_Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, p. 424.
[247] A. Després, _La Prostitution à Paris_, p. 191.

[248] F. Aurientis, _Etude Medico-légale sur la jurisprudence actuelle à
propos de la Transmission des Maladies Venériennes_, Thèse de Paris, 1906.

[249] In England at present "a husband knowingly and wilfully infecting
his wife with the venereal disease, cannot be convicted criminally, either
under a charge of assault or of inflicting grievous bodily harm" (N.
Geary, _The Law of Marriage_, p. 479). This was decided in 1888 in the
case of _R. v. Clarence_ by nine judges to four judges in the Court for
the Consideration of Crown Cases Reserved.

[250] Modern democratic sentiment is opposed to the sequestration of a
prostitute merely because she is diseased. But there can be no reasonable
doubt whatever that if a diseased prostitute infects another person, and
is unable to pay the very heavy damages which should be demanded in such a
case, she ought to be secluded and subjected to treatment. That is
necessary in the interests of the community. But it is also necessary, to
avoid placing a premium on the commission of an offence which would ensure
gratuitous treatment and provision for a prostitute without means, that
she should be furnished with facilities for treatment in any case.

[251] It has, however, been decided by the Paris Court of Appeal that for
a husband to marry when knowingly suffering from a venereal disease and to
communicate that disease to his wife is a sufficient cause for divorce
(_Semaine Médicale_, May, 1896).

[252] The large volume, entitled _Sexualpädagogik_, containing the
Proceedings of the Third of these Congresses, almost ignores the special
subject of venereal disease, and is devoted to the questions involved by
the general sexual education of the young, which, as many of the speakers
maintained, must begin with the child at his mother's knee.

[253] "Workmen, soldiers, and so on," Neisser remarks (Senator and
Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage_, vol. ii, p. 485),
"can more easily find non-prostitute girls of their own class willing to
enter into amorous relations with them which result in sexual intercourse,
and they are therefore less exposed to the danger of infection than those
men who have recourse almost exclusively to prostitutes" (see also Bloch,
_Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, p. 437).

[254] The character and extent of such lectures are fully discussed in the
Proceedings of the Third Congress of the German Society for Combating
Venereal Diseases, _Sexualpädagogik_, 1907.

[255] I leave out of account, as beyond the scope of the present work, the
auxiliary aids to the suppression of venereal diseases furnished by the
promising new methods, only now beginning to be understood, of treating or
even aborting such diseases (see, e.g., Metchnikoff, _The New Hygiene_,
1906).

[256] Max von Niessen, "Herr Doktor, darf ich heiraten?" _Mutterschutz_,
1906, p. 352.




CHAPTER IX.

SEXUAL MORALITY.

Prostitution in Relation to Our Marriage System--Marriage and
Morality--The Definition of the Term "Morality"--Theoretical Morality--Its
Division Into Traditional Morality and Ideal Morality--Practical
Morality--Practical Morality Based on Custom--The Only Subject of
Scientific Ethics--The Reaction Between Theoretical and Practical
Morality--Sexual Morality in the Past an Application of Economic
Morality--The Combined Rigidity and Laxity of This Morality--The
Growth of a Specific Sexual Morality and the Evolution of Moral
Ideals--Manifestations of Sexual Morality--Disregard of the Forms of
Marriage--Trial Marriage--Marriage After Conception of Child--Phenomena in
Germany, Anglo-Saxon Countries, Russia, etc.--The Status of Woman--The
Historical Tendency Favoring Moral Equality of Women with Men--The Theory
of the Matriarchate--Mother-Descent--Women in Babylonia--Egypt--Rome--The
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries--The Historical Tendency
Favoring Moral Inequality of Woman--The Ambiguous Influence of
Christianity--Influence of Teutonic Custom and Feudalism--Chivalry--Woman
in England--The Sale of Wives--The Vanishing Subjection of
Woman--Inaptitude of the Modern Man to Domineer--The Growth of Moral
Responsibility in Women--The Concomitant Development of Economic
Independence--The Increase of Women Who Work--Invasion of the Modern
Industrial Field by Women--In How Far This Is Socially Justifiable--The
Sexual Responsibility of Women and Its Consequences--The Alleged Moral
Inferiority of Women--The "Self-Sacrifice" of Women--Society Not Concerned
with Sexual Relationships--Procreation the Sole Sexual Concern of the
State--The Supreme Importance of Maternity.


It has been necessary to deal fully with the phenomena of prostitution
because, however aloof we may personally choose to hold ourselves from
those phenomena, they really bring us to the heart of the sexual question
in so far as it constitutes a social problem. If we look at prostitution
from the outside, as an objective phenomenon, as a question of social
dynamics, it is seen to be not a merely accidental and eliminable incident
of our present marriage system but an integral part of it, without which
it would fall to pieces. This will probably be fairly clear to all who
have followed the preceding exposition of prostitutional phenomena. There
is, however, more than this to be said. Not only is prostitution to-day,
as it has been for more than two thousand years, the buttress of our
marriage system, but if we look at marriage, not from the outside as a
formal institution, but from the inside with relation to the motives that
constitute it, we find that marriage in a large proportion of cases is
itself in certain respects a form of prostitution. This has been
emphasized so often and from so many widely different standpoints that it
may seem hardly necessary to labor the point here. But the point is one of
extreme importance in relation to the question of sexual morality. Our
social conditions are unfavorable to the development of a high moral
feeling in woman. The difference between the woman who sells herself in
prostitution and the woman who sells herself in marriage, according to the
saying of Marro already quoted, "is only a difference in price and
duration of the contract." Or, as Forel puts it, marriage is "a more
fashionable form of prostitution," that is to say, a mode of obtaining, or
disposing of, for monetary considerations, a sexual commodity. Marriage
is, indeed, not merely a more fashionable form of prostitution, it is a
form sanctified by law and religion, and the question of morality is not
allowed to intrude. Morality may be outraged with impunity provided that
law and religion have been invoked. The essential principle of
prostitution is thus legalized and sanctified among us. That is why it is
so difficult to arouse any serious indignation, or to maintain any
reasoned objections, against our prostitution considered by itself. The
most plausible ground is that of those[257] who, bringing marriage down to
the level of prostitution, maintain that the prostitute is a "blackleg"
who is accepting less than the "market rate of wages," i.e., marriage, for
the sexual services she renders. But even this low ground is quite unsafe.
The prostitute is really paid extremely well considering how little she
gives in return; the wife is really paid extremely badly considering how
much she often gives, and how much she necessarily gives up. For the sake
of the advantage of economic dependence on her husband, she must give up,
as Ellen Key observes, those rights over her children, her property, her
work, and her own person which she enjoys as an unmarried woman, even, it
may be added, as a prostitute. The prostitute never signs away the right
over her own person, as the wife is compelled to do; the prostitute,
unlike the wife, retains her freedom and her personal rights, although
these may not often be of much worth. It is the wife rather than the
prostitute who is the "blackleg."

It is by no means only during recent years that our marriage
system has been arraigned before the bar of morals. Forty years
ago James Hinton exhausted the vocabulary of denunciation in
describing the immorality and selfish licentiousness which our
marriage system covers with the cloak of legality and sanctity.
"There is an unsoundness in our marriage relations," Hinton
wrote. "Not only practically are they dreadful, but they do not
answer to feelings and convictions far too widespread to be
wisely ignored. Take the case of women of marked eminence
consenting to be a married man's mistress; of pure and simple
girls saying they cannot see why they should have a marriage by
law; of a lady saying that if she were in love she would not have
any legal tie; of its being necessary--or thought so by good and
wise men--to keep one sex in bitter and often fatal ignorance.
These things (and how many more) show some deep unsoundness in
the marriage relations. This must be probed and searched to the
bottom."

At an earlier date, in 1847, Gross-Hoffinger, in his _Die
Schicksale der Frauen und die Prostitution_--a remarkable book
which Bloch, with little exaggeration, describes as possessing an
epoch-marking significance--vigorously showed that the problem of
prostitution is in reality the problem of marriage, and that we
can only reform away prostitution by reforming marriage, regarded
as a compulsory institution resting on an antiquated economic
basis. Gross-Hoffinger was a pioneering precursor of Ellen Key.

More than a century and a half earlier a man of very different
type scathingly analyzed the morality of his time, with a brutal
frankness, indeed, that seemed to his contemporaries a
revoltingly cynical attitude towards their sacred institutions,
and they felt that nothing was left to them save to burn his
books. Describing modern marriage in his _Fable of the Bees_
(1714, p. 64), and what that marriage might legally cover,
Mandeville wrote: "The fine gentleman I spoke of need not
practice any greater self-denial than the savage, and the latter
acted more according to the laws of nature and sincerity than the
first. The man that gratifies his appetite after the manner the
custom of the country allows of, has no censure to fear. If he
is hotter than goats or bulls, as soon as the ceremony is over,
let him sate and fatigue himself with joy and ecstasies of
pleasure, raise and indulge his appetite by turns, as
extravagantly as his strength and manhood will give him leave. He
may, with safety, laugh at the wise men that should reprove him:
all the women and above nine in ten of the men are of his side;
nay, he has the liberty of valuing himself upon the fury of his
unbridled passions, and the more he wallows in lust and strains
every faculty to be abandonedly voluptuous, the sooner he shall
have the good-will and gain the affection of the women, not the
young, vain, and lascivious only, but the prudent, grave, and
most sober matrons."

Thus the charge brought against our marriage system from the
point of view of morality is that it subordinates the sexual
relationship to considerations of money and of lust. That is
precisely the essence of prostitution.

The only legitimately moral end of marriage--whether we regard it from the
wider biological standpoint or from the narrower standpoint of human
society--is as a sexual selection, effected in accordance with the laws of
sexual selection, and having as its direct object a united life of
complete mutual love and as its indirect object the procreation of the
race. Unless procreation forms part of the object of marriage, society has
nothing whatever to do with it and has no right to make its voice heard.
But if procreation is one of the ends of marriage, then it is imperative
from the biological and social points of view that no influences outside
the proper natural influence of sexual selection should be permitted to
affect the choice of conjugal partners, for in so far as wholesome sexual
selection is interfered with the offspring is likely to be injured and the
interests of the race affected.

It must, of course, be clearly understood that the idea of
marriage as a form of sexual union based not on biological but on
economic considerations, is very ancient, and is sometimes found
in societies that are almost primitive. Whenever, however,
marriage on a purely property basis, and without due regard to
sexual selection, has occurred among comparatively primitive and
vigorous peoples, it has been largely deprived of its evil
results by the recognition of its merely economic character, and
by the absence of any desire to suppress, even nominally, other
sexual relationships on a more natural basis which were outside
this artificial form of marriage. Polygamy especially tended to
conciliate unions on an economic basis with unions on a natural
sexual basis. Our modern marriage system has, however, acquired
an artificial rigidity which excludes the possibility of this
natural safeguard and compensation. Whatever its real moral
content may be, a modern marriage is always "legal" and "sacred."
We are indeed so accustomed to economic forms of marriage that,
as Sidgwick truly observed (_Method of Ethics_, Bk. ii, Ch. XI),
when they are spoken of as "legalized prostitution" it constantly
happens that "the phrase is felt to be extravagant and
paradoxical."

A man who marries for money or for ambition is departing from the
biological and moral ends of marriage. A woman who sells herself for life
is morally on the same level as one who sells herself for a night. The
fact that the payment seems larger, that in return for rendering certain
domestic services and certain personal complacencies--services and
complacencies in which she may be quite inexpert--she will secure an
almshouse in which she will be fed and clothed and sheltered for life
makes no difference in the moral aspect of her case. The moral
responsibility is, it need scarcely be said, at least as much the man's as
the woman's. It is largely due to the ignorance and even the indifference
of men, who often know little or nothing of the nature of women and the
art of love. The unintelligence with which even men who might, one thinks,
be not without experience, select as a mate, a woman who, however fine and
charming she may be, possesses none of the qualities which her wooer
really craves, is a perpetual marvel. To refrain from testing and proving
the temper and quality of the woman he desires for a mate is no doubt an
amiable trait of humility on a man's part. But it is certain that a man
should never be content with less than the best of what a woman's soul and
body have to give, however unworthy he may feel himself of such a
possession. This demand, it must be remarked, is in the highest interests
of the woman herself. A woman can offer to a man what is a part at all
events of the secret of the universe. The woman degrades herself who sinks
to the level of a candidate for an asylum for the destitute.

Our discussion of the psychic facts of sex has thus, it will be seen,
brought us up to the question of morality. Over and over again, in
setting forth the phenomena of prostitution, it has been necessary to use
the word "moral." That word, however, is vague and even, it may be,
misleading because it has several senses. So far, it has been left to the
intelligent reader, as he will not fail to perceive, to decide from the
context in what sense the word was used. But at the present point, before
we proceed to discuss sexual psychology in relation to marriage, it is
necessary, in order to avoid ambiguity, to remind the reader what
precisely are the chief main senses in which the word "morality" is
commonly used.

The morality with which ethical treatises are concerned is _theoretical
morality_. It is concerned with what people "ought"--or what is "right"
for them--to do. Socrates in the Platonic dialogues was concerned with
such theoretical morality: what "ought" people to seek in their actions?
The great bulk of ethical literature, until recent times one may say the
whole of it, is concerned with that question. Such theoretical morality
is, as Sidgwick said, a study rather than a science, for science can only
be based on what is, not on what ought to be.

Even within the sphere of theoretical morality there are two very
different kinds of morality, so different indeed that sometimes each
regards the other as even inimical or at best only by courtesy, with yet a
shade of contempt, "moral." These two kinds of theoretical morality are
_traditional morality_ and _ideal morality_. Traditional morality is
founded on the long established practices of a community and possesses the
stability of all theoretical ideas based in the past social life and
surrounding every individual born into the community from his earliest
years. It becomes the voice of conscience which speaks automatically in
favor of all the rules that are thus firmly fixed, even when the
individual himself no longer accepts them. Many persons, for example, who
were brought up in childhood to the Puritanical observance of Sunday, will
recall how, long after they had ceased to believe that such observances
were "right," they yet in the violation of them heard the protest of the
automatically aroused voice of "conscience," that is to say the expression
within the individual of customary rules which have indeed now ceased to
be his own but were those of the community in which he was brought up.

Ideal morality, on the other hand, refers not to the past of the community
but to its future. It is based not on the old social actions that are
becoming antiquated, and perhaps even anti-social in their tendency, but
on new social actions that are as yet only practiced by a small though
growing minority of the community. Nietzsche in modern times has been a
conspicuous champion of ideal morality, the heroic morality of the
pioneer, of the individual of the coming community, against traditional
morality, or, as he called it, herd-morality, the morality of the crowd.
These two moralities are necessarily opposed to each other, but, we have
to remember, they are both equally sound and equally indispensable, not
only to those who accept them but to the community which they both
contribute to hold in vital theoretical balance. We have seen them both,
for instance, applied to the question of prostitution; traditional
morality defends prostitution, not for its own sake, but for the sake of
the marriage system which it regards as sufficiently precious to be worth
a sacrifice, while ideal morality refuses to accept the necessity of
prostitution, and looks forward to progressive changes in the marriage
system which will modify and diminish prostitution.

But altogether outside theoretical morality, or the question of what
people "ought" to do, there remains _practical morality_, or the question
of what, as a matter of fact, people actually do. This is the really
fundamental and essential morality. Latin _mores_ and Greek aethos both
refer to _custom_, to the things that are, and not to the things that
"ought" to be, except in the indirect and secondary sense that whatever
the members of the community, in the mass, actually do, is the thing that
they feel they ought to do. In the first place, however, a moral act was
not done because it was felt that it ought to be done, but for reasons of
a much deeper and more instinctive character.[258] It was not first done
because it was felt it ought to be done, but it was felt it "ought" to be
done because it had actually become the custom to do it.

The actions of a community are determined by the vital needs of a
community under the special circumstances of its culture, time, and land.
When it is the general custom for children to kill their aged parents that
custom is always found to be the best not only for the community but even
for the old people themselves, who desire it; the action is both
practically moral and theoretically moral.[259] And when, as among
ourselves, the aged are kept alive, that action is also both practically
and theoretically moral; it is in no wise dependent on any law or rule
opposed to the taking of life, for we glory in the taking of life under
the patriotic name of "war," and are fairly indifferent to it when
involved by the demands of our industrial system; but the killing of the
aged no longer subserves any social need and their preservation ministers
to our civilized emotional needs. The killing of a man is indeed
notoriously an act which differs widely in its moral value at different
periods and in different countries. It was quite moral in England two
centuries ago and less, to kill a man for trifling offences against
property, for such punishment commended itself as desirable to the general
sense of the educated community. To-day it would be regarded as highly
immoral. We are even yet only beginning to doubt the morality of
condemning to death and imprisoning for life an unmarried girl who
destroyed her infant at birth, solely actuated, against all her natural
impulses, by the primitive instinct of self-defense. It cannot be said
that we have yet begun to doubt the morality of killing men in war, though
we no longer approve of killing women and children, or even non-combatants
generally. Every age or land has its own morality.

"Custom, in the strict sense of the word," well says Westermarck,
"involves a moral rule.... Society is the school in which men learn to
distinguish between right and wrong. The headmaster is custom."[260]
Custom is not only the basis of morality but also of law. "Custom is
law."[261] The field of theoretical morality has been found so fascinating
a playground for clever philosophers that there has sometimes been a
danger of forgetting that, after all, it is not theoretical morality but
practical morality, the question of what men in the mass of a community
actually do, which constitutes the real stuff of morals.[262] If we define
more precisely what we mean by morals, on the practical side, we may say
that it is constituted by those customs which the great majority of the
members of a community regard as conducive to the welfare of the community
at some particular time and place. It is for this reason--i.e., because it
is a question of what is and not of merely what some think ought to
be--that practical morals form the proper subject of science. "If the word
'ethics' is to be used as the name for a science," Westermarck says, "the
object of that science can only be to study the moral consciousness as a
fact."[263]

Lecky's _History of European Morals_ is a study in practical
rather than in theoretical morals. Dr. Westermarck's great work,
_The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, is a more modern
example of the objectively scientific discussion of morals,
although this is not perhaps clearly brought out by the title. It
is essentially a description of the actual historical facts of
what has been, and not of what "ought" to be. Mr. L.T. Hobhouse's
_Morals in Evolution_, published almost at the same time, is
similarly a work which, while professedly dealing with ideas,
i.e., with rules and regulations, and indeed disclaiming the task
of being "the history of conduct," yet limits itself to those
rules which are "in fact, the normal conduct of the average man"
(vol. i, p. 26). In other words, it is essentially a history of
practical morality, and not of theoretical morality. One of the
most subtle and suggestive of living thinkers, M. Jules de
Gaultier, in several of his books, and notably in _La Dépendance
de la Morale et l'Indépendance des Moeurs_ (1907), has analyzed
the conception of morals in a somewhat similar sense. "Phenomena
relative to conduct," as he puts it (op. cit., p. 58), "are given
in experience like other phenomena, so that morality, or the
totality of the laws which at any given moment of historic
evolution are applied to human practice, is dependent on
customs." I may also refer to the masterly exposition of this
aspect of morality in Lévy-Bruhl's _La Morale et la Science des
Moeurs_ (there is an English translation).

Practical morality is thus the solid natural fact which forms the
biological basis of theoretical morality, whether traditional or ideal.
The excessive fear, so widespread among us, lest we should injure morality
is misplaced. We cannot hurt morals though we can hurt ourselves. Morals
is based on nature and can at the most only be modified. As Crawley
rightly insists,[264] even the categorical imperatives of our moral
traditions, so far from being, as is often popularly supposed, attempts to
suppress Nature, arise in the desire to assist Nature; they are simply an
attempt at the rigid formulation of natural impulses. The evil of them
only lies in the fact that, like all things that become rigid and dead,
they tend to persist beyond the period when they were a beneficial vital
reaction to the environment. They thus provoke new forms of ideal
morality; and practical morals develops new structures, in accordance with
new vital relationships, to replace older and desiccated traditions.

There is clearly an intimate relationship between theoretical morals and
practical morals or morality proper. For not only is theoretical morality
the outcome in consciousness of realized practices embodied in the
general life of the community, but, having thus become conscious, it
reacts on those practices and tends to support them or, by its own
spontaneous growth, to modify them. This action is diverse, according as
we are dealing with one or the other of the strongly marked divisions of
theoretical morality: traditional and posterior morality, retarding the
vital growth of moral practice, or ideal and anterior morality,
stimulating the vital growth of moral practice. Practical morality, or
morals proper, may be said to stand between these two divisions of
theoretical morality. Practice is perpetually following after anterior
theoretical morality, in so far of course as ideal morality really is
anterior and not, as so often happens, astray up a blind alley. Posterior
or traditional morality always follows after practice. The result is that
while the actual morality, in practice at any time or place, is always
closely related to theoretical morality, it can never exactly correspond
to either of its forms. It always fails to catch up with ideal morality;
it is always outgrowing traditional morality.

It has been necessary at this point to formulate definitely the three
chief forms in which the word "moral" is used, although under one shape or
another they cannot but be familiar to the reader. In the discussion of
prostitution it has indeed been easily possible to follow the usual custom
of allowing the special sense in which the word was used to be determined
by the context. But now, when we are, for the moment, directly concerned
with the specific question of the evolution of sexual morality, it is
necessary to be more precise in formulating the terms we use. In this
chapter, except when it is otherwise stated, we are concerned primarily
with morals proper, with actual conduct as it develops among the masses of
a community, and only secondarily with anterior morality or with posterior
morality.

Sexual morality, like all other kinds of morality, is necessarily
constituted by inherited traditions modified by new adaptations to the
changing social environment. If the influence of tradition becomes unduly
pronounced the moral life tends to decay and lose its vital adaptability.
If adaptability becomes too facile the moral life tends to become unstable
and to lose authority. It is only by a reasonable synthesis of structure
and function--of what is called the traditional with what is called the
ideal--that the moral life can retain its authority without losing its
reality. Many, even among those who call themselves moralists, have found
this hard to understand. In a vain desire for an impossible logicality
they have over-emphasized either the ideal influence on practical morals
or, still more frequently, the traditional influence, which has appealed
to them because of the impressive authority its _dicta_ seem to convey.
The results in the sphere we are here concerned with have often been
unfortunate, for no social impulse is so rebellious to decayed traditions,
so volcanically eruptive, as that of sex.

We are accustomed to identify our present marriage system with "morality"
in the abstract, and for many people, perhaps for most, it is difficult to
realize that the slow and insensible movement which is always affecting
social life at the present time, as at every other time, is profoundly
affecting our sexual morality. A transference of values is constantly
taking place; what was once the very standard of morality becomes immoral,
what was once without question immoral becomes a new standard. Such a
process is almost as bewildering as for the European world two thousand
years ago was the great struggle between the Roman city and the Christian
Church, when it became necessary to realize that what Marcus Aurelius, the
great pattern of morality, had sought to crush as without question
immoral,[265] was becoming regarded as the supreme standard of morality.
The classic world considered love and pity and self-sacrifice as little
better than weakness and sometimes worse; the Christian world not only
regarded them as moralities but incarnated them in a god. Our sexual
morality has likewise disregarded natural human emotions, and is incapable
of understanding those who declare that to retain unduly traditional laws
that are opposed to the vital needs of human societies is not a morality
but an immorality.

The reason why the gradual evolution of moral ideals, which is always
taking place, tends in the sexual sphere, at all events among ourselves,
to reach a stage in which there seems to be an opposition between
different standards lies in the fact that as yet we really have no
specific sexual morality at all.[266] That may seem surprising at first to
one who reflects on the immense weight which is usually attached to
"sexual morality." And it is undoubtedly true that we have a morality
which we apply to the sphere of sex. But that morality is one which
belongs mainly to the sphere of property and was very largely developed on
a property basis. All the historians of morals in general, and of marriage
in particular, have set forth this fact, and illustrated it with a wealth
of historical material. We have as yet no generally recognized sexual
morality which has been based on the specific sexual facts of life. That
becomes clear at once when we realize the central fact that the sexual
relationship is based on love, at the very least on sexual desire, and
that that basis is so deep as to be even physiological, for in the absence
of such sexual desire it is physiologically impossible for a man to effect
intercourse with a woman. Any specific sexual morality must be based on
that fact. But our so-called "sexual morality," so far from being based on
that fact, attempts to ignore it altogether. It makes contracts, it
arranges sexual relationships beforehand, it offers to guarantee
permanency of sexual inclinations. It introduces, that is, considerations
of a kind that is perfectly sound in the economic sphere to which such
considerations rightly belong, but ridiculously incongruous in the sphere
of sex to which they have solemnly been applied. The economic
relationships of life, in the large sense, are, as we shall see, extremely
important in the evolution of any sound sexual morality, but they belong
to the conditions of its development and do not constitute its basis.[267]

The fact that, from the legal point of view, marriage is
primarily an arrangement for securing the rights of property and
inheritance is well illustrated by the English divorce law
to-day. According to this law, if a woman has sexual intercourse
with any man beside her husband, he is entitled to divorce her;
if, however, the husband has intercourse with another woman
beside his wife, she is not entitled to a divorce; that is only
accorded if, in addition, he has also been cruel to her, or
deserted her, and from any standpoint of ideal morality such a
law is obviously unjust, and it has now been discarded in nearly
all civilized lands except England.

But from the standpoint of property and inheritance it is quite
intelligible, and on that ground it is still supported by the
majority of Englishmen. If the wife has intercourse with other
men there is a risk that the husband's property will be inherited
by a child who is not his own. But the sexual intercourse of the
husband with other women is followed by no such risk. The
infidelity of the wife is a serious offence against property; the
infidelity of the husband is no offence against property, and
cannot possibly, therefore, be regarded as a ground for divorce
from our legal point of view. The fact that his adultery
complicated by cruelty is such a ground, is simply a concession
to modern feeling. Yet, as Helena Stöcker truly points out
("Verschiedenheit im Liebesleben des Weibes und des Mannes,"
_Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_, Dec., 1908), a married man
who has an unacknowledged child with a woman outside of marriage,
has committed an act as seriously anti-social as a married woman
who has a child without acknowledging that the father is not her
husband. In the first case, the husband, and in the second case,
the wife, have placed an undue amount of responsibility on
another person. (The same point is brought forward by the author
of _The Question of English Divorce_, p. 56.)

I insist here on the economic element in our sexual morality,
because that is the element which has given it a kind of
stability and become established in law. But if we take a wider
view of our sexual morality, we cannot ignore the ancient element
of asceticism, which has given religious passion and sanction to
it. Our sexual morality is thus, in reality, a bastard born of
the union of property-morality with primitive ascetic morality,
neither in true relationship to the vital facts of the sexual
life. It is, indeed, the property element which, with a few
inconsistencies, has become finally the main concern of our law,
but the ascetic element (with, in the past, a wavering
relationship to law) has had an important part in moulding
popular sentiment and in creating an attitude of reprobation
towards sexual intercourse _per se_, although such intercourse is
regarded as an essential part of the property-based and
religiously sanctified institution of legal marriage.

The glorification of virginity led by imperceptible stages to the
formulation of "fornication" as a deadly sin, and finally as an
actual secular "crime." It is sometimes stated that it was not
until the Council of Trent that the Church formally anathematized
those who held that the state of marriage was higher than that of
virginity, but the opinion had been more or less formally held
from almost the earliest ages of Christianity, and is clear in
the epistles of Paul. All the theologians agree that fornication
is a mortal sin. Caramuel, indeed, the distinguished Spanish
theologian, who made unusual concessions to the demands of reason
and nature, held that fornication is only evil because it is
forbidden, but Innocent XI formally condemned that proposition.
Fornication as a mortal sin became gradually secularized into
fornication as a crime. Fornication was a crime in France even as
late as the eighteenth century, as Tarde found in his historical
investigations of criminal procedure in Périgord; adultery was
also a crime and severely punished quite independently of any
complaint from either of the parties (Tarde, "Archéologie
Criminelle en Périgord," _Archives de l'Anthropologie
Criminelle_, Nov. 15, 1898).

The Puritans of the Commonwealth days in England (like the
Puritans of Geneva) followed the Catholic example and adopted
ecclesiastical offences against chastity into the secular law. By
an Act passed in 1653 fornication became punishable by three
months' imprisonment inflicted on both parties. By the same Act
the adultery of a wife (nothing is said of a husband) was made
felony, both for her and her partner in guilt, and therefore
punishable by death (Scobell, _Acts and Ordinances_, p. 121).

The action of a pseudo-morality, such as our sexual morality has been, is
double-edged. On the one side it induces a secret and shamefaced laxity,
on the other it upholds a rigid and uninspiring theoretical code which so
few can consistently follow that theoretical morality is thereby degraded
into a more or less empty form. "The human race would gain much," said the
wise Sénancour, "if virtue were made less laborious. The merit would not
be so great, but what is the use of an elevation which can rarely be
sustained?"[268] At present, as a more recent moralist, Ellen Key, puts
it, we only have an immorality which favors vice and makes virtue
irrealizable, and, as she exclaims with pardonable extravagance, to preach
a sounder morality to the young, without at the same time condemning the
society which encourages the prevailing immorality, is "worse than folly,
it is crime."

It is on the lines along which Sénancour a century ago and Ellen Key
to-day are great pioneers that the new forms of anterior or ideal
theoretical morality are now moving, in advance, according to the general
tendency in morals, of traditional morality and even of practice.

There is one great modern movement of a definite kind which will serve to
show how clearly sexual morality is to-day moving towards a new
standpoint. This is the changing attitude of the bulk of the community
towards both State marriage and religious marriage, and the growing
tendency to disallow State interference with sexual relationships, apart
from the production of children.

There has no doubt always been a tendency among the masses of the
population in Europe to dispense with the official sanction of sexual
relationships until such relationships have been well established and the
hope of offspring has become justifiable. This tendency has been
crystallized into recognized customs among numberless rural communities
little touched either by the disturbing influences of the outside world or
the controlling influences of theological Christian conceptions. But at
the present day this tendency is not confined to the more primitive and
isolated communities of Europe among whom, on the contrary, it has tended
to die out. It is an unquestionable fact, says Professor Bruno Meyer, that
far more than the half of sexual intercourse now takes place outside legal
marriage.[269] It is among the intelligent classes and in prosperous and
progressive communities that this movement is chiefly marked. We see
throughout the world the practical common sense of the people shaping
itself in the direction which has been pioneered by the ideal moralists
who invariably precede the new growth of practical morality.

The voluntary childless marriages of to-day have served to show the
possibility of such unions outside legal marriage, and such free unions
are becoming, as Mrs. Parsons points out, "a progressive substitute for
marriage."[270] The gradual but steady rise in the age for entering on
legal marriage also points in the same direction, though it indicates not
merely an increase of free unions but an increase of all forms of normal
and abnormal sexuality outside marriage. Thus in England and Wales, in
1906, only 43 per 1,000 husbands and 146 per 1,000 wives were under age,
while the average age for husbands was 28.6 years and for wives 26.4
years. For men the age has gone up some eight months during the past forty
years, for women more than this. In the large cities, like London, where
the possibilities of extra-matrimonial relationships are greater, the age
for legal marriage is higher than in the country.

If we are to regard the age of legal marriage as, on the whole,
the age at which the population enters into sexual unions, it is
undoubtedly too late. Beyer, a leading German neurologist, finds
that there are evils alike in early and in late marriage, and
comes to the conclusion that in temperate zones the best age for
women to marry is the twenty-first year, and for men the
twenty-fifth year.

Yet, under bad economic conditions and with a rigid marriage law,
early marriages are in every respect disastrous. They are among
the poor a sign of destitution. The very poorest marry first, and
they do so through the feeling that their condition cannot be
worse. (Dr. Michael Ryan brought together much interesting
evidence concerning the causes of early marriage in Ireland in
his _Philosophy of Marriage_, 1837, pp. 58-72). Among the poor,
therefore, early marriage is always a misfortune. "Many good
people," says Mr. Thomas Holmes, Secretary of the Howard
Association and missionary at police courts (in an interview,
_Daily Chronicle_, Sept. 8, 1906), "advise boys and girls to get
married in order to prevent what they call a 'disgrace.' This I
consider to be absolutely wicked, and it leads to far greater
evils than it can possibly avert."

Early marriages are one of the commonest causes both of
prostitution and divorce. They lead to prostitution in
innumerable cases, even when no outward separation takes place.
The fact that they lead to divorce is shown by the significant
circumstance that in England, although only 146 per 1,000 women
are under twenty-one at marriage, of the wives concerned in
divorce cases, 280 per 1,000 were under twenty-one at marriage,
and this discrepancy is even greater than it appears, for in the
well-to-do class, which can alone afford the luxury of divorce,
the normal age at marriage is much higher than for the population
generally. Inexperience, as was long ago pointed out by Milton
(who had learnt this lesson to his cost), leads to shipwreck in
marriage. "They who have lived most loosely," he wrote, "prove
most successful in their matches, because their wild affections,
unsettling at will, have been so many divorces to teach them
experience."

Miss Clapperton, referring to the educated classes, advocates
very early marriage, even during student life, which might then
be to some extent carried on side by side (_Scientific
Meliorism_, Ch. XVII). Ellen Key, also, advocates early marriage.
But she wisely adds that it involves the necessity for easy
divorce. That, indeed, is the only condition which can render
early marriage generally desirable. Young people--unless they
possess very simple and inert natures--can neither foretell the
course of their own development and their own strongest needs,
nor estimate accurately the nature and quality of another
personality. A marriage formed at an early age very speedily
ceases to be a marriage in anything but name. Sometimes a young
girl applies for a separation from her husband even on the very
day after marriage.

The more or less permanent free unions formed among us in Europe are
usually to be regarded merely as trial-marriages. That is to say they are
a precaution rendered desirable both by uncertainty as to either the
harmony or the fruitfulness of union until actual experiment has been
made, and by the practical impossibility of otherwise rectifying any
mistake in consequence of the antiquated rigidity of most European divorce
laws. Such trial marriages are therefore demanded by prudence and caution,
and as foresight increases with the development of civilization, and
constantly grows among us, we may expect that there will be a parallel
development in the frequency of trial marriage and in the social attitude
towards such unions. The only alternative--that a radical reform in
European marriage laws should render the divorce of a legal marriage as
economical and as convenient as the divorce of a free marriage--cannot yet
be expected, for law always lags behind public opinion and public
practice.

If, however, we take a wider historical view, we find that we are in
presence of a phenomenon which, though favored by modern conditions, is
very ancient and widespread, dating, so far as Europe is concerned, from
the time when the Church first sought to impose ecclesiastical marriage,
so that it is practically a continuation of the ancient European custom of
private marriage.

Trial-marriages pass by imperceptible gradations into the group
of courtship customs which, while allowing the young couple to
spend the night together, in a position of more or less intimacy,
exclude, as a rule, actual sexual intercourse. Night-courtship
flourishes in stable and well-knit European communities not
liable to disorganization by contact with strangers. It seems to
be specially common in Teutonic and Celtic lands, and is known by
various names, as _Probenächte, fensterln, Kiltgang,
hand-fasting, bundling, sitting-up, courting on the bed, etc_. It
is well known in Wales; it is found in various English counties
as in Cheshire; it existed in eighteenth century Ireland
(according to Richard Twiss's _Travels_); in New England it was
known as _tarrying_; in Holland it is called _questing_. In
Norway, where it is called _night-running_, on account of the
long distance between the homesteads, I am told that it is
generally practiced, though the clergy preach against it; the
young girl puts on several extra skirts and goes to bed, and the
young man enters by door or window and goes to bed with her; they
talk all night, and are not bound to marry unless it should