No one will question woman's aptitude for religion, whatever the opinion held as to what the organic basis of that aptitude may be. If we accept that woman is more sensitive to suggestion, more emotional, and more imaginative in her nature, it is plain why religion affects her more deeply than men. The extraordinary way in which woman can be influenced by religious suggestion is similar in its nature to that saturation of her innermost thoughts with love, which is due in part, as I believe, to the special qualities of her sex-functions, but also, in part, to the over-emphasised sexuality produced in her by an artificial existence. Women have accepted religious beliefs as they have accepted man's valuation of temporal things, even although these may be utterly at variance with their nature and their desires.

It has been said that the disposition of woman makes her peculiarly conservative and uncritical of religious beliefs. Others suggest that there is a "specific religious sense" in women related with a higher standard of character. This I do not believe: it is part of the fiction of woman's superior morality. I think in most women is hidden an immense appetite for life, an immense capacity for expenditure of force. She does not often dare to listen to these deeps within her soul; yet the insurgent voices fill her. There is in the life of most women something wanting, some general idea, some aim to hold life together. The effort of woman—often unconscious, but always present—to realise herself in love has forced her to practise duplicity and to accept dependence. And this sense of dependence in her on a protector, not always forthcoming, and, even when present, not always able to protect, has sent her in search of something outside and beyond the known and fallible, and has prepared her to accept with eagerness any professed revelation of the infallible unknown.

We have seen again and again in the course of our inquiry how deep and natural the sex impulse is in woman, and this, combined with the much greater complexity of her sexual life, renders her position peculiarly liable to be affected disastrously by any failure of love. It must be recognised that unbounded piety is often no more than a sex symptom, proceeding from deprivation or from satiety of love, as also from love's failure in loveless marriage. It seems to me that this connection of the religious impulse with sexuality is a very important thing for women to understand. In our achievement of facing the truth in the place of evasions about fundamental things, lies the path, I believe along which woman can escape, if ever she is to escape, from the confusion of purposes that distract her at present.

The intimate association between religious ideas and feelings and the sexual life is abundantly proved by the history of all peoples. We first meet it in the widespread early practice of religious prostitution, which has aptly been called "lust sacrifice." It is even more manifest in the ancient religious erotic festivals. Of these we have examples in the festivals of Isis in Egypt, in the Dionysian and Eleusinian festivals of the Hellenes, in the Roman Bacchanalia and festival of Flora, and among the Jews in the feast of Baal-peor. In these festivals the frenzy of religious mysticism merges with the wildest sexual licence. Sexual mysticism found its way also into Christianity, a fact to which the lives of the saints furnish an illuminating witness. And down to the present day we may notice its manifestations in the most diverse sects during any period of religious revival. We still meet with sexual excesses under the shadow of faith, as, for instance, occurred in the late revival in Wales.

Havelock Ellis has laid stress on the leading significance of religious sexual perceptions, and their special importance on the emotional feminine character. This subject is so deeply connected with women that I shall, I hope, be pardoned if I pause for a moment to relate a personal experience which may help to make this truth more clear.

In my girlhood I was strongly drawn to religion, partly through training and example, but more, as I now know, by the affectability of my strongly feminine temperament. My religious enthusiasm was so intense that often I was in a condition which must have been closely connected with erotic religious ecstasy. Salvation was the essential fact of my life; seeking for it brought me the excitement I unconsciously craved of conflicts and fulfilled desires. I sought for God as the passionate woman seeks her lover. I recall a period—I was approaching womanhood—during which I prayed continuously and earnestly that it might be granted to me, as to the saints of old, to see God and the Risen Christ. For long I received no answer. This did not weaken my faith, but the great trouble of my mind became for long a consciousness of my own unworthiness. I began an absurd and childish system of self-punishments, and what I thought would lead to purification. Then there came a night—it was summer and I was looking from my window out at the beautiful evening sky—when my prayer was answered. I seemed, in very truth, to see God. From that time, and for long, I lived in extraordinary happiness. I am sure that I must have become hysterical. I felt that I was set apart by God; I conceived the idea of founding a new religious sect. That I made no attempt to do this was due to circumstances, which forced me into active work to gain my own living. Religion continued very largely in my life, but I was too healthily occupied to be favoured with any more visions. But the essential point in all this is its close connection with my sexual development. So far I had never been in love. I believe that the natural sex desires awakened consciously in me much later than is common. My need for religion lasted until my sex needs were fully satisfied, then, little by little, it faded. I want to state the truth. I did not then trace, nor should I have understood, this connection. The knowledge came to me long years afterwards; how it does not matter, but I am certain that in me the religious impulse and the sex impulse are one.

Love has in it much of the same supernatural element as religion. Both the sex-act and the act of finding salvation come into intimate association with woman's need of dependence; hence arises the remarkable relation between the two, and that easy transition of sexual emotion into religious emotion which is manifest in so many women. In both cases the surrender, the renunciation of personal will, is an experience fraught with passionate pleasure. "Love," as H.G. Wells has said, "is the individualised correlation of salvation, like that it is a synthetic consequence of conflict and confusions." It is true that few women render love the compliment of taking it seriously. To many it is merely this: a little amusement, clothes, a home, money to buy new toys; some mild pleasure, a little chagrin, a little weariness, and then the end. They do not realise or ever desire love in its full joy of personal surrender. So, too, many women never, save in some time of personal bewilderment, desire or seek salvation. But such aimlessness brings its own emptiness, and women strain and seek towards the god-head. For the truth remains, woman's need of love is greater than man's need, and for this reason, where love fails her, her desire for salvation is deeper than man's desire. And here again, and once again, we see the difference between the sexes. The woman pays the higher price for her implicit, unquestioning, and unconscious obedience to Nature. And society has made the payment still heavier. Let us for this last pity women! The dice they have had to throw in the game of life is their sex, and they have only been allowed one throw, and when they have thrown wastefully—yes, it is here that religion has entered into the game. It may almost be said to measure the failures and false boundaries in women's loves. The songs of love and the songs of faith are alike; and women act worship as also they are often driven to act love. The woman who knows her own heart must know that this is true. And one cannot wish to see the opium of religion taken from women until the game is made a fairer one for them to play.

There is another point to consider.

Many great thinkers have striven against this profound and primitive connection between the bodily and spiritual impulses, which has seemed to them an intrusion of evil, impairing their pure spirituality by the sexual life. They have thus recommended and followed asceticism in order to arrive at a heightened spirituality. The error here is obvious. The spiritual activities cannot be divided from the physical; as well cut the flower off from its roots, and then expect to gather the fruit. This is why sex-denial and sex-excesses so often go together. Hence the undeniable unchastity of the mediaeval cloisters. Nor need the manifestations of sex be physical. Erotic imagination and voluptuous revelations are expressions of sex-passion. The monstrous sexual visions of the saints reflect in a typical manner the incredible violence of the sexual perception of ascetics.

We observe it, then, as a fact of wide experience that the ascetic life is rooted really in the functional impulses; and further, that it is only through sexual perception that the spiritual and imaginative can be grasped and reached. What the ascetic has done is to fear overmuch. It must not be overlooked that this continual battle with the primary force of life is necessarily futile in accomplishing its own aim. For the woman or man who, for the religious or any other ideal, wishes to overcome the sex-needs must keep the subject always before her, or his, consciousness. Thus it comes about that the ascetic is always more occupied with sex than the normal individual. It seems to me that this is a truth few women have learnt to face.

I am not for a moment denying that the potential energy of the sexual impulse may be transformed with benefit into productive spiritual activities, finding its vent in religion, as also in poetry, in art, and in all creative work. Plato must have had this in his mind when he speaks of "thought as a sublimated sexual impulse." Schopenhauer, and many other thinkers, lay stress on the connection between the work of productive genius and the modification of the sexual impulse. This may be illustrated—if examples are needed in proof—by the power that has been exercised so conspicuously by women throughout the world in religious movements. Two of the greater festivals of the Catholic Church, for instance, owe their origin to the illumination of women; the mystic writings of Santa Teresa of Avila give classic expression to the highest powers of the spirit. Take again the part played by women as religious leaders of the convents in the early Middle Ages. In them women of spirit and capacity found a wide and satisfying career, many of them showing great administrative ability and a quite remarkable power for government. In recent times mention may be made of the Theosophists, the most important modern religious movement established in this country and led by women; and of Christian Science, which, under the able guidance of Mrs. Eddy, has sprung up and flourished. It is instructive to note that both these religions are connected with, and largely established on, magical faith and esoteric doctrines and practices. In almost all the religions founded by women we may trace a similar relation with hypnotic phenomena which must be regarded as closely dependent on sexual sources. The proof is wider even than these particular instances. It is without doubt the transformation of suppressed sexual instincts that has made women the chief supporters of all religions.

It may be said that the religious impulse has to a large extent lost its hold upon women. This is true. A new age must expect to see a new departure. As women take active participation in the work of the world their sense of dependence and need for protection will diminish, and we may look for a corresponding decrease in that display of excessive religious emotion that dependence has fostered. But the needs of woman can never be satisfied alone with work. The natural desires remain imperative; deny these, and there will be left only the barren tree robbed of its fruits. Sexuality first breathes into woman's spiritual being warm and blooming life.

The religious ascetic is not common among us to-day. Yet the old seeking for something is there. The impulse towards asceticism has, I think, rather changed its form than passed from women. The place of the female saint is being taken by the social ascetic. Desire is not now set to gain salvation, but is turned towards a heightened intellectual individuation, showing itself in nervous mental activity. No one can have failed to note the immense egoism of the modern woman. Women are still in fear of life and love. They have been made ascetics through the long exercise of restraint upon their explosively emotional temperament. They have restrained their natures to remain pure. This false ideal of chastity was in the first place forced upon them, but by long habit it has been accentuated and has been backed up by woman's own blindness and fear. Thus to-day, in their new-found freedom, women are seeking to bind men up in the same bonds of denial which have restrained them. In the past they have over-readily imbibed the doctrine of a different standard of purity for the sexes, now they are in revolt—indeed, they are only just emerging from a period of bitterness in relation to this matter. Men made women into puritans, and women are arising in the strength of their faith to enforce puritanism on men. Is this malice or is it revenge? In any case it is foolishness. Bound up as the sexual impulse is with the entire psychic emotional being, there would be left behind without it only the wilderness of a cold abstraction. The Christian belief in souls and bodies separate, and souls imprisoned in vile clay, has wrought terrible havoc to women. I believe the two—soul and body—are one and indivisible. Women have yet this lesson to learn: the capacity for sense-experience is the sap of life. The power to feel passion is in direct ratio to the strength of the individual's hold upon life; and may be said to mark the height of his, or her, attainment in the scale of being. It is only another out of many indications of the strength of sexual emotion in women that so many of them are afraid of the beauty and the natural joys of love.

There is one thing more I would wish to point out in closing this very insufficient survey of an exceedingly complicated and difficult subject. To me it seems that here, in this finer understanding of love, we open the door to the only remedy that will wipe out the hateful fear of women, which has wrought such havoc in the relationship between the sexes. Woman, restrained to purity, has of necessity fallen often into impurity. And men, knowing this better than woman herself, have feared her, though they have failed in any true understanding of the cause. Let me give you the estimate of woman which Maupassant, in Moonlight, has placed in the mouth of a priest. It is the most illuminating passage in one of the most exquisite of his stories—

"He hated woman, hated her unconsciously and instinctively despised her. He often repeated to himself the words of Christ: 'Woman, what have I to do with thee?' And he would add, 'It seems as if God Himself felt discontented with that particular creation.' For him was that child of whom the poet speaks, impure, through and through impure. She was the temptress who had led away the first man, and still continued her work of perdition; a frail creature but dangerous, mysteriously disturbing. And even more than their sinful bodies he hated their loving souls.... God, in his opinion, had created woman solely to tempt man, to put him to the proof."

One lesson women and men have to learn: so easy to be put into words, so difficult to carry out by deeds. To get good from each other the sexes must give love the one to the other. The human heart in loneliness eats out itself, causes its own emptiness, creates its own terrors. Nature gives lavishly, wantonly, and woman is nearer to Nature than man is, therefore she must give the more freely, the more generously. There can be no such thing as the goodness of one-half of life without the goodness of the other half. Love between woman and man is mutual; is continual giving. Not by storing up for the good of one sex or in waste for the pleasure of the other, but by free bestowing is salvation. Wherefore, not in the enforced chastity of woman, but in her love, will man gain his new redemption.

FOOTNOTES:

[318] Velazquez is known to us only by the name of his mother; his father's name was de Silva.

[319] I have taken these passages from the chapter on "The Women of Galicia," in my Spain Revisited.

[320] Man and Woman, p. 377; Moebius, Stachylogie, 1901.

[321] The passage occurs in a lecture by Prof. Thomson and Mrs. Thomson on "The Position of Woman Biologically Considered," and was one of a series delivered in Edinburgh to consider and estimate the recent changes in the position of woman. The addresses have been published in a book entitled The Position of Woman, Actual and Ideal.

[322] Sexual Life of Our Times, p. 74.

[323] Sex and Society, pp. 306, 307.

[324] Quoted by Bloch, Sexual Life of Our Times, p. 80.

[325] Sexual Life of Our Times, pp. 80, 81.



CONTENTS OF CHAPTER X

THE SOCIAL FORMS OF THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP

I.—Marriage

The difficulty of the problem of marriage—Facts to be considered—Marriage and the family among the animals—Among primitive peoples—Progress from lower to higher forms of the sexual association—An examination of the purpose of marriage—The fear of hasty reforms—Practical morality—Marriage an institution older than mankind—The practical moral ends of marriage—The racial and individual factors—No real antagonism between the two—What is good for the individual must react also for the benefit of the race—Various systems of marriage—Monogamy the form that has prevailed—The higher law of the true marriage—Conventional monogamic marriage—Its failure in practical morality—Coexistence with polygamy and prostitution—Chief grounds for the reform of marriage—An indictment by Mr. Wells—Our marriage system based upon the rights of property—This not necessarily evil—The Egyptian marriage contracts—The Roman marriage—The influence of Christianity—Asceticism and the glorification of virginity—Confusions and absurdities—The failure of our sexual morality—Mammon marriages—Sins against the race—Two examples from my own experience—The iniquity of our bastardy laws—The waste of love—Free-love—Its failure as a practical solution—The reform of marriage—The tendency to place the form of the sexual relationship above the facts of love—The dependence of the consciousness of duty upon freedom—The sexual responsibility of women.

II.—Divorce

Traditional morality—Practical conditions of divorce—The moral code—This must be modified to meet new conditions—The enforced continuance of an unreal marriage—This the grossest form of immorality—The barbarism of our divorce laws—The action of the Church and State—Confusion and absurdities—Divorce relief from misfortune, not a crime—Personal responsibility in marriage—A recognition of the equality of the mother with the father—Sanction by the State of free divorce—The example of Egypt and Babylon—The Roman divorce by consent—The condemnation of free divorce not the outcome of true morality—The immorality of indissoluble marriage—Loyalty and duty in love—The claims of the child—One advantage of free divorce—Adoption of children under the State—Growing disinclination against coercive marriage—The waste to the race—Our responsibility to the future.

III.—Prostitution

The dependence of prostitution upon marriage—The extent and difficulties of the problem involved—Prostitution essentially a woman's question—Women's past attitude towards it—The diffusion of disease by means of prostitution—Apathy and ignorance of women—This changing—What action will women take in the future?—Grounds for fear—The White Slave Bill—Its absurd futility—The opinion of Bernard Shaw—Poverty as a cause of prostitution—This not the only factor—The real evil lies deeper—The economic reformer—The moral crusade—Men's passions—Seduction—These causes need careful examination—Lippert's view—Idleness, frivolity, and love of finery as causes—The desire for excitement—The need for personal knowledge of the prostitute—What I have learnt from different members of this profession—The prostitute's attitude towards her trade—The sale of sex very profitable to the expert trader—The sexual frigidity of the prostitute—Importance and significance of this—A further examination into the causes of the evil—Poverty seldom the chief motive for prostitution—The influence of inheritance upon the sexual life—The degradation of our legitimate loves the ultimate cause of prostitution—The demand for the prostitute by men—Causes of this demand—Repression of the primitive sexual instincts by civilisation—The foolishness of casting blame upon men—The duplex morality of the sexes—Its influence on the degradation of passion—Woman's unprofitable service to chastity—The connection with prostitution—My belief in passion as the only source of help.



CHAPTER X

THE SOCIAL FORMS OF THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP

I.—Marriage

"The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement; it is a statement of fact. In so far as we are individuals, in so far as we seek to follow merely individual ends, we are accidental, disconnected, without significance, the sport of chance. In so far as we realise ourselves as experiments of the species for the species, just in so far do we escape from the accidental and the chaotic. We are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves."—H.G. WELLS.

"There is no subject," says Bernard Shaw in his delightful preface to Getting Married, "on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage." And, in truth, it is not easy to avoid such foolishness if we understand at all the complexity of the relationship of the sexes. Sentiment rules our actions in this connection, whereas our talk on the subject is directed by intellect. And the demands of the emotions are at once more imperious and tyrannical, and more fastidious and more critical, than are the demands of the mind. Thus the more firmly reason checks the riot of imagination the greater the danger of error. Of all of which what is the moral? This: It is useless to talk or to think unless it is also possible and expedient to act.

Be it noted, then, first that our marriage customs and laws are founded and have been framed not for, or by, the personal needs—that is, the likes and dislikes of men and women, but by the exigencies of social and economic necessities. Now, from this it will be readily seen that individual inclinations are very likely, even if not bound, to clash with, as they seek to conform to, the usages of society. Always there will tend to be prevalent everywhere a hostility—at times latent, at others active—between these two forces; against the special desires of women and men on the one hand, and the laws enforced by a social and economic community on the other. Always there will tend to arise some who will desire to change the accepted marriage form, those who, considering first the personal needs, will advocate the loosening or the breaking of the marriage-bond; while others, looking only to the stability which they believe to be founded in law and custom, will seek to keep and to make the tie indissoluble.

This perpetual conflict is, it seems to me, the greatest difficulty that has to be faced in any effort to readjust the conditions of marriage. In our contemporary society there is a deep-lying dissatisfaction with the existing relations of the sexes, a yearning and restless need for change. In no other direction are the confusions and uncertainty of the contemporary mind more manifest. The change that has taken place so rapidly in the attitudes of women and men has brought with it a very strong and, what seems to be a new, revolt against the ignominious conditions of our amatory life as bound by coercive monogamy. We are questioning where before we have accepted, and are seeking out new ways in which mankind will go—will go because it must.

Yet just because of this imperative urging the greater caution is called for in introducing any changes in the laws or customs affecting marriage. Present social and economic conditions are to a great extent chaotic. It would be a sorry thing if in haste we were to establish practices that must come to an end, when we have freed ourselves from the present transition; changes that would not be for the welfare of generations still unborn. It will, however, hardly be denied by any one that reform is needed. All will admit that a change must be made in some direction, and an attempt to say where it should be tried must therefore be faced.

Does Nature give us any help in solving the problem? None whatever. It would seem, indeed, that Nature has in some ways arranged the love relation in regard to the needs of the two sexes very badly. But putting this aside for the present, it is clear that in regard to the form of marriage Nature has no preference; all ways are equal to her, provided that the race profits by them, or at least does not suffer too much from them. We found abundant proof of this in our examination of marriage and the family as established already in the animal kingdom; the modes of sexual association offer great variety, no species being of necessity restricted to any one form of union. Polygamy, polyandry, and monogamy all are practised. The family is sometimes patriarchal, though more often it is matriarchal, with the female the centre of it, and her love for the young infinitely stronger and more devoted than the male, though even in this direction there are many and notable exceptions. When we came to study the history of mankind we found similar conditions persisting. Separate groups living as they best could without caring about theories; their sexual conduct ordered by a compromise between the procreative needs on the one hand, and the necessities of the social conditions on the other. Marriage forms, as we understand them, were for long unknown, the relations of the sexes slowly evolving from a more or less restricted promiscuity to a family union at first merely temporary, and only later becoming fixed and permanent. Thus very gradually the primitive instinctive sex impulses underwent expansion, and always in the direction of the control of the individual desires in the interest of the family.

The unit of the group or state is the family, therefore sex-customs arise and laws are made not to suit the convenience of the woman or the man, but for the preservation and good of the family. In a word, the children—they are the pivot about which all regulations of marriage should turn.

It is certain, however, that such control and such laws have never in the past, and never in the future can be fixed to one unchanging form. In proof of this I must refer the reader back to the historical section of this book, where nothing stands out clearer than that the most diverse morality and customs prevail in matters of sex. Wherever for any reason there arises a tendency towards any form of sexual association, such form is likely to be established as a habit, and, persisting, it comes to be regarded as right, and is enforced by custom and later by law, and also sometimes sanctified by religion. It comes to be regarded as moral, and other forms become immoral.

Now, all this may seem to be rather far away from the matter we are discussing—the present dissatisfaction with our marriage system. But the point I want to make clear is this: there is no rigid and unchangeable code of right or wrong in the sexual relationship. Our opinions here are based for the most part on traditional morality, which accepts what is as right because it is established. A small but growing minority, looking in an exact opposite direction, turn to an ideal morality, considering the facts of sex not as they are, but as they think they ought to be. Both these attitudes are alike harmful. The one refuses to go forward, the other rushes on blindly, goaded by sentiment or by personal desires. And to-day the greater danger seems to me to rest with the hasty reformers. It is an essentially feminine crusade. By this I do not mean that it is advocated alone by women, but that in itself it must be regarded as feminine; a view which elevates a subjective ideal relationship of sex above all objective facts. The desires and feelings and sentiments are set up in opposition to historical experience and communal tradition. We hear much, and especially in the writings and talk of women, of such vapid phrases as "Self-realisation in love," "The enhancement of the individual life," and "The spiritualising of sex." Such personal views, which exalt the passing needs of the individual above the enduring interests of the race, are in direct opposition to progress. What is rather needed is an examination of marriage and other forms of our sexual relationships by practical morality, by which I mean the estimating of their merits and defects in relation to the vital needs of the community under the circumstances of the present.

To do this we must first clear our minds from the belief that regards our present form of monogamic marriage as ordained by Nature and sanctified by God. He who accepts the development of the love of one man for one woman from other and earlier forms of association may well look forward in faith to a future progress from our existing marriage: yet, though eager for reform, he will, remembering the slowness of this steady upward progress in love's refinement in the past, refrain from acting in haste, understanding the impossibility of forcing any Utopia of the sexes. No change can be made in a matter so intimate as marriage by a mere altering of the law. Only such reforms as are the natural outgrowth of an enlightened public feeling can be of benefit, and thus permanent in their result. I must go further than this and say that what may very possibly be right for the few cannot be regarded as practically moral and good until it can be accepted and acted upon by the people at large. In sex more than in any other department of life we are all linked together; we are our brother's keeper, and the blood of the race will be required at our hands. Many women, and some men, do not realise at all the immense complications of sex and the claims passion makes on many natures. I am sure that this is the explanation of much of the foolish talk that one hears. I tried to make clear in the first chapters of this book the irresistible elemental power of the uncurbed sexual instincts. And this force is at least as strong now as it was in the beginning of life. For in sex we have, as yet, learnt very little. We who are living among the sophistication of aeroplanes, the inheritors of the knowledge of all the ages, have still to pass in wonder along the paths of love, entering into it blindly and making all the old mistakes.

Am I, then, afraid that I plead thus for caution? No, I am not. I rest my faith in the development of the racial element in love side by side with its personal ends of physical and spiritual joy. For the sex impulses, which have ruled women and men, will assuredly come to be ruled by them. Just as in the past life has been moulded and carried on by love's selection, acting unconsciously and ignorant of the ends it followed, so in the future the race will be developed and carried onwards by deliberate selection, and the creative energy of love will become the servant of women and men. The mighty dynamic force will then be capable of further and, as yet, unrealised development. This is no vain hope. It has its proof in the past history of the selective power of love. The problems of our individual loves are linked on to the racial life. The hope for improvement rests thus in a growing understanding of the individual's relation to the race, and in an expansion of our knowledge and practice of the high duties love enforces.

Let us look now at the practical direction of the present. We have reached these conclusions as a starting-point—

(1) We have inherited marriage as a social, nay more, a racial institution.

(2) The practical moral end of marriage, whether we regard it from the wider biological standpoint or from the narrower standpoint of society, is a selection of the sexes by means of love, having as its social object the carrying on of the race, and as its personal object a mutual life of complete physical, mental, and psychical union.

(3) The first of these, the racial object, is the concern of the State; the second, the personal need of love, is the concern of the individual woman and man.

(4) It is the business of the State to make such laws that the interests of the race, i.e. the children, are protected.

From this it would seem to follow that beyond such care the State has nothing to do with the sexual relationship. Here I am placed in a difficulty. I cannot accept this view. I do not believe that the loves of women and men, even apart from children being born from such union, can ever be merely a personal matter between the two individuals concerned. For this reason any woman and man is a potential mother or father, and may become so in a later union. We cannot break the links which bind the individual to the race. I am very clear in my mind, however, of the need of recognising this perpetual duality in the objects of love. It is not necessary to bring forward any proof of the profound significance of the individual side of the sexual passion in the progress of civilisation. We may accept what is really proved by all of us in our acts, that love and love's embrace are not exercised only, or indeed chiefly, for the purpose of procreation, but are of quite equal importance to the parents, necessary for the complete life—the physical and mental development and the joy of the woman and the man.

It may seem, then, that we are thus faced by two opposing forces. That is not the case. There is real harmony underlying the apparent opposition of these two interests, and each is, indeed, the indispensable complement of the other. Both the personal and the further-reaching racial objects of love alike belong to the great synthesis of life. I do not, of course, deny, what every one knows, that there is at present an opposition and even conflict in certain individual cases. This is but one sign of chaos and the wastage of love. But this does not change the truth; there can be no gain for the individual in the personal ends of love unless there is also a corresponding gain to the wider racial end. The element of self-assertion in our loves must be brought into correlation with the universal and immortal development of life. This is so evident that I will not wait to elaborate it further. I will only point out that all the good, as also all the evil, that the individual is able to gain from love must ultimately react also for the benefit, or the wastage, of the race. Thus we have to get every good that we can out of our sexual experiences for ourselves for this very reason that we do not stand alone. It is because the race flows through us that we have to make the utmost of our individual opportunities and powers, so that, understanding our position as guardians to the generations yet unborn, we may use to the very full, but refrain from any misuse of love's possibilities of joy. We know that all we gain for ourselves we gain in trust for the race, and what we lose for ourselves we waste for the life to come. This has, of course, been said before by numberless people, but it seems to me it has been realised by very few, and until it is realised to the fullest extent it will never begin to be practised. We shall continue at a crossed purpose between our own interests and desires and the interests of the race, and shall go on wasting the forces of love needlessly and riotously.

Armed with these conclusions I shall now attempt to examine our existing marriage in its relation (1) to the needs of the children, (2) to the individual needs apart from parentage. The extent of the problems involved is almost illimitable, thus all that I can do is to touch very briefly and insufficiently on a few facts.

As we question in turn the various systems of marriage it becomes clear that monogamy is the form which has most widely prevailed, and will be likely to be maintained, because of its superior survival value. In other words, because it best serves the interests of the race by assuring to the woman and her children the individual interest and providence of the father. I believe further that monogamy of all the sexual associations serves best the personal needs of the parents; and, moreover, that it represents the form of union which is in harmony with the instincts and desires of the majority of people. The ideal of permanent marriage between one woman and one man to last for the life of both must persist as an ideal never to be lost. I wish to state this as my belief quite clearly. The higher love in true marriage is the veritable law of the life to be; and beside it all experiments in sensation will rot in their emptiness and their self-love.

But this faith of mine in an ideal and lasting union does not lessen at all my scepticism in the moral inefficacy of our present marriage system. It is not the particular form of marriage practised that, after all, is the main thing, but the kind of lives people live under that form. The mere acceptance of a legally enforced monogamy does not carry us very far in practical morality; we must claim something much deeper than this.

And this brings us to the base counterfeit of monogamy that is accepted and practised by many among us to-day; base because it is a monogamy largely mitigated by clandestine transitory loves—tipplings with sensation and snackings at lust which betray passion. Facts of daily observation may not be shuffled out of consideration by any hypocrisy. They must be faced and dealt with. Our marriage system is buttressed with prostitution, which thus makes our moral attitude one of intolerable deception, and our efforts at reform not only ineffective, but absurd. Without the assistance of the prostitution of one class of women and the enforced celibacy of another class our marriage in its present form could not stand. It is no use shirking it; if marriage cannot be made more moral—and by this I mean more able to meet the sex needs of all men and all women—then we must accept prostitution. No sentimentalism can save us; we must give our consent to this sacrifice of women as necessary to the welfare and stability of society. But with this question I shall deal in a later section of this chapter. There is, however, more than this to be said. Marriage is itself in many cases a legalised form of prostitution. From the standpoint of morals, the woman who sells herself in marriage is on the same level as the one who sells herself for a night, the only difference is in the price paid and the duration of the contract. Nay, it is probably fair to say that at the lowest such sale-marriage results in the greater evil, for the prostitute does not bear children. If she has a child it has, as a rule, been born first; such is our morality that motherhood often drives her on to the streets!

Any woman who marries for money or position is departing from the biological and moral ends of marriage. A child can be born gladly only as the fruit of love. It is in this direction, rather than in maintaining a barren virginity, that woman's chastity should be guarded. We may excuse women on the grounds of possible ignorance, but, none the less, have the conditions of marriage been unfavourable to the development of a fine moral feeling in women or in men. No one can have failed to feel surprised at the men many girls are content to marry; it is one thing that must be set against the claim women make as the morally superior sex. Mr. Wells, whom I have already quoted in this matter, places in the mouth of one of his characters, in his recent book, Marriage, a true and terrible indictment of women.

"If there was one thing in which you might think woman would show a sense of some divine purpose in life it is in the matter of children, and they show about as much care in the matter—oh, as rabbits! Yes, rabbits. I stick to it. Look at the things a nice girl will marry; look at the men's children she'll submit to bring into the world. Cheerfully! Proudly! For the sake of the home and the clothes!"

The fact is our marriage in its present legal form is primarily an arrangement for securing the rights of property. This in itself is not necessarily evil. Economic necessities cannot be ignored in any form of the sexual relationship; it is rather a readjustment that is called for here. We have seen how admirably a marriage system based upon property in the form of free contracts worked in Egypt, and how happy were the family relationships under this system of equal partnership between the wife and husband. I would again recommend the careful study of these marriage contracts to all those interested in marriage reform. The contracts were never fixed in one form; all that was required being that the interests of the woman and the children were in all cases protected. Take again the Roman marriage which, in its latest fine developments, has special interest, as the history of modern marriage systems may be traced back to it. The Romans came, like the Egyptians, to regard marriage as a contract rather than a legal form. In the custom of usus, which supplanted the earlier and sacred confarreatio, there was no ceremony at all. I would recall to the memory of my readers the significant fact that in both these great countries this freedom in marriage was associated with the freedom of woman. It must be recognised that these two forces act together.

Traditional customs in marriage, as in all other departments of life, tend to become worn out, and whenever any form presses too heavily on a sufficient number of individuals acting against, instead of for, the interests of those concerned, there arises a movement towards reform. This happened in Rome, and led to the establishment of marriage by usus, which was further modified by the practice known as conventio in manus, whereby the wife by passing three nights in the year from her husband was able to break through the terrible right of the husband's manus. It is possible that by some such simple way of escape we may come to change the pressure of our coercive marriage.

The briefest glance at our marriage system proves it to be founded on the patriarchal idea of woman as the property of man, which is sufficiently illustrated by the fact that a husband can claim sums of money as compensation from any man who sexually approaches his wife, while a woman, on her side, is granted compensation in the case of a breach of promise of marriage. If we seek to find how this condition has arisen we must look backwards into the past. To the fine legacy left by the Roman law (which, regarding marriage as a contract, placed the two sexes in a position of equal freedom) was added the customs of the barbarians and the base Jewish system, giving to the husband rights in marriage and divorce denied to the wife. Later, in the twelfth century, came the capture of marriage by the Church and the establishment of Canon law, whereby the property-value of marriage became inextricably mingled with the sanctification of marriage as a sacrament, which, strengthened by Christian asceticism and the glorification of virginity, involved a corresponding contempt cast on all love outside of legal marriage.[326] The action of this double standard of sexual morality has led on the one side to the setting-up of a theoretical ideal, which, as few are able to follow it, tends to become an empty form, and this, on the other side, leads to a hidden laxity that rushes to waste love out to a swift finish. The puritan view has left us an inheritance of denials. It is small wonder, under such circumstances, that marriage is often immoral, so often ending in repulsion and weariness. "Our sexual morality," it has been said with fine truth by Havelock Ellis, "is in reality a bastard born of the union of property-morality with primitive ascetic morality, neither in true relationship to the vital facts of life."

It may, indeed, be doubted if apart from property considerations we have left any sexual morality at all. How else were it possible for marriage (which, if it is to fulfil its moral biological ends, must be based on physical and mental affinity and fitness) to be contracted, as it often is, without knowledge or any true care of these essential factors, and, moreover, to guarantee a permanence of a relationship thus entered into blindly. At least it should be considered necessary that a certificate of the health of the partners be obtained before marriage. What is required to ensure our individual life ought to be demanded before we create new life. Here, as I believe, is one direction in which the State should take action. Parentage on the part of degenerate human beings is a crime, and as such it ought to be prevented. It may be, and is, argued that any action of the State in this direction entails an interference with the rights of the individual. Just the same may be said of all laws. The man who wishes to steal or to kill either another or himself may, with equal reason, hold that it is an interference of the law that he is not permitted to follow his inclinations in these matters. The sins that he may wish to commit are assuredly less evil in their results than the sin of irresponsible parentage. You see what I mean. For if this unceasing crime against the unborn could somehow be stopped there would be so great a reduction of all other sins that we might well be freed from many laws. As an example I would refer the reader back to the wise Spartans, to consider how great was the gain to them as individuals by their strict and unceasing care for the welfare of the race.

There are many who attribute to mammon-marriages all the terrible evils of our disordered love-life of to-day. It is, therefore, well to remember that such conditions are not really a new thing, and cannot be regarded as the result of our commercialised civilisation. The intrusion of economics into marriage is of very ancient origin, and may be found among peoples who are almost primitive. But there is this important difference. In earlier and more vigorous societies such property-based marriages occur side by side with other forms of sexual associations, on a more natural basis, which are openly accepted and honoured. Our marriage system by its rigorous exclusions closes this way of escape. Morality may be outraged to any extent provided that law and religion have been invoked in legal marriage.

Let me give my readers two cases from my own experience; facts speak more forcibly than any mere statements of opinion. In a village that I know well a woman, legally married, bore five idiot children one after the other; her husband was a confirmed drinker and a mental degenerate. One of the children fortunately died. The text that was chosen as fitting for his funeral card was, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." About the same time in the same village a girl gave birth to an illegitimate child. She was a beautiful girl; the father, who did not live in the village, was strong and young; probably the child would have been healthy. But the girl was sent from her situation and, later, was driven from her home by her father. At the last she sought refuge in a disused quarry, and she was there for two days without food. When we found her her child had been born and was dead. Afterwards the girl went mad. I will add no comment, except to record my belief that under a saner social organisation such crimes against love would be impossible.

As was said years ago by the wise Senancour, "The human race would gain much if virtue were made less laborious." Let us view these large questions in the light of their results to the individual and the race. This practical morality will serve us better than any traditional code. So only shall we learn to see if we cannot rid love of stress and pain that is unendurable. We force women and men into rebellion, into fearing concealments, and the dark and furtive ways of vice. For this reason we must, I believe, make the regulations of law as wide as possible, taking care only that mothers and all children must be safeguarded, whether in legal marriage or outside. All of which forces the conclusion: the same act of love cannot be good or bad just because it is performed in or out of marriage. To hold such an opinion is really as absurd as saying that food is more or less digestible according to whether grace is, or is not, said before the meal. All marriage forms are only matters of custom and expediency.

In face of the iniquity of our bastardy laws we may well pause to doubt the traditional ideas of our sexual code and conventional morality. It seems to me that in these questions of sex we have receded further and further from the reality of things, and become blinded and baffled by the very idols to love that men have set up. One thing renders love altogether and incurably wrong, and that is waste. The terribly high death-rate among illegitimate children alone suffices to illustrate the actual conditions, to say nothing of the greater waste often carried on in those children who live. The question of the maintenance of such unfathered children is a scandal of our time. We may surely claim that the birth of any child, without exception, must be preceded by some form of contract which, though not necessarily binding the mother and the father to each other, will place on both alike the obligation of adequate fulfilment of the duties to their child. This, I believe, the State must enforce. If inability on the part of the parents to make such provision is proved, the State must step in with some wide and fitting scheme of insurance of childhood. The carrying out of even these simple demands will lead us a great step forward in practical morality. It will open up the way to a saner and more beautiful future.

But here, in case I am mistaken and thought to be desiring the loosening of the bonds between the sexes, I must repeat again how firmly I accept marriage as the best, the happiest, and the most practical form of the sexual association. The ideal union is, I am certain, an indestructible bond, trebly woven of inclination, duty, and convenience. Marriage is an institution older than any existing society, older than mankind, and reaches back, as Fabre's study of insects has so beautifully shown us, to an infinitely remote past. Its forms are, therefore, too fundamentally blended with human and, further back, with animal society for them to be shaken with theories, or even the practices of individuals or groups of individuals. Thus I accept marriage: I believe that its form must be regulated and cannot be left to the development of individual desires against the needs of the race.

There are some who, in seeking liberation from the ignominious conditions of our present amatory life, are wishing to rid marriage from all legal bonds, and are pointing to Free-love as the way of escape. To me this seems a very great mistake. I admit the splendid imaginative appeal in the idea of Love's freedom as it is put forward, for instance, by the great Swedish feminist, Ellen Key; I am unable to accept it as practical morality. This, I believe, should be the only sound basis for reform. The real question is not what people ought to do, but what they actually do and are likely to go on doing. It is these facts that the idealist fails to face. Love is a very mixed game indeed. And all that the wisest reformer has ever been able to do is to make bad guesses at the solution of its problems.

The fundamental principle of the new ideal morality is that love and marriage must always coincide, and, therefore, when love ceases the bond should be broken. This in theory is, of course, right. I doubt if it is, or ever will be, possible in practice. Experience has forced the knowledge that the most passionate love is often the most likely to end in disaster. Nor do I think that the evil is much lessened when no legal bond is entered into. Those few people who have made a success of Free-love would probably have made an equal success of marriage. I know personally several cases in which the same woman, and many in which the same man, has tried in succession legal marriage and free unions and has been equally unhappy in both.

All the facts seem to me to point in another direction for reform. I do not think that life's great central purpose of carrying on the race (not alone giving birth to fit children, but the equally necessary work of both parents uniting in caring for and bringing them up) can be left safely to be confused and wasted by its dependence on the gratification of personal desires. I wish that I thought otherwise. It would make it all so much easier. It is useless to point back here to the action of love's selection in the past history of life. As civilisation progresses, and as individual needs become elaborated and wealth increases, we tend to get further and further away from the realities of love. We choose our partners without understanding, and think very little of the needs of the future. What I want is to free marriage from those bonds that can be proved to act against practical morality. I do not wish at all to lessen its binding, only to defend it against the conventions of a false and narrow traditional morality. In love, as in every human relationship, it is character that avails and prevails—nothing else. Marriage is, or ought to be, the most practically moral institution that any civilisation is able to produce. Women and men are likely to get out of any form of the sexual association results in proportion to that which they put into it. A great many people put nothing into marriage, and they are disappointed when they get out of it—nothing. We shall put more into marriage, and not less, in proportion as we come to understand it and to value its enduring importance.

After all it is the people of any race who make marriage, not marriage the people. The form of union is but a symbol of the people's character, their desires, and capacities. If we have evolved the wrong women and men, then any reform of marriage is vain. Have we in our weakened civilisation drifted so far from life that the inherent attributes of loyalty and discipline to the future are no longer with us in sufficient measure adequately to respond to the enduring realities of love? The answer is with women. We must demand from the fathers of our children, as we demand from ourselves, loyalty to the well-being of the race; the discipline of our personal desires and loves that we may maintain ourselves fit as the bearers and protectors of those wider interests, which belong not to ourselves, not to this generation alone, but to the life and the future history of our race. Woman must again assert, as she did in the past, that she is the maker of men. She must reclaim her right, held by the female from the beginning of life, as the director of love's selective power. And more even than this. Woman with man must be the framer of the law, and the guide and director of all the relations of the sexes. But it is not sufficient to do this by mere proclamation. Virile nations are not made by theories or by the blast of the trumpet. They are reared in the bonds of marriage, and what we incorporate in that bond will be manifest in our children.

II.—Divorce

"The result of dissolving the formal stringency of the marriage relationship, it is sometimes said, would be a tendency to an immoral laxity. Those who make this statement overlook the fact that laxity tends to reach a maximum as the result of stringency, and that where the merely external authority of a rigid marriage law prevails then the extreme excesses of licence must flourish. It is also undoubtedly true, and for the same reason, that any sudden removal of restraints necessarily involves a reaction to the opposite extreme of licence. A slave is not changed in a stroke into an autonomous free man."—HAVELOCK ELLIS.

In putting forward a practical morality for marriage we have to remember that we are not really uprooting traditional morality. There is no necessity. Of its own decay the old morality has fallen in a confusion of ruin. The ideal marriage is the union of one woman with one man for life. This we have established. We have now to look at the question from another side and ask, How far is this ideal monogamy possible in practice? I think the answer must be that, as we stand at present, it is possible to very few. For marriage is essentially a state of bondage—there is no getting away from this—a state which calls upon the individual to surrender his personal freedom in the interests of the race and the stability of social structure. I have proved that this bondage acts really for the benefit and happiness of the individual, but this deep truth I must now leave. Marriage is, thus, a concession of the individual to the general welfare of the future and of the State. Now, with human nature as it is in its present development, it is clearly claiming the impossible to demand indissoluble marriage. Divorce is really implicit in the conditions of marriage itself, and the firmest believers in monogamy must be the supporters of practical and moral conditions of divorce.

The moral code of any society represents the experience of its members. But experience is continually changing and enlarging, and moral codes must also change and enlarge, or they become worn-out and useless. Those people who are unable to modify their moral code to fit new conditions and growth are doomed to extinction, while the people who adjust their customs and laws to meet new requirements open up the way to move on, and still onwards, in continual progress.

It were well to remember this as we come to question the conditions of our law of divorce. There can be no possible doubt that if marriage is to remain and become moral there must be an easier dissolution of its bonds. The enforced continuance of an unreal marriage is really the grossest form of immorality, harmful not only to the individuals concerned, but to the children. The prejudices handed down to us by past tradition have twisted morals into an assertion that a husband or wife who have ceased to love must continue to share the rites of marriage in mutual repugnance, or live in an unnatural celibacy.

The question as to how this condition arose may be answered very briefly. The Church ordained that marriage is indissoluble, but, this being found impossible to maintain in practice, the State stepped in with a way of escape—a kind of emergency exit. But what a makeshift it is! how flagrantly indecent! how inconsistent! Adultery must be committed. To escape the degradation of an unworthy partner another partner must first be sought, and love degraded in an act of infidelity. Adultery is, in fact, a State-endowed offence against morality, just as the indissolubility of marriage is a theological perversion of the plainest moral law, that the true relationship between the sexes is founded on love. This bastard-born morality of Church and State is as immoral in theory as it is evil in practice.

For if we look deeper it becomes clear that the test to be applied here is the same as in every relation between the sexes: the conditions of divorce, like the conditions of marriage, must be such as best serve the interests of the race. This means, in the first place, that both partners in a marriage must have the assurance that when the moral conditions of the contract are broken, or through any reason become inefficient, they can be liberated, without any shame or idea of delinquency being attached to the dissolution. "Divorce is relief from misfortune and not a crime," to quote from the admirable statute-book of Norway, a saying which should be one of universal application in divorce. This must be done not merely as an act of justice to the individual; it is called for equally in the interests of the race. The woman or man from whom a divorce ought to be obtained is in almost all cases the woman or man who ought not to be a parent. We may go further than this. Divorce cannot be considered on the physical side alone, there is a psychological divorce which is far deeper, and also far more frequent. The woman or man who for any reason is unhappy in marriage is unfitted to be a parent in that marriage, and the way should be opened to them, if they desire, to have other children born in love in a new marriage with a more fitting mate. Our eyes are shut to the damning facts which confront us on every side. Take, for instance, the case of the drunkard, the insane, the syphilitic, the consumptive, parent bound in marriage. On biological and economic grounds it is folly to leave in such hands the protection of the race. It is the business of the State, as I believe, to regulate the law to prevent, as far as possible, the birth of unfit children; at least we may demand that Church and State cease to grant their sanction to this flagrant sin.

It is of the utmost importance to realise that Divorce Law Reform is needed to bring our jurisprudence up to the level of the modern civilised State. Our law in this respect lags far behind that of other countries, and is only one example out of many of our hide-bound attachment to ancient abuses. The opposition shown against the splendid and fearless recommendations for the extension of the grounds of divorce, voiced by the Majority Report in the recent Divorce Law Commission, prove how far we are still from understanding the higher morality of marriage. The recent Commission and the strong movement in favour of reform will, without doubt, lead to a change in the glaring injustice and inconsistencies of our law. It is, however, certain that an enlightened divorce law must go much further than providing ways of escape from marriage. Such exits tend to destroy the true sanctity of marriage; also they are unable to meet the needs of all classes, no matter how wide and numerous they are. They can never form the ultimate solution. They tend to make marriage ridiculous, and there are real grounds in the objections raised against them. There must be no special exits; the door of marriage itself must be left open to go out of as it is open to enter. This will come. When personal responsibility in marriage is developed, when all the relationships of sexes are founded on the recognition of the equality of the mother with the father—the woman with the man, then will come divorce by mutual consent.

Whenever divorce is difficult, there woman's lot is hard and her position low. It is a part of the patriarchal custom which regards women as property. It would be easy to prove this by the history of marriage in the civilisations of the past, as also by an examination of the present divorce laws in civilised countries. I cannot do this, but I make the assertion without the least shadow of doubt. I would point back in proof to the Egyptian and Babylonian divorce law, and to the splendid development of Roman Law in this direction. Consent is accepted as necessary to marriage; it should be the condition of divorce. This, I believe, is the only solution which women will be content to accept, when once they are awakened to their responsibilities in marriage. And here I would quote the wise dictum of Mr. Cunninghame Graham: "Divorce is the charter of Woman's Freedom".

The condemnation of divorce and the pillorying of divorced persons are not really the outcome of any concern for true morality, though most people deceive themselves that they are. They are predominantly the outcome of ignorance, of prejudices and false values, based, on the one hand, on the primitive patriarchal view of the wife (hence the insistence on woman's chastity and the inequality of the law), and, on the other, on the ecclesiastical doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage and the sin of all relationships outside its bonds. It is only when we realise how deeply and terribly these worn-out views have saturated and falsified our judgments that we come to understand the barbarism of our present laws of divorce.

It is significant that those who talk most of the sanctity of marriage are the very people who fear most the extension of divorce, seeming to believe that any loosening of its chains would lead to a dissolution of the institution of marriage. One marvels at the weakness of faith shown in such a view. It is not possible to hold the argument both ways. If the partners in marriage are happy, why lock them in? if not, why pretend that they are? The best argument I ever heard for divorce was a remark made to me in a conversation with a working man. He said, "When two people are fighting it is not very safe to lock the door". After all, what you do is this: you give occasion for the locks to be broken.

I have already spoken of loyalty and duty in relation to marriage, and nothing that I say now must be thought to lessen at all my deep belief in the personal responsibility of the individual in every relationship of the sexes. Living together even after the death of love may, indeed, be right if this is done in the interests of the children. But it can never be right to compel such action by law. For then in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred what is regarded as duty is really a question of expediency. It is very easy to deceive ourselves. And it requires more courage than most people possess to face the fact that what has perhaps been a happy and fruitful marriage has died a slow and bitter death. But the higher morality claims that a child must be born in love and reared in love, or, at the lowest, in an atmosphere from which all enmity is absent. Only the parent who is strong enough to subordinate the individual right to the rights of the child can safely remain in a marriage without love.

One great advantage of free divorce is that the wife and husband would not part, as is almost inevitable under present conditions, in hatred, but in friendship. This would enable them to meet one another from time to time and unite together in care of any children of the marriage. If such reasonable conduct was for any reason impossible on the part of either or both parents, then the State must appoint a guardian to fill the place of one parent or both. No child should be brought up without a mother and a father. The adoption of children under the State might in this way open up fruitful opportunities whereby childless women and men might gain the joys of parenthood.

This condition of safety by free-divorce once established, would do much to mitigate the hostility against marriage which is so unfortunately prevalent among us to-day. Practical morality is teaching us the immorality of indissoluble marriage. In Spain, a country that I know well, where marriage is indissoluble, an increasing number of men—and these the best and most thoughtful—are refraining from marriage for this very reason. It follows, as a result, that in Spain the illegitimate birth-rate is very high. The difficulty of divorce is also a strong factor that upholds prostitution.

Many women and men of exceptional gifts and character, conscious of an increasing intolerance against the makeshift morality imposed upon our sexual life, are standing outside of marriage and evading parentage. For this waste we are responsible to the future. Thus, finally, we find this truth: the principle of divorce reform forms the most practical foundation—and one waiting ready to our hands—for the reformation of marriage and the re-establishment of its sanctity. It also has direct and urgent bearing on many of the problems of womanhood.

III.—Prostitution

"Nought so vile that on the earth doth live But to the earth some special good doth give; Nor nought so good but strained from that fair use, Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse: Virtue itself turns vice being misapplied, And vice sometimes by action dignified."—Romeo and Juliet.

"In nature there's no blemish but the mind, None can be called deformed but the unkind."—Twelfth Night.

A brief and final section of this chapter on the sexual relationships must be devoted to the question of the conditions of prostitution, which are really part of the conditions of marriage, being correlated with that institution in its present coercive form, in fact, part of it and growing out of it.

The extent of the problems involved here are so immense, the difficulties so great and the issues so involved that I hesitate at making any attempt to treat so wide a subject briefly and necessarily inadequately in the short space at my disposal. Yet it seems to me impossible to take the easy way and pass it over in silence, and I may be able to contribute a word or two of worth to this very complex social phenomenon. I shall limit myself to the aspects of the question that seem to me important, choosing in preference the facts about which I have some little personal knowledge.

Essentially this is a woman's question. What do women know about it? Almost nothing. We are really as ignorant of the character, moral, mental and physical of "the fallen woman," as if she belonged to an extinct species. We know her only to pity her or to despise her, which is, in result, to know nothing that is true about her. To deal with the problem needs women and men of the finest character and the widest sympathy. There are some of them at work now, but these, for the most part, are engaged in the almost impossible task of rescue work, which does not bring, I think, a real understanding of the facts in their wider social aspect.

Women are, however, realising that they cannot continue to shirk this part of their civic duties. These "painted tragedies" of our streets have got to be recognised and dealt with; and this not so much for the sake of the prostitute, but for all women's safety and the health of the race. The time is not far distant when the mothers of the community, the sheltered wives of respectable homes, must come to understand that their own position of moral safety is maintained at the expense of a traffic whose very name they will not mention. For the prostitute, though unable to avenge herself, has had a mighty ally in Nature, who has taken her case in hand and has avenged it on the women and their children, who have received the benefits of our legal marriage system. M. Brieux deals with this question in Les Avaries: it is a tragedy that should be read by all women.

For this reason, if for no other, the existence of prostitution has to be faced by women. Apathy and ignorance will no longer be accepted as excuse, in the light of the sins against the race slowly piled up through the centuries by vice and disease. But what will be the result of women's action in this matter? What will they do? What changes in the law will they demand? The importance of these questions forces itself upon all those who realise at all the difficulties of the problem. What we see and hear does not, I think, give great hopes. Every woman who dares to speak on this great burked subject seems to have "a remedy" ready to her hand. What one hears most frequently are unconsidered denunciations of "the men who are responsible." For example, I heard one woman of education state publicly that there was no problem of prostitution! I mention this because it seems to me a very grave danger, an instance of the feminine over-haste in reform, which, while casting out one devil, but prepares the way for seven other devils worse than the first. Women seem to expect to solve problems that have vexed civilisation since the beginnings of society. This attitude is a little irritating. Every attempt hitherto to grapple with prostitution has been a failure. Women have to remember that it has existed as an institution in nearly all historic times and among nearly all races of men. It is as old as monogamic marriage, and maybe the result of that form of the sexual relationship, and not, as some have held, a survival of primitive sexual licence. The action of women in this question must be based on an educated opinion, which is cognisant with the past history of prostitution, recognises the facts of its action to-day in all civilised countries, and understands the complexity of the problem from the man's side as well as the woman's. Nothing less than this is necessary if any fruitful change is to be effected, when women shall come to have a voice to direct the action the State should assume towards this matter. The one measure which has recently been brought forward and passed, largely aided by women, especially the militant Suffragists—I refer to the White Slave Traffic Bill—is just the most useless, ill-devised and really preposterous law with which this tremendous problem could be mocked. As Bernard Shaw has recently said—

"The act is the final triumph of the vice it pretends to repress. There is one remedy and one alone, for the White Slave Traffic. Make it impossible, by the enactment of a Minimum Wage law and by the proper provision of the unemployed, for any woman to be forced to choose between prostitution and penury, and the White Slaver will have no more power over the daughters of labourers, artisans and clerks than he (or under the New Act she) will have over the wives of Bishops."

Now all this is true, but is not all the truth. Remove the economic pressure and no woman will be driven, or be likely to be trapped, into entering the oldest profession in the world; but this does not say that she will not enter it. The establishment of a minimum wage will assuredly lighten the evil, but it will not end prostitution. The economic factor is by no means the only factor. It is quite true that poverty drives many women into the profession—that this should be so is one of the social crimes that must, and will, be remedied.

The real problem lies deeper than this. Want is not the incentive to the traffic of sex in the case of the dancer or chorus girl in regular employment, of the forewoman in a factory or shop who earns steady wages, or among numerous women belonging to much higher social positions. These women choose prostitution, they are not driven into it. It is necessary to insist upon this. The belief in the efficacy of economic reform amounts almost to a disease—a kind of unquestioning fanatical faith. Again and again I have been met by the assurance, made by men who should know better, as well as by women, that no woman would sell herself if economic causes were removed. Such opinion proves a very plain ignorance of the history and facts of prostitution. It is only a little more scientific than the view of the woman moral crusader, who believes that the "social evil" can easily be remedied by self-control on the part of men. One of the worst vices common to women at present is spiritual pride. One wonders if these short-cut reformers have ever been acquainted with a single member of this class they hope to repress by legal enactments or other measures, such as early marriage, better wages for women, moral education, the censorship of amusements, and so forth. It is not so simple. You see, what is needed is an understanding of the conditions, not from the reformer's standard of thought, but from that of the prostitute, which is a very different matter. How can any one hope to reform a class whose real lives, thoughts, and desires are unknown to them?

My effort to reach bed-rock facts had led me to seek first-hand information from these women, many of whom I have come to know intimately, and to like. I have learnt a great deal, much more than from all my close study of the problem as it is presented in books. Problems are never so simple in the working out as they appear in theories. Moral doctrines fall to pieces; even statistics and the estimates of expert investigators are apt to become curiously unreal in the light of a very little practical knowledge. I have learnt that there is no one type of prostitute, no one cause of the evil, no one remedy that will cure it.

And here, before I go further, I must in fairness state that I have been compelled to give up the view held by me, in common with most women, that men and their uncontrolled passions are chiefly responsible for this hideous traffic. It is so comfortable to place the sins of society on men's passions. But as an unbiassed inquirer I have learnt that seduction as a cause of prostitution requires very careful examination. We women have got to remember that if many of our fallen sisters have been seduced by men, at least an equal number of men have received their sexual initiation at the hands of our sex. This seduction of men by women is often the starting-point of a young man's association with courtesans. It is time to assert that, if women suffer through men's passion, men suffer no less from women's greed. I am inclined to accept the estimate of Lippert (Prostitution in Hamburg) that the principal motives to prostitution are "idleness, frivolity, and, above all, the love of finery." This last is, as I believe, a far more frequent and stronger factor in determining towards prostitution than actual want, and one, moreover, that is very deeply rooted in the feminine character. I do not wish to be cynical, but facts have forced on me the belief that the majority of prostitutes are simply doing for money what they originally did of their own will for excitement and the gain of some small personal gift.

There are, of course, many types among these unclassed women, as many as there are in any other class, probably even more. Yet, in one respect, I have found them curiously alike. Just as the members of any other trade have a special attitude towards their work, so prostitutes have, I think, a particular way of viewing their trade in sex. It is a mistake of sentiment to believe they have any real dislike to this traffic. Such distaste is felt by the unsuccessful and by others in periods of unprofitable business, but not, I think, otherwise. To me it has seemed in talking with them—as I have done very freely—that they regard the sexual embraces of their partners exactly in the light that I regard the process of the actual writing down of my books—as something, in itself unimportant and tiresome, but necessary to the end to be gained. This was first made clear to me in a conversation with a member of the higher demi-monde, a woman of education and considerable character. "After all," she said, "it is really a very small thing to do, and gives one very little trouble, and men are almost always generous."

This remarkable statement seems to me representative of the attitude of most prostitutes. They are much better paid, if at all successful, than they ever could be as workers. The sale of their sex opens up to them the same opportunities of gain that gambling on the stock-exchange or betting on the racecourse, for instance, opens up to men. It also offers the same joy of excitement, undoubtedly a very important factor. There are a considerable number of women who are drawn to and kept in the profession, not through necessity, but through neurosis.

There is no doubt that prostitution is very profitable to the clever trader. I was informed by one woman, for instance, that a certain country, whose name I had perhaps better withhold, "Is a Paradise for women." Quite a considerable fortune, either in money or jewels, may be reaped in a few months and sometimes in a few weeks. But the woman must keep her head; cleverness is more important even than beauty. I learnt that it was considered foolish to remain with the same partner for more than two nights, the oftener a change was made the greater the chance of gain. The richest presents are given as a rule by young boys or old men: some of these boys are as young as fifteen years.

Now the really extraordinary thing to me was that my informant had plainly no idea of my moral sensibility being shocked at these statements. Of course, if I had shown the least surprise or condemnation, she would at once have agreed with me—but I didn't. I was trying to see things as she saw them, and my interest caused her really to speak to me as she felt. I am certain of this, as was proved to me in a subsequent conversation, in which I was told the history of a girl friend, who had got into difficulties and been helped by my informant. (These women are almost always kind and generous to one another. I know of one case in which a woman who had been trapped into a bogus marriage and then deserted, afterwards helped with money the girl and bastard child, also left by the man who had deceived her.) The story was ended with this extraordinary remark, "It was all my friend's own fault, she was not particular who she went with; she would go with any man just because she took a fancy to him. I often told her how foolish she was, but she always said she could not help it."

It was then that I realised the immensity of the gulf which separated my outlook from that of this successful courtesan. To her to be not particular was to give oneself without a due return in money: to me——! Well, I needed all my control at that moment not to let her see what I felt. I have never been conscious of so deep a pity for any woman before, or felt so fierce an anger against social conditions that made this degradation of love possible. For, mark you, I know this woman well, have known her for years, and I can, and do, testify that in many directions apart from her trade, her virtue, her refinement and her character are equal, even if not superior, to my own. This is the greatest lesson I have learnt. The degradation of prostitution rests not with these women, but on us, the sheltered, happy women who have been content to ignore or despise them. Do you come to know these women (and this is very difficult) you are just as able to like them and in many ways to respect them, as you are to like and to respect any "straight" woman. You may hate their trade, you cannot justly hate them.

I would like here to bring forward as a chief cause of prostitution a factor which, though mentioned by many investigators,[327] has not, I think, been sufficiently recognised. To me it has been brought very forcibly home by my personal investigations. I mean sexual frigidity. This is surely the clearest explanation of the moral insensibility of the prostitute. I have not enough knowledge to say whether this is a natural condition, or whether it is acquired. I am certain, however, that it is present in those courtesans whom I have known. These women have never experienced passion. I believe that the traffic of love's supreme rite means less to them than it would do to me to shake hands with a man I disliked.

Now, if I am right, this fact will explain a great deal. I believe, moreover, that here a way opens out whereby in the future prostitution may be remedied. This is no fanciful statement, but a practical belief in passion as a power containing all forces. To any one who shares the faith I have been developing in this book, what I mean will be evident. If we consider how large a factor physical sex is in the life of woman, it becomes clear that any atrophy of these instincts must be in the highest degree hurtful. Moral insensibility is almost always combined with economic dependence. If all mating was founded, as it ought to be, on love, and all children born from lovers, there would follow as an inevitable result a truer insistence on reality in the relationships of the sexes. With a strengthening of passion in the mothers of the race, sex will return to its right and powerful purpose; love of all types, from the merest physical to the highest soul attraction, will be brought back to its true biological end—the service of the future.

I know, of course, as I have said already, that, just as there are many different forms of prostitution, there are many and varied types of prostitutes, and that, therefore, it is foolishness to hold fast in a one-sided manner to a single theory. There are undoubtedly voluptuous women among prostitutes. These I have not considered. For one thing I have not met them. I have preferred to speak of the women I have known personally. In the light of what I have learnt from them, I have come to believe that only in comparatively few cases does sexual desire lead any woman to adopt a career of prostitution, and in still fewer cases does passion persist. The insistence so often made on this factor as a cause of prostitution is due, in part, to ignorance as to the real feelings of these women, and also, in part, to its moral plausibility. We are so afraid of normal passion that we readily assume abnormal passion to be the cause of the evil. But far truer causes on the women's side are love of luxury and dislike of work. I think the estimates given by men on this subject have to be accepted with great caution. It must be remembered that it is the business of these women to excite passion, and, to do this, they must have learnt to simulate passion; and men, as every woman who is not ignorant or a fool knows, are easy to deceive. It may also be added that to the woman of strong sexuality the career of prostitution is suited. It is possible that in the future and under wiser conditions such women only will choose this profession.

For the same reason I have passed very lightly over the economic factor as a cause of prostitution. I believe that this will be changed. I do not under-estimate the undoubted importance of the driving pressure of want. But, as I have tried to make clear, it does not take us to the root of the problem. Poverty can only be regarded as probably the strongest out of many accessory causes. The socialists and economic apostles have to face this: no possible raising of women's wages can abolish prostitution.[328]

We must hold firmly to the fact that characterlessness, which is incapable of overcoming opposition and takes the path that is easiest, is the result of the individual's inherited disposition, with the addition of his, or her, own experience; and of these it is the former that, as a rule, determines to prostitution. Every kind of moral and intellectual looseness and dullness can, for the most part, be traced to this cause. At all events it is the strongest among many. Not alone for the prostitute's sake must this subject be seriously approached, but for society's sake as well. As things stand with us at present, moral sensitiveness has a poor chance of being cultivated, and those who realise that this is the case are still very few. Women have yet to learn the responsibilities of love, not only in regard to their duties of child-bearing and child-rearing, but in its personal bearing on their own sexual needs and the needs of men. I believe that the degradation of our legitimate love-relationships is the ultimate cause of prostitution, to which all other causes are subsidiary.

If we look now at the position for a moment from the other side—the man's side—a very difficult question awaits us. It is a question that women must answer. What is the real need of the prostitute on the part of men? This demand is present everywhere under civilisation; what are its causes? and how far are these likely to be changed? Now it is easy to bring forward answers, such as the lateness of marriage, difficulty of divorce, and all those social and economic causes which may be grouped together and classed as "lack of opportunity of legitimate love." Without question these causes are important, but, like the economic factor which drives women into prostitution, they are not fundamental; they are also remediable. They do not, however, explain the fact, which all know, that the prostitute is sought out by numberless men who have ample opportunity of unpriced love with other women. Here we have a preference for the prostitute, not the acceptance of her as a substitute taken of necessity. It is, of course, easy to say that such preference is due to the lustful nature of the male. There was a time when I accepted this view—it is, without doubt, a pleasant and a flattering one for women. I have learnt the folly of such shallow condemnations of needs I had not troubled to understand. Possibly no woman can quite get to the truth here; but at least I have tried to see facts straight and without feminine prejudice.

This is what seems to me to be the explanation.

We have got to recognise that there are primitive instincts of tremendous power, which, held in check by our dull and laborious, yet sexually-exciting, civilisation, break out at times in many individuals like a veritable monomania. In earlier civilisations this fact was frankly recognised, and such instincts were prevented from working mischief by the provision of means wherein they might expend themselves. Hence the widespread custom of festivals with the accompanying orgy; but these channels have been closed to us with a result that is often disastrous. No woman can have failed to feel astonishment at the attractive force the prostitute may, and often does, exercise on cultured men of really fine character. There is some deeper cause here than mere sexual necessity. But if we accept, as we must, the existence of these imperatively driving, though usually restrained impulses, it will be readily seen that prostitution provides a channel in which this surplus of wild energy may be expended. It lightens the burden of the customary restraints. There are many men, I believe, who find it a relief just to talk with a prostitute—a woman with whom they have no need to be on guard. The prostitute fulfils that need that may arise in even the most civilised man for something primitive and strong: a need, as has been said by a male writer, better than I can express it, "for woman in herself, not woman with the thousand and one tricks and whimsies of wives, mothers and daughters."

This is a truth that it seems to me it is very necessary for all women to realise. It is in our foolishness and want of knowledge that we cast our contempt upon men. Women flinch from the facts of life. These women who, regarded by us as "the supreme types of vice," are yet, from this point of view, "the most efficient guardians of our virtue." Must we not then rather see if there is no cause in ourselves for blame?

It has been held for generations that woman must practise principles of virtue to counteract man's example. This has led to an entirely false standard. A solving compromise has been found in the ideal of purity in one set of women and passion in another. And this state of things has continued indefinitely until it has become to some extent true. Numberless women have withered in this unprofitable service to chastity. The sexual coldness of the modern woman, which sociologists continually refer to, exists mainly in consequence of this constant system of repression. Female virtue has been over-cultivated, the flower has grown to an enormous size, but it has lost its scent. A hypocritical and a lying system has been set up professing disbelief in that which it knows is necessary to the needs of the individual woman and to the larger needs of the race. Physical love is only inglorious when it is regarded ingloriously. Why this horror of passion? The tragedy of woman it seems is this, that with such power of love as she has in her there should be so little opportunity for its use—so much for its waste. Those of us who believe in passion as the supreme factor in race-building, must know that this view of its shamefulness is weakening the race.

I, therefore, hold firmly as my belief that the hateful traffic in love will flourish just as long, and in proportion, as we regard passion outside of prostitution with shame. Each one of us women is responsible. Do we not know that there is not this difference between our sexual needs and those of men? Let us tear down the old pretence. Do not instincts arise in us, too, that demand expression, free from all coercion of convention? And if we stifle them are we really the better—the more moral sex? I doubt this, as I have come to doubt so many of the lies that have been accepted as the truth about women.