable book aroused much controversy and strong feeling against the author, so that he found it desirable to leave London and settle in the country. Projects of marriage reform have never since come from the Church, but from philosophers and moralists, though not rarely from writers of definitely religious character. Senancour, who was so delicate and sensitive a moralist in the sexual sphere, introduced a temperate discussion of polygamy into his De l'Amour (vol. ii, pp. 117-126). It seemed to him to be neither positively contrary nor positively conformed to the general tendency of our present conventions, and he concluded that "the method of conciliation, in part, would be no longer to require that the union of a man and a woman should only cease with the death of one of them." Cope, the biologist, expressed a somewhat more decided opinion. Under some circumstances, if all three parties agreed, he saw no objection to polygyny or polyandry. "There are some cases of hardship," he said, "which such permission would remedy. Such, for instance, would be the case where the man or woman had become the victim of a chronic disease; or, when either party should be childless, and in other contingencies that could be imagined." There would be no compulsion in any direction, and full responsibility as at present. Such cases could only arise exceptionally, and would not call for social antagonism. For the most part, Cope remarks, "the best way to deal with polygamy is to let it alone" (E.D. Cope, "The Marriage Problem," Open Court, Nov. 15 and 22, 1888). In England, Dr. John Chapman, the editor of the Westminster Review, and a close associate of the leaders of the Radical movement in the Victorian period, was opposed to State dictation as regards the form of marriage, and believed that a certain amount of sexual variation would be socially beneficial. Thus he wrote in 1884 (in a private letter): "I think that as human beings become less selfish polygamy [i.e., polygyny], and even polyandry, in an ennobled form, will become increasingly frequent."

James Hinton, who, a few years earlier, had devoted much thought and attention to the sexual question, and regarded it as indeed the greatest of moral problems, was strongly in favor of a more vital flexibility of marriage regulations, an adaptation to human needs such as the early Christian Church admitted. Marriage, he declared, must be "subordinated to service," since marriage, like the Sabbath, is made for man and not man for marriage. Thus in case of one partner becoming insane he would permit the other partner to marry again, the claim of the insane partner, in case of recovery, still remaining valid. That would be a form of polygamy, but Hinton was careful to point out that by "polygamy" he meant "less a particular marriage-order than such an order as best serves good, and which therefore must be essentially variable. Monogamy may be good, even the only good order, if of free choice; but a law for it is another thing. The sexual relationship must be a natural thing. The true social life will not be any fixed and definite relationship, as of monogamy, polygamy, or anything else, but a perfect subordination of every sexual relationship whatever to reason and human good."

Ellen Key, who is an enthusiastic advocate of monogamy, and who believes that the civilized development of personal love removes all danger of the growth of polygamy, still admits the existence of variations. She has in mind such solutions of difficult problems as Goethe had before him when he proposed at first in his Stella to represent the force of affection and tender memories as too strong to admit of the rupture of an old bond in the presence of a new bond. The problem of sexual variation, she remarks, however (Liebe und Ethik, p. 12), has changed its form under modern conditions; it is no longer a struggle between the demand of society for a rigid marriage-order and the demand of the individual for sexual satisfaction, but it has become the problem of harmonizing the ennoblement of the race with heightened requirements of erotic happiness. She also points out that the existence of a partner who requires the other partner's care as a nurse or as an intellectual companion by no means deprives that other partner of the right to fatherhood or motherhood, and that such rights must be safeguarded (Ellen Key, Ueber Liebe und Ehe, pp. 166-168).

A prominent and extreme advocate of polygyny, not as a simple rare variation, but as a marriage order superior to monogamy, is to be found at the present day in Professor Christian von Ehrenfels of Prague (see, e.g., his Sexualethik, 1908; "Die Postulate des Lebens," Sexual-Probleme, Oct., 1908; and letter to Ellen Key in her Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 466). Ehrenfels believes that the number of men inapt for satisfactory reproduction is much larger than that of women, and that therefore when these are left out of account, a polygynic marriage order becomes necessary. He calls this "reproduction-marriage" (Zeugungsehe), and considers that it will entirely replace the present marriage order, to which it is morally superior. It would be based on private contracts. Ehrenfels holds that women would offer no objection, as a woman, he believes, attaches less importance to a man as a wooer than as the father of her child. Ehrenfels's doctrine has been seriously attacked from many sides, and his proposals are not in the line of our progress. Any radical modification of the existing monogamic order is not to be expected, even if it were generally recognized, which cannot be said to be the case, that it is desirable. The question of sexual variations, it must be remembered, is not a question of introducing an entirely new form of marriage, but only of recognizing the rights of individuals, in exceptional cases, to adopt such aberrant forms, and of recognizing the corresponding duties of such individuals to accept the responsibilities of any aberrant marriage forms they may find it best to adopt. So far as the question of sexual variations is more than this, it is, as Hinton argued, a dynamical method of working towards the abolition of the perilous and dangerous promiscuity of prostitution. A rigid marriage order involves prostitution; a flexible marriage order largely—though not, it may be, entirely—renders prostitution unnecessary. The democratic morality of the present day, so far as the indications at present go, is opposed to the encouragement of a quasi-slave class, with diminished social rights, such as prostitutes always constitute in a more or less marked degree. It is fairly evident, also, that the rapidly growing influence of medical hygiene is on the same side. We may, therefore, reasonably expect in the future a slow though steady increase in the recognition, and even the extension, of those variations of the monogamic order which have, in reality, never ceased to exist.

It is lamentable that at this period of the world's history, nearly two thousand years after the wise legislators of Rome had completed their work, it should still be necessary to conclude that we are to-day only beginning to place marriage on a reasonable and humane basis. I have repeatedly pointed out how largely the Canon law has been responsible for this arrest of development. One may say, indeed, that the whole attitude of the Church, after it had once acquired complete worldly dominance, must be held responsible. In the earlier centuries the attitude of Christianity was, on the whole, admirable. It held aloft great ideals but it refrained from enforcing those ideals at all costs; thus its ideals remained genuine and could not degenerate into mere hypocritical empty forms; much flexibility was allowed when it seemed to be for human good and made for the avoidance of evil and injustice. But when the Church attained temporal power, and when that power was concentrated in the hands of Popes who subordinated moral and religious interests to political interests, all the claims of reason and humanity were flung to the winds. The ideal was no more a fact than it was before, but it was now treated as a fact. Human relationships remained what they were before, as complicated and as various, but henceforth one rigid pattern, admirable as an ideal but worse than empty as a form, was arbitrarily set up, and all deviations from it treated either as non-existent or damnable. The vitality was crushed out of the most central human institutions, and they are only to-day beginning to lift their heads afresh.

If—to sum up—we consider the course which the regulation of marriage has run during the Christian era, the only period which immediately concerns us, it is not difficult to trace the main outlines. Marriage began as a private arrangement, which the Church, without being able to control, was willing to bless, as it also blessed many other secular affairs of men, making no undue attempt to limit its natural flexibility to human needs. Gradually and imperceptibly, however, without the medium of any law, Christianity gained the complete control of marriage, cooerdinated it with its already evolved conceptions of the evil of lust, of the virtue of chastity, of the mortal sin of fornication, and, having through the influence of these dominating conceptions limited the flexibility of marriage in every possible direction, it placed it on a lofty but narrow pedestal as the sacrament of matrimony. For reasons which by no means lay in the nature of the sexual relationships, but which probably seemed cogent to sacerdotal legislators who assimilated it to ordination, matrimony was declared indissoluble. Nothing was so easy to enter as the gate of matrimony, but, after the manner of a mouse-trap, it opened inwards and not outwards; once in there was no way out alive. The Church's regulation of marriage while, like the celibacy of the clergy, it was a success from the point of view of ecclesiastical politics, and even at first from the point of view of civilization, for it at least introduced order into a chaotic society, was in the long run a failure from the point of view of society and morals. On the one hand it drifted into absurd subtleties and quibbles; on the other, not being based on either reason or humanity, it had none of that vital adaptability to the needs of life, which early Christianity, while holding aloft austere ideals, still largely retained. On the side of tradition this code of marriage law became awkward and impracticable; on the biological side it was hopelessly false. The way was thus prepared for the Protestant reintroduction of the conception of marriage as a contract, that conception being, however, brought forward less on its merits than as a protest against the difficulties and absurdities of the Catholic Canon law. The contractive view, which still largely persists even to-day, speedily took over much of the Canon law doctrines of marriage, becoming in practice a kind of reformed and secularized Canon law. It was somewhat more adapted to modern needs, but it retained much of the rigidity of the Catholic marriage without its sacramental character, and it never made any attempt to become more than nominally contractive. It has been of the nature of an incongruous compromise and has represented a transitional phase towards free private marriage. We can recognize that phase in the tendency, well marked in all civilized lands, to an ever increasing flexibility of marriage. The idea, and even the fact, of marriage by consent and divorce by failure of that consent, which we are now approaching, has never indeed been quite extinct. In the Latin countries it has survived with the tradition of Roman law; in the English-speaking countries it is bound up with the spirit of Puritanism which insists that in the things that concern the individual alone the individual himself shall be the supreme judge. That doctrine as applied to marriage was in England magnificently asserted by the genius of Milton, and in America it has been a leaven which is still working in marriage legislation towards an inevitable goal which is scarcely yet in sight. The marriage system of the future, as it moves along its present course, will resemble the old Christian system in that it will recognize the sacred and sacramental character of the sexual relationship, and it will resemble the civil conception in that it will insist that marriage, so far as it involves procreation, shall be publicly registered by the State. But in opposition to the Church it will recognize that marriage, in so far as it is purely a sexual relationship, is a private matter the conditions of which must be left to the persons who alone are concerned in it; and in opposition to the civil theory it will recognize that marriage is in its essence a fact and not a contract, though it may give rise to contracts, so long as such contracts do not touch that essential fact. And in one respect it will go beyond either the ecclesiastical conception or the civil conception. Man has in recent times gained control of his own procreative powers, and that control involves a shifting of the centre of gravity of marriage, in so far as marriage is an affair of the State, from the vagina to the child which is the fruit of the womb. Marriage as a state institution will centre, not around the sexual relationship, but around the child which is the outcome of that relationship. In so far as marriage is an inviolable public contract it will be of such a nature that it will be capable of automatically covering with its protection every child that is born into the world, so that every child may possess a legal mother and a legal father. On the one side, therefore, marriage is tending to become less stringent; on the other side it is tending to become more stringent. On the personal side it is a sacred and intimate relationship with which the State has no concern; on the social side it is the assumption of the responsible public sponsorship of a new member of the State. Some among us are working to further one of these aspects of marriage, some to further the other aspect. Both are indispensable to establish a perfect harmony. It is necessary to hold the two aspects of marriage apart, in order to do equal justice to the individual and to society, but in so far as marriage approaches its ideal state those two aspects become one.

We have now completed the discussion of marriage as it presents itself to the modern man born in what in mediaeval days was called Christendom. It is not an easy subject to discuss. It is indeed a very difficult subject, and only after many years is it possible to detect the main drift of its apparently opposing and confused currents when one is oneself in the midst of them. To an Englishman it is, perhaps, peculiarly difficult, for the Englishman is nothing if not insular; in that fact lie whatever virtues he possesses, as well as their reverse sides.[374]

Yet it is worth while to attempt to climb to a height from which we can view the stream of social tendency in its true proportions and estimate its direction. It is necessary to do so if we value our mental peace in an age when men's minds are agitated by many petty movements which have nothing to do with their great temporal interests, to say nothing of their eternal interests. When we have attained a wide vision of the solid biological facts of life, when we have grasped the great historical streams of tradition,—which together make up the map of human affairs,—we can face serenely the little social transitions which take place in our own age, as they have taken place in every age.

FOOTNOTES:

[312] Rosenthal, of Breslau, from the legal side, goes so far as to argue ("Grundfragen des Eheproblems," Die Neue Generation, Dec., 1908), that the intention of procreation is essential to the conception of legal marriage.

[313] J.A. Godfrey, Science of Sex, p. 119.

[314] E.D. Cope, "The Marriage Problem," Open Court, Nov., 1888.

[315] See ante, p. 395.

[316] Waechter, Eheschiedungen, pp. 95 et seq.; Esmein, Marriage en Droit Canonique, vol. i, p. 6; Howard, History of Matrimonial Institutions, vol. ii, p. 15. Howard (in agreement with Lecky) considers that the freedom of divorce was only abused by a small section of the Roman population, and that such abuse, so far as it existed, was not the cause of any decline of Roman morals.

[317] The opinions of the Christian Fathers were very varied, and they were sometimes doubtful about them; see, e.g., the opinions collected by Cranmer and enumerated by Burnet, History of Reformation (ed. Nares), vol. ii, p. 91.

[318] Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, enacted a strict and peculiar divorce law (allowing a wife to divorce her husband only when he was a homicide, a poisoner, or a violator of sepulchres), which could not be maintained. In 497, therefore, Anastasius decreed divorce by mutual consent. This was abolished by Justinian, who only allowed divorce for various specified causes, among them, however, including the husband's adultery. These restrictions proved unworkable, and Justinian's successor and nephew, Justin, restored divorce by mutual consent. Finally, in 870, Leo the Philosopher returned to Justinian's enactment (see, e.g., Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, arts. "Adultery" and "Marriage").

[319] The element of reverence in the early German attitude towards women and the privileges which even the married woman enjoyed, so far as Tacitus can be considered a reliable guide, seem to have been the surviving vestiges of an earlier social state on a more matriarchal basis. They are most distinct at the dawn of German history. From the first, however, though divorce by mutual consent seems to have been possible, German custom was pitiless to the married woman who was unfaithful, sterile, or otherwise offended, though for some time after the introduction of Christianity it was no offence for the German husband to commit adultery (Westermarck, Origin of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii, p. 453).

[320] "This form of marriage," says Hobhouse (op. cit., vol. i, p. 156), "is intimately associated with the extension of marital power." Cf. Howard, op. cit., vol. i, p. 231. The very subordinate position of the mediaeval German woman is set forth by Hagelstange, Sueddeutsches Bauernleben in Mittelalter, 1898, pp. 70 et seq.

[321] Howard, op. cit., vol. i, p. 259; Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, art. Arrhae. It would appear, however, that the "bride-sale," of which Tacitus speaks, was not strictly the sale of a chattel nor of a slave-girl, but the sale of the mund or protectorship over the girl. It is true the distinction may not always have been clear to those who took part in the transaction. Similarly the Anglo-Saxon betrothal was not so much a payment of the bride's price to her kinsmen, although as a matter of fact, they might make a profit out of the transaction, as a covenant stipulating for the bride's honorable treatment as wife and widow. Reminiscences of this, remark Pollock and Maitland (op. cit., vol. ii, p. 364), may be found in "that curious cabinet of antiquities, the marriage ritual of the English Church."

[322] Howard, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 278-281, 386. The Arrha crept into Roman and Byzantine law during the sixth century.

[323] J. Wickham Legg, Ecclesiological Essays, p. 189. It may be added that the idea of the subordination of the wife to the husband appeared in the Christian Church at a somewhat early period, and no doubt independently of Germanic influences; St. Augustine said (Sermo XXXVII, cap. vi) that a good materfamilias must not be ashamed to call herself her husband's servant (ancilla).

[324] See, e.g., L. Gautier, La Chevalerie, Ch. IX.

[325] Howard, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 293 et seq.; Esmein, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 25 et seq.; Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities art. "Contract of Marriage."

[326] Any later changes in Catholic Canon law have merely been in the direction of making matrimony still narrower and still more remote from the practice of the world. By a papal decree of 1907, civil marriages and marriages in non-Catholic places of worship are declared to be not only sinful and unlawful (which they were before), but actually null and void.

[327] E.S.P. Haynes, Our Divorce Law, p. 3.

[328] It was the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century, which made ecclesiastical rites essential to binding marriage; but even then fifty-six prelates voted against that decision.

[329] Esmein, op. cit., vol. i, p. 91.

[330] It is sometimes said that the Catholic Church is able to diminish the evils of its doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage by the number of impediments to marriage it admits, thus affording free scope for dispensations from marriage. This scarcely seems to be the case. Dr. P.J. Hayes, who speaks with authority as Chancellor of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, states ("Impediments to Marriage in the Catholic Church," North American Review, May, 1905) that even in so modern and so mixed a community as this there are few applications for dispensations on account of impediments; there are 15,000 Catholic marriages per annum in New York City, but scarcely five per annum are questioned as to validity, and these chiefly on the ground of bigamy.

[331] The Canonists, say Pollock and Maitland (loc. cit.), "made a capricious mess of the marriage law." "Seldom," says Howard (op. cit., vol i, p. 340), "have mere theory and subtle quibbling had more disastrous consequences in practical life than in the case of the distinction between sponsalia de praesenti and de futuro."

[332] Howard, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 386 et seq. On the whole, however, Luther's opinion was that marriage, though a sacred and mysterious thing, is not a sacrament; his various statements on the matter are brought together by Strampff, Luther ueber die Ehe, pp. 204-214.

[333] Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 61 et seq.

[334] Probably as a result of the somewhat confused and incoherent attitude of the Reformers, the Canon law of marriage, in a modified form, really persisted in Protestant countries to a greater extent than in Catholic countries; in France, especially, it has been much more profoundly modified (Esmein, op. cit., vol. i, p. 33).

[335] The Quaker conception of marriage is still vitally influential. "Why," says Mrs. Besant (Marriage, p. 19), "should not we take a leaf out of the Quaker's book, and substitute for the present legal forms of marriage a simple declaration publicly made?"

[336] Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 456. The actual practice in Pennsylvania appears, however, to differ little from that usual in the other States.

[337] Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 109. "It is, indeed, wonderful," Howard remarks, "that a great nation, priding herself on a love of equity and social liberty, should thus for five generations tolerate an invidious indulgence, rather than frankly and courageously to free herself from the shackles of an ecclesiastical tradition."

[338] "The enforced continuance of an unsuccessful union is perhaps the most immoral thing which a civilized society ever countenanced, far less encouraged," says Godfrey (Science of Sex, p. 123). "The morality of a union is dependent upon mutual desire, and a union dictated by any other cause is outside the moral pale, however custom may sanction it, or religion and law condone it."

[339] Adultery in most savage and barbarous societies is regarded, in the words of Westermarck, as "an illegitimate appropriation of the exclusive claims which the husband has acquired by the purchase of his wife, as an offence against property;" the seducer is, therefore, punished as a thief, by fine, mutilation, even death (Origin of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii, pp. 447 et seq.; id., History of Human Marriage, p. 121). Among some peoples it is the seducer who alone suffers, and not the wife.

[340] It is sometimes said in defence of the claim for damages for seducing a wife that women are often weak and unable to resist masculine advances, so that the law ought to press heavily on the man who takes advantage of that weakness. This argument seems a little antiquated. The law is beginning to accept the responsibility even of married women in other respects, and can scarcely refuse to accept it for the control of her own person. Moreover, if it is so natural for the woman to yield, it is scarcely legitimate to punish the man with whom she has performed that natural act. It must further be said that if a wife's adultery is only an irresponsible feminine weakness, a most undue brutality is inflicted on her by publicly demanding her pecuniary price from her lover. If, indeed, we accept this argument, we ought to reintroduce the mediaeval girdle of chastity.

[341] Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 114.

[342] This rule is, in England, by no means a dead letter. Thus, in 1907, a wife who had left her home, leaving a letter stating that her husband was not the father of her child, subsequently brought an action for divorce, which, as the husband made no defence, she obtained. But, the King's Proctor having learnt the facts, the decree was rescinded. Then the husband brought an action for divorce, but could not obtain it, having already admitted his own adultery by leaving the previous case undefended. He took the matter up to the Court of Appeal, but his petition was dismissed, the Court being of opinion that "to grant relief in such a case was not in the interest of public morality." The safest way in England to render what is legally termed marriage absolutely indissoluble is for both parties to commit adultery.

[343] Magnus Hirschfeld, Zeitschrift fuer Sexualwissenschaft, Oct., 1908.

[344] H. Adner, "Die Richterliche Beurteilung der 'Zerruetteten' Ehe," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. ii, Teil 8.

[345] Gross-Hoffinger, Die Schichsale der Frauen und die Prostitution, 1847; Bloch presents a full summary of the results of this inquiry in an Appendix to Ch. X of his Sexual Life of Our Times.

[346] Divorce in the United States is fully discussed by Howard, op. cit., vol. iii.

[347] H. Muensterberg, The Americans, p. 575. Similarly, Dr. Felix Adler, in a study of "The Ethics of Divorce" (The Ethical Record, 1890, p. 200), although not himself an admirer of divorce, believes that the first cause of the frequency of divorce in the United States is the high position of women.

[348] In an important article, with illustrative cases, on "The Neuro-psychical Element in Conjugal Aversion" (Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, Sept., 1892) Smith Baker refers to the cases in which "a man may find himself progressively becoming antipathetic, through recognition of the comparatively less developed personality of the one to whom he happens to be married. Marrying, perhaps, before he has learned to accurately judge of character and its tendencies, he awakens to the fact that he is honorably bound to live all his physiological life with, not a real companion, but a mere counterfeit." The cases are still more numerous, the same writer observes, in which the sexual appetite of the wife fails to reveal itself except as the result of education and practice. "This sort of natural-unnatural condition is the source of much disappointment, and of intense suffering on the part of the woman as well as of family dissatisfaction." Yet such causes for divorce are far too complex to be stated in statute-books, and far too intimate to be pleaded in courts of justice.

[349] Ten years ago, if not still, the United States came fourth in order of frequency of divorce, after Japan, Denmark, and Switzerland.

[350] Lecky, the historian of European morals, has pointed out (Democracy and Liberty, vol. ii, p. 172) the close connection generally between facility of divorce and a high standard of sexual morality.

[351] So, e.g., Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, vol. i, p. 237.

[352] In England this step was taken in the reign of Henry VII, when the forcible marriage of women against their will was forbidden by statute (3 Henry VII, c. 2). Even in the middle of the seventeenth century, however, the question of forcible marriage had again to be dealt with (Inderwick, Interregnum, pp. 40 et seq.).

[353] Woods Hutchinson (Contemporary Review, Sept., 1905) argues that when there is epilepsy, insanity, moral perversion, habitual drunkenness, or criminal conduct of any kind, divorce, for the sake of the next generation, should be not permissive but compulsory. Mere divorce, however, would not suffice to attain the ends desired.

[354] Similarly in Germany, Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, who had suffered much from marriage, whatever her own defects of character may have been, writes at the end of Meine Lebensbeichte that "as long as women have not the courage to regulate, without State-interference or Church-interference, relationships which concern themselves alone, they will not be free." In place of this old decayed system of marriage so opposed to our modern thoughts and feelings, she would have private contracts made by a lawyer. In England, at a much earlier period, Charles Kingsley, who was an ardent friend to women's movements, and whose feeling for womanhood amounted almost to worship, wrote to J.S. Mill: "There will never be a good world for women until the last remnant of the Canon law is civilized off the earth."

[355] "No fouler institution was ever invented," declared Auberon Herbert many years ago, expressing, before its time, a feeling which has since become more common; "and its existence drags on, to our deep shame, because we have not the courage frankly to say that the sexual relations of husband and wife, or those who live together, concern their own selves, and do not concern the prying, gloating, self-righteous, and intensely untruthful world outside."

[356] Hobhouse, op. cit. vol. i, p. 237.

[357] The same conception of marriage as a contract still persists to some extent also in the United States, whither it was carried by the early Protestants and Puritans. No definition of marriage is indeed usually laid down by the States, but, Howard says (op. cit., vol. ii, p. 395), "in effect matrimony is treated as a relation partaking of the nature of both status and contract."

[358] This point of view has been vigorously set forth by Paul and Victor Margueritte, Quelques Idees.

[359] I may remark that this was pointed out, and its consequences vigorously argued, many years ago by C.G. Garrison, "Limits of Divorce," Contemporary Review, Feb., 1894. "It may safely be asserted," he concludes, "that marriage presents not one attribute or incident of anything remotely resembling a contract, either in form, remedy, procedure, or result; but that in all these aspects, on the contrary, it is fatally hostile to the principles and practices of that division of the rights of persons." Marriage is not contract, but conduct.

[360] See, e.g., P. and V. Margueritte, op. cit.

[361] As quoted by Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 29.

[362] Ellen Key similarly (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 343) remarks that to talk of "the duty of life-long fidelity" is much the same as to talk of "the duty of life-long health." A man may promise, she adds, to do his best to preserve his life, or his love; he cannot unconditionally undertake to preserve them.

[363] Hobhouse, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 159, 237-9; cf. P. and V. Margueritte, Quelques Idees.

[364] "Divorce," as Garrison puts it ("Limits of Divorce," Contemporary Review, Feb., 1894), "is the judicial announcement that conduct once connubial in character and purpose, has lost these qualities.... Divorce is a question of fact, and not a license to break a promise."

[365] See, ante, p. 425.

[366] It has been necessary to discuss reproduction in the first chapter of the present volume, and it will again be necessary in the concluding chapter. Here we are only concerned with procreation as an element of marriage.

[367] Nietzold, Die Ehe in AEgypten zur Ptolemaeisch-roemischen Zeit, 1903, p. 3. This bond also accorded rights to any children that might be born during its existence.

[368] See, e.g., Ellen Key, Mutter und Kind, p. 21. The necessity for the combination of greater freedom of sexual relationships with greater stringency of parental relationships was clearly realized at an earlier period by another able woman writer, Miss J.H. Clapperton, in her notable book, Scientific Meliorism, published in 1885. "Legal changes," she wrote (p. 320), "are required in two directions, viz., towards greater freedom as to marriage and greater strictness as to parentage. The marriage union is essentially a private matter with which society has no call and no right to interfere. Childbirth, on the contrary, is a public event. It touches the interests of the whole nation."

[369] Ellen Key, Liebe und Ehe, p. 168; cf. the same author's Century of the Child.

[370] In Germany alone 180,000 "illegitimate" children are born every year, and the number is rapidly increasing; in England it is only 40,000 per annum, the strong feeling which often exists against such births in England (as also in France) leading to the wide adoption of methods for preventing conception.

[371] "Where are real monogamists to be found?" asked Schopenhauer in his essay, "Ueber die Weibe." And James Hinton was wont to ask: "What is the meaning of maintaining monogamy? Is there any chance of getting it, I should like to know? Do you call English life monogamous?"

[372] "Almost everywhere," says Westermarck of polygyny (which he discusses fully in Chs. XX-XXII of his History of Human Marriage) "it is confined to the smaller part of the people, the vast majority being monogamous." Maurice Gregory (Contemporary Review, Sept., 1906) gives statistics showing that nearly everywhere the tendency is towards equality in number of the sexes.

[373] In a polygamous land a man is of course as much bound by his obligations to his second wife as to his first. Among ourselves the man's "second wife" is degraded with the name of "mistress," and the worse he treats her and her children the more his "morality" is approved, just as the Catholic Church, when struggling to establish sacerdotal celibacy, approved more highly the priest who had illegitimate relations with women than the priest who decently and openly married. If his neglect induces a married man's mistress to make known her relationship to him the man is justified in prosecuting her, and his counsel, assured of general sympathy, will state in court that "this woman has even been so wicked as to write to the prosecutor's wife!"

[374] Howard, in his judicial History of Matrimonial Institutions (vol. ii. pp. 96 et seq.), cannot refrain from drawing attention to the almost insanely wild character of the language used in England not so many years ago by those who opposed marriage with a deceased wife's sister, and he contrasts it with the much more reasonable attitude of the Catholic Church. "Pictures have been drawn," he remarks, "of the moral anarchy such marriages must produce, which are read by American, Colonial, and Continental observers with a bewilderment that is not unmixed with disgust, and are, indeed, a curious illustration of the extreme insularity of the English mind." So recently as A.D. 1908 a bill was brought into the British House of Lords proposing that desertion without cause for two years shall be a ground for divorce, a reasonable and humane measure which is law in most parts of the civilized world. The Lord Chancellor (Lord Loreburn), a Liberal, and in the sphere of politics an enlightened and sagacious leader, declared that such a proposal was "absolutely impossible." The House rejected the proposal by 61 votes to 2. Even the marriage decrees of the Council of Trent were not affirmed by such an overwhelming majority. In matters of marriage legislation England has scarcely yet emerged from the Middle Ages.



CHAPTER XI.

THE ART OF LOVE.

Marriage Not Only for Procreation—Theologians on the Sacramentum Solationis—Importance of the Art of Love—The Basis of Stability in Marriage and the Condition for Right Procreation—The Art of Love the Bulwark Against Divorce—The Unity of Love and Marriage a Principle of Modern Morality—Christianity and the Art of Love—Ovid—The Art of Love Among Primitive Peoples—Sexual Initiation in Africa and Elsewhere—The Tendency to Spontaneous Development of the Art of Love in Early Life—Flirtation—Sexual Ignorance in Women—The Husband's Place in Sexual Initiation—Sexual Ignorance in Men—The Husband's Education for Marriage—The Injury Done by the Ignorance of Husbands—The Physical and Mental Results of Unskilful Coitus—Women Understand the Art of Love Better Than Men—Ancient and Modern Opinions Concerning Frequency of Coitus—Variation in Sexual Capacity—The Sexual Appetite—The Art of Love Based on the Biological Facts of Courtship—The Art of Pleasing Women—The Lover Compared to the Musician—The Proposal as a Part of Courtship—Divination in the Art of Love—The Importance of the Preliminaries in Courtship—The Unskilful Husband Frequently the Cause of the Frigid Wife—The Difficulty of Courtship—Simultaneous Orgasm—The Evils of Incomplete Gratification in Women—Coitus Interruptus—Coitus Reservatus—The Human Method of Coitus—Variations in Coitus—Posture in Coitus—The Best Time for Coitus—The Influence of Coitus in Marriage—The Advantages of Absence in Marriage—The Risks of Absence—Jealousy—The Primitive Function of Jealousy—Its Predominance Among Animals, Savages, etc., and in Pathological States—An Anti-Social Emotion—Jealousy Incompatible with the Progress of Civilization—The Possibility of Loving More Than One Person at a Time—Platonic Friendship—The Conditions Which Make It Possible—The Maternal Element in Woman's Love—The Final Development of Conjugal Love—The Problem of Love One of the Greatest of Social Questions.

It will be clear from the preceding discussion that there are two elements in every marriage so far as that marriage is complete. On the one hand marriage is a union prompted by mutual love and only sustainable as a reality, apart from its mere formal side, by the cultivation of such love. On the other hand marriage is a method for propagating the race and having its end in offspring. In the first aspect its aim is erotic, in the second parental. Both these ends have long been generally recognized. We find them set forth, for instance, in the marriage service of the Church of England, where it is stated that marriage exists both for "the mutual society, help and comfort that the one ought to have of the other," and also for "the procreation of children." Without the factor of mutual love the proper conditions for procreation cannot exist; without the factor of procreation the sexual union, however beautiful and sacred a relationship it may in itself be, remains, in essence, a private relationship, incomplete as a marriage and without public significance. It becomes necessary, therefore, to supplement the preceding discussion of marriage in its general outlines by a final and more intimate consideration of marriage in its essence, as embracing the art of love and the science of procreation.

There has already been occasion from time to time to refer to those who, starting from various points of view, have sought to limit the scope of marriage and to suppress one or other of its elements. (See e.g., ante, p. 135.)

In modern times the tendency has been to exclude the factor of procreation, and to regard the relationship of marriage as exclusively lying in the relationship of the two parties to each other. Apart from the fact, which it is unnecessary again to call attention to, that, from the public and social point of view, a marriage without children, however important to the two persons concerned, is a relationship without any public significance, it must further be said that, in the absence of children, even the personal erotic life itself is apt to suffer, for in the normal erotic life, especially in women, sexual love tends to grow into parental love. Moreover, the full development of mutual love and dependence is with difficulty attained, and there is absence of that closest of bonds, the mutual cooeperation of two persons in producing a new person. The perfect and complete marriage in its full development is a trinity.

Those who seek to eliminate the erotic factor from marriage as unessential, or at all events as only permissible when strictly subordinated to the end of procreation, have made themselves heard from time to time at various periods. Even the ancients, Greeks and Romans alike, in their more severe moments advocated the elimination of the erotic element from marriage, and its confinement to extra-marital relationships, that is so far as men were concerned; for the erotic needs of married women they had no provision to make. Montaigne, soaked in classic traditions, has admirably set forth the reasons for eliminating the erotic interest from marriage: "One does not marry for oneself, whatever may be said; a man marries as much, or more, for his posterity, for his family; the usage and interest of marriage touch our race beyond ourselves.... Thus it is a kind of incest to employ, in this venerable and sacred parentage, the efforts and the extravagances of amorous license" (Essais, Bk. i, Ch. XXIX; Bk. iii, Ch. V). This point of view easily commended itself to the early Christians, who, however, deliberately overlooked its reverse side, the establishment of erotic interests outside marriage. "To have intercourse except for procreation," said Clement of Alexandria (Paedagogus, Bk. ii, Ch. X), "is to do injury to Nature." While, however, that statement is quite true of the lower animals, it is not true of man, and especially not true of civilized man, whose erotic needs are far more developed, and far more intimately associated with the finest and highest part of the organism, than is the case among animals generally. For the animal, sexual desire, except when called forth by the conditions involved by procreative necessities, has no existence. It is far otherwise in man, for whom, even when the question of procreation is altogether excluded, sexual love is still an insistent need, and even a condition of the finest spiritual development. The Catholic Church, therefore, while regarding with admiration a continence in marriage which excluded sexual relations except for the end of procreation, has followed St. Augustine in treating intercourse apart from procreation with considerable indulgence, as only a venial sin. Here, however, the Church was inclined to draw the line, and it appears that in 1679 Innocent XI condemned the proposition that "the conjugal act, practiced for pleasure alone, is exempt even from venial sin."

Protestant theologians have been inclined to go further, and therein they found some authority even in Catholic writers. John a Lasco, the Catholic Bishop who became a Protestant and settled in England during Edward VI's reign, was following many mediaeval theologians when he recognized the sacramentum solationis, in addition to proles, as an element of marriage. Cranmer, in his marriage service of 1549, stated that "mutual help and comfort," as well as procreation, enter into the object of marriage (Wickham Legg, Ecclesiological Essays, p. 204; Howard, Matrimonial Institutions, vol. i, p. 398). Modern theologians speak still more distinctly. "The sexual act," says Northcote (Christianity and Sex Problems, p. 55), "is a love act. Duly regulated, it conduces to the ethical welfare of the individual and promotes his efficiency as a social unit. The act itself and its surrounding emotions stimulate within the organism the powerful movements of a vast psychic life." At an earlier period also, Schleiermacher, in his Letters on Lucinde, had pointed out the great significance of love for the spiritual development of the individual.

Edward Carpenter truly remarks, in Love's Coming of Age, that sexual love is not only needed for physical creation, but also for spiritual creation. Bloch, again, in discussing this question (The Sexual Life of Our Time, Ch. VI) concludes that "love and the sexual embrace have not only an end in procreation, they constitute an end in themselves, and are necessary for the life, development, and inner growth of the individual himself."

It is argued by some, who admit mutual love as a constituent part of marriage, that such love, once recognized at the outset, may be taken for granted, and requires no further discussion; there is, they believe, no art of love to be either learnt or taught; it comes by nature. Nothing could be further from the truth, most of all as regards civilized man. Even the elementary fact of coitus needs to be taught. No one could take a more austerely Puritanic view of sexual affairs than Sir James Paget, and yet Paget (in his lecture on "Sexual Hypochondriasis") declared that "Ignorance about sexual affairs seems to be a notable characteristic of the more civilized part of the human race. Among ourselves it is certain that the method of copulating needs to be taught, and that they to whom it is not taught remain quite ignorant about it." Gallard, again, remarks similarly (in his Clinique des Maladies des Femmes) that young people, like Daphnis in Longus's pastoral, need a beautiful Lycenion to give them a solid education, practical as well as theoretical, in these matters, and he considers that mothers should instruct their daughters at marriage, and fathers their sons. Philosophers have from time to time recognized the gravity of these questions and have discoursed concerning them; thus Epicurus, as Plutarch tells us,[375] would discuss with his disciples various sexual matters, such as the proper time for coitus; but then, as now, there were obscurantists who would leave even the central facts of life to the hazards of chance or ignorance, and these presumed to blame the philosopher.

There is, however, much more to be learnt in these matters than the mere elementary facts of sexual intercourse. The art of love certainly includes such primary facts of sexual hygiene, but it involves also the whole erotic discipline of marriage, and that is why its significance is so great, for the welfare and happiness of the individual, for the stability of sexual unions, and indirectly for the race, since the art of love is ultimately the art of attaining the right conditions for procreation.

"It seems extremely probable," wrote Professor E.D. Cope,[376] "that if this subject could be properly understood, and become, in the details of its practical conduct, a part of a written social science, the monogamic marriage might attain a far more general success than is often found in actual life." There can be no doubt whatever that this is the case. In the great majority of marriages success depends exclusively upon the knowledge of the art of love possessed by the two persons who enter into it. A life-long monogamic union may, indeed, persist in the absence of the slightest inborn or acquired art of love, out of religious resignation or sheer stupidity. But that attitude is now becoming less common. As we have seen in the previous chapter, divorces are becoming more frequent and more easily obtainable in every civilized country. This is a tendency of civilization; it is the result of a demand that marriage should be a real relationship, and that when it ceases to be real as a relationship it should also cease as a form. That is an inevitable tendency, involved in our growing democratization, for the democracy seems to care more for realities than for forms, however venerable. We cannot fight against it; and we should be wrong to fight against it even if we could.

Yet while we are bound to aid the tendency to divorce, and to insist that a valid marriage needs the wills of two persons to maintain it, it is difficult for anyone to argue that divorce is in itself desirable. It is always a confession of failure. Two persons, who, if they have been moved in the slightest degree by the normal and regular impulse of sexual selection, at the outset regarded each other as lovable, have, on one side or the other or on both, proved not lovable. There has been a failure in the fundamental art of love. If we are to counterbalance facility of divorce our only sound course is to increase the stability of marriage, and that is only possible by cultivating the art of love, the primal foundation of marriage.

It is by no means unnecessary to emphasize this point. There are still many persons who have failed to realize it. There are even people who seem to imagine that it is unimportant whether or not pleasure is present in the sexual act. "I do not believe mutual pleasure in the sexual act has any particular bearing on the happiness of life," once remarked Dr. Howard A. Kelly.[377] Such a statement means—if indeed it means anything—that the marriage tie has no "particular bearing" on human happiness; it means that the way must be freely opened to adultery and divorce. Even the most perverse ascetic of the Middle Ages scarcely ventured to make a statement so flagrantly opposed to the experiences of humanity, and the fact that a distinguished gynecologist of the twentieth century can make it, with almost the air of stating a truism, is ample justification for the emphasis which it has nowadays become necessary to place on the art of love. "Uxor enim dignitatis nomen est, non voluptatis," was indeed an ancient Pagan dictum. But it is not in harmony with modern ideas. It was not even altogether in harmony with Christianity. For our modern morality, as Ellen Key well says, the unity of love and marriage is a fundamental principle.[378]

The neglect of the art of love has not been a universal phenomenon; it is more especially characteristic of Christendom. The spirit of ancient Rome undoubtedly predisposed Europe to such a neglect, for with their rough cultivation of the military virtues and their inaptitude for the finer aspects of civilization the Romans were willing to regard love as a permissible indulgence, but they were not, as a people, prepared to cultivate it as an art. Their poets do not, in this matter, represent the moral feeling of their best people. It is indeed a highly significant fact that Ovid, the most distinguished Latin poet who concerned himself much with the art of love, associated that art not so much with morality as with immorality. As he viewed it, the art of love was less the art of retaining a woman in her home than the art of winning her away from it; it was the adulterer's art rather than the husband's art. Such a conception would be impossible out of Europe, but it proved very favorable to the growth of the Christian attitude towards the art of love.

Love as an art, as well as a passion, seems to have received considerable study in antiquity, though the results of that study have perished. Cadmus Milesius, says Suidas, wrote fourteen great volumes on the passion of love, but they are not now to be found. Rohde (Das Griechische Roman, p. 55) has a brief section on the Greek philosophic writers on love. Bloch (Beitraege zur Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil I, p. 191) enumerates the ancient women writers who dealt with the art of love. Montaigne (Essais, liv. ii, Ch. V) gives a list of ancient classical lost books on love. Burton (Anatomy of Melancholy, Bell's edition, vol. iii, p. 2) also gives a list of lost books on love. Burton himself dealt at length with the manifold signs of love and its grievous symptoms. Boissier de Sauvages, early in the eighteenth century, published a Latin thesis, De Amore, discussing love somewhat in the same spirit as Burton, as a psychic disease to be treated and cured.

The breath of Christian asceticism had passed over love; it was no longer, as in classic days, an art to be cultivated, but only a malady to be cured. The true inheritor of the classic spirit in this, as in many other matters, was not the Christian world, but the world of Islam. The Perfumed Garden of the Sheik Nefzaoui was probably written in the city of Tunis early in the sixteenth century by an author who belonged to the south of Tunis. Its opening invocation clearly indicates that it departs widely from the conception of love as a disease: "Praise be to God who has placed man's greatest pleasures in the natural parts of woman, and has destined the natural parts of man to afford the greatest enjoyments to woman." The Arabic book, El Ktab, or "The Secret Laws of Love," is a modern work, by Omer Haleby Abu Othman, who was born in Algiers of a Moorish mother and a Turkish father.

For Christianity the permission to yield to the sexual impulse at all was merely a concession to human weakness, an indulgence only possible when it was carefully hedged and guarded on every side. Almost from the first the Christians began to cultivate the art of virginity, and they could not so dislocate their point of view as to approve of the art of love. All their passionate adoration in the sphere of sex went out towards chastity. Possessed by such ideals, they could only tolerate human love at all by giving to one special form of it a religious sacramental character, and even that sacramental halo imparted to love a quasi-ascetic character which precluded the idea of regarding love as an art.[379] Love gained a religious element but it lost a moral element, since, outside Christianity, the art of love is part of the foundation of sexual morality, wherever such morality in any degree exists. In Christendom love in marriage was left to shift for itself as best it might; the art of love was a dubious art which was held to indicate a certain commerce with immorality and even indeed to be itself immoral. That feeling was doubtless strengthened by the fact that Ovid was the most conspicuous master in literature of the art of love. His literary reputation—far greater than it now seems to us[380]—gave distinction to his position as the author of the chief extant text-book of the art of love. With Humanism and the Renaissance and the consequent realization that Christianity had overlooked one side of life, Ovid's Ars Amatoria was placed on a pedestal it had not occupied before or since. It represented a step forward in civilization; it revealed love not as a mere animal instinct or a mere pledged duty, but as a complex, humane, and refined relationship which demanded cultivation; "arte regendus amor." Boccaccio made a wise teacher put Ovid's Ars Amatoria into the hands of the young. In an age still oppressed by the mediaeval spirit, it was a much needed text-book, but it possessed the fatal defect, as a text-book, of presenting the erotic claims of the individual as divorced from the claims of good social order. It never succeeded in establishing itself as a generally accepted manual of love, and in the eyes of many it served to stamp the subject it dealt with as one that lies outside the limits of good morals.

When, however, we take a wider survey, and inquire into the discipline for life that is imparted to the young in many parts of the world, we shall frequently find that the art of love, understood in varying ways, is an essential part of that discipline. Summary, though generally adequate, as are the educational methods of primitive peoples, they not seldom include a training in those arts which render a woman agreeable to a man and a man agreeable to a woman in the relationship of marriage, and it is often more or less dimly realized that courtship is not a mere preliminary to marriage, but a biologically essential part of the marriage relationship throughout.

Sexual initiation is carried out very thoroughly in Azimba land, Central Africa. H. Crawford Angus, the first European to visit the Azimba people, lived among them for a year, and has described the Chensamwali, or initiation ceremony, of girls. "At the first sign of menstruation in a young girl, she is taught the mysteries of womanhood, and is shown the different positions for sexual intercourse. The vagina is handled freely, and if not previously enlarged (which may have taken place at the harvest festival when a boy and girl are allowed to 'keep house' during the day-time by themselves, and when quasi-intercourse takes place) it is now enlarged by means of a horn or corn-cob, which is inserted and secured in place by bands of bark cloth. When all signs [of menstruation] have passed, a public announcement of a dance is given to the women in the village. At this dance no men are allowed to be present, and it was only with a great deal of trouble that I managed to witness it. The girl to be 'danced' is led back from the bush to her mother's hut where she is kept in solitude to the morning of the dance. On that morning she is placed on the ground in a sitting position, while the dancers form a ring around her. Several songs are then sung with reference to the genital organs. The girl is then stripped and made to go through the mimic performance of sexual intercourse, and if the movements are not enacted properly, as is often the case when the girl is timid and bashful, one of the older women will take her place and show her how she is to perform. Many songs about the relation between men and women are sung, and the girl is instructed as to all her duties when she becomes a wife. She is also instructed that during the time of her menstruation she is unclean, and that during her monthly period she must close her vulva with a pad of fibre used for the purpose. The object of the dance is to inculcate to the girl the knowledge of married life. The girl is taught to be faithful to her husband and to try to bear children, and she is also taught the various arts and methods of making herself seductive and pleasing to her husband, and of thus retaining him in her power." (H. Crawford Angus, "The Chensamwali," Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1898, Heft 6, p. 479).

In Abyssinia, as well as on the Zanzibar coast, according to Stecker (quoted by Ploss-Bartels, Das Weib, Section 119) young girls are educated in buttock movements which increase their charm in coitus. These movements, of a rotatory character, are called Duk-Duk. To be ignorant of Duk-Duk is a great disgrace to a girl. Among the Swahili women of Zanzibar, indeed, a complete artistic system of hip-movements is cultivated, to be displayed in coitus. It prevails more especially on the coast, and a Swahili woman is not counted a "lady" (bibi) unless she is acquainted with this art. From sixty to eighty young women practice this buttock dance together for some eight hours a day, laying aside all clothing, and singing the while. The public are not admitted. The dance, which is a kind of imitation of coitus, has been described by Zache ("Sitten und Gebraeuche der Suaheli," Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1899, Heft 2-3, p. 72). The more accomplished dancers excite general admiration. During the latter part of this initiation various feats are imposed, to test the girl's skill and self-control. For instance, she must dance up to a fire and remove from the midst of the fire a vessel full of water to the brim, without spilling it. At the end of three months the training is over, and the girl goes home in festival attire. She is now eligible for marriage. Similar customs are said to prevail in the Dutch East Indies and elsewhere.