MALE AND FEMALE SEX-INSTINCTS AND MORALE DIAMETRICALLY DIFFERENT

"In conjunction with any other beings but men, women would have been angels; but with men they are just women, which when all is said and done, is much the same thing."—De Livry.

I

Among many other misconceptions with regard to Sex-characteristics, is the modern teaching that the sex-instinct is identical in men and women.

Ignoring the truth that a higher moral code is the mark of psychical superiority, and moreover that the exaction of it from women, under social penalty, has done more than any other thing to purify and to exalt the woman-character, impassioned fallacy now sees this higher standard demanded of the sex as a stigma of inferiority, and as an injustice. Accordingly it preaches equal liberty in this as in other respects. The trend toward equalisation is unfortunately (but inevitably) in the direction of lowering the woman-code rather than of raising man's.

No falser or more disastrous doctrine could be promulgated. As in all its other attributes and functions, so in this, the woman-nature differs wholly from that of the male. The primal male sex-instinct was one of tyranny and subjugation. There was no element of affection in it, and its bent was toward promiscuity. In the primal female, the instinct as an initiative impulse was non-existent. The surrender was to fear, and to habit engendered by fear. Fondness for her mate came to woman by way of her love for his child, a source essentially monogamous in trend.

Physical passion in woman is derived from the Male-traits in her. It is, accordingly, a borrowed, not an inherent instinct. And in all natural women, passion is secondary to love; love belonging to her own intrinsic nature. Because of its heritage, there is, in a true woman's love, always a maternal altruistic element: unselfish, ministering, devoted. Love has come to be intensified in her by fire of passion and by force of personal attraction. It is no longer a mere meek surrender, with fear for spur and maternity for solace. In proportion as she is of high organisation, it has become a complex of mind and emotion and sense; intense and vital. But always, in proportion as she is womanly, her own way of loving—the way of devotion and tenderness—is ascendant over passion.

In man, howsoever it be leavened by the higher love, passion dominates. When in woman passion dominates love, she is loving with the Male-traits in her—not as woman. And in the measure wherein she falls short of the womanly monogamous ideal, she is less woman than she is male.

Mr. Justice Hannen, for long President of the Divorce Court—and a subtle expert in women—observed that it was not the passionate, warm-eyed women who figured most before him, but, in far greater number, the cold-blooded, greedy and emotionless. Because for one woman who succumbs to love or passion, twenty transgress from motives of vanity or gain; or from mere frivolous craving for excitement.

It is the sexless women who are most immoral, for the same reason that some dyspeptics are always hungry. Persons of healthy digestion eat, and are satisfied. The healthfully-sexed love, and are content. The emotionless woman is for ever seeking in novelty, emotions she lacks the emotion to feel. Such women exploit passion for vanity, for distraction, or for the primal male-instinct of subjugation. Their desire for a lover is less a sentiment than it is of the nature of that craving for drink, or for drugs, or for dress, which many of this order also indulge. All are megalomanias—natural instincts distorted to vices by warp of abnormal self-centredness.

With its foundations laid in instinct, its organic emotionalism, its streak of mental irresponsibility, and its hunger for approbation, the Woman-nature, when lacking in the higher Woman-traits of affection and selflessness, or when these are not duly absorbed in the natural interests and functions of the sex, may degenerate to a very ugly thing.

Some of our latter-day "smart" young married women, childless or with one or two children consigned to hirelings, their passions excited by marriage and not duly assuaged by maternity, their impulses unchastened and their powers unexpended in affection and care for the family, seek outlet and distraction in promiscuous philanderings, in intrigue or in vice.

Human faculty and impulse diverted from their normal channels readily find crooked and dangerous courses.

In the fourth year of War, the Prussian Protestant State-Church declared that "immorality among German women has attained such a degree that the very foundations of Society are threatened." This and kindred developments in other War-ridden countries are not due to women having changed their natures, but are the outcome of conditions so altered as to have released them from the wholesome disciplinary exercise of their accustomed duties, relaxing thus the salutary curbs of habit and convention. Child of Nature that she is, woman is a born rebel; for ever in revolt against the law and order and restraints which man has imposed as indispensable to Progress. Whereas men abhor, women exult in crises and upheavals. Because these serve for outlet to their restive emotionalism and supply scope for exotic sensation, while at the same time giving them temporary mastery over the male—who is always at a disadvantage in exhibitions of feeling.

And this temperamental erraticism is valuably disciplined by the masculine bent for rule and method, and normally finds admirable safety-valves in wifely, housewifely, and motherly functions.

II

To advocate a moral standard higher for women than for men is regarded now as reactionary and regressive.

Nevertheless, it is certain that beyond all the other virtues, personal purity is essentially the highest, and is racially the most valuable of all the Woman-qualities. Lapses in the other sex are in no way comparable, as regards moral, biological, or sociological significance, with kindred lapses in woman. Because of her native non-conformability, once she has deviated from the monogamous code, she is dangerously likely never after to conform to it. (It is a truism that The woman who has one, has many lovers.) Her non-conformity requires, accordingly, to be protected by a social ordinance more rigid than is that of man. Man being less complex of psychology, moreover, that which in him is merely biological is vice in woman. The fact alone that the male is able to employ the sex-function as a weapon of brutality (as in violation) proves him totally dissimilar to woman in this relation.

Man disperses; Woman absorbs. And the consistency of Nature is such that these two diametrically-opposite biological modes in reproduction are reflected on the planes of mind and impulse. The diametrical difference of the modes disposes outright of the Feminist demand for identical moral codes for the sexes; the sex-functions of the two being so intrinsically contrary in method and inherence, with correspondingly signal differences in moral impulse and significance.

Biologically, the masculine function concludes with its fulfilment. Whereas the feminine function begins mainly therewith, and continues thence onward to operate in an ever-deepening, broadening, and intensifying tide of issues; biological and psychological. And so potent and subtle is Nature's consistency with regard to this primary and vital function of woman in Life, that whether or not biological issue results, psychological issues do inevitably. Woman's mode and mood of receptiveness in this mysterious union so operate that, in her surrender, she admits to the inmost sanctuary of her being an alien presence—which remains with her till death. Fade as it may from her consciousness, it remains, nevertheless, impressed for ever after on the vibrant records of her sensitive Subconsciousness, as vitally as in the hour of her surrender. And underlying mind and character and conduct ever after, it for ever after contributes its quota to these.

Because of the vivifying potence of her creative womanhood—the function whereof is to engender Life—the stranger admitted to her citadel becomes endued with Life, and takes up his abode with her to the end of her natural term. For this reason, the adulterous woman is adulterous in a sense impossible to man—adulterous in both a vital and an intrinsic psychical sense that is revolting.

With the increasing intensification in the male, with advancing evolution, of his inherited Woman-traits, he has become ever further endowed with Woman's Sub- and Supra-conscious faculties. So that the function which was, in its primal moral, but brief and cursory, ending summarily with its biological fulfilment, has become increasingly endued in him with the vital emotionalism, and accordingly with the moral significance inherent to the Woman-nature. If his experiences fade more quickly from his consciousness than hers do, they remain nevertheless (in the degree of his psychical development) potent still in his Subconsciousness—as possibly adulterating and debasing factors. But since his Subconscious emotionalism is an acquired and not an inherent part of his male mentality, it is a medium vastly less sensitised and operative in him than it is in her; of whom it is the very basis of her being.

This is no apology, of course, for masculine aberration, but a counsel of feminine virtue—a counsel making indirectly, therefore, but none the less surely for masculine virtue also. The reasons for chastity in the one sex differ diametrically from those which should be the motive thereof in the other, however.

Chivalry and Prostitution are incompatible.

It must be confessed, however, that deterioration of the woman-organisation and temperament conduces greatly to masculine promiscuity. Not only because this entails loss of power to charm and bind the mate, but because with the sex-immaturity, on the one hand of the over-Feminised type, on the other, of the Mannish woman, women lose, in greater or less degree, the natural power of one sex to assuage passion in the other.

Man is deteriorated, moreover, by moral and psychical deterioration in that sex whence moral impulse springs, because, in such case, the appeal of woman ceases to be, as is normal, to the emotional and chivalrous in him, but evokes, on the contrary, biological instinct mainly, or merely.

It is well-established truth that her first lover (or her husband, supposing she had loved him) retains a unique hold upon a woman's mind throughout her after-life—his personality or memory dominating her imagination as no later-comer is able to do. This is because that first enters into possession of both Consciousness and Subconsciousness while the tablets of these are still virgin and unblotted. This first impresses himself, therefore, clearly and strongly defined upon her exquisitely-sensitised tablets of remembrance.

Latter-day young girls, permitted the injurious licence of free and unchaperoned association with the other sex, even when they come to marriage, inviolate, have, many of them, passed through experiences which so have blurred and sullied their young highly-impressionable temperament and senses as to have despoiled these of that fair purity and freshness indispensable alike to potent impressions and to deep attachments. In natural woman who has arrived at womanhood without premature arousing of the senses, soul and sense are at fine poise, and respond in vital unison to love. In girls whose innocence and conduct have not been duly safeguarded, the prematurely-excited senses have become detached from the soul—from the higher emotions, that is. With the result that this fine poise of mind and body, which is the Hall-mark of Woman-development, and whence romantic passion issues, has been irretrievably lost.

The same is true, in degree, of young men. They too deteriorate when biological instinct is dissociated in them from the higher impulses of passion. But in men, the poise, being less delicate, is not only less readily lost, but it is more readily recovered. In this, as in other things, the normal male makes for means; while woman's bent is toward extremes. Further, physical passion being normally far stronger in him, and initiative in impulse—whereas in her it is mainly responsive—the senses assert sway over him spontaneously. While in natural girls these lie more or less dormant, unless artificially roused, or until aroused in natural response to love.

Early philanderings (more serious than boy-and-girl comradeship and innocent flirtation) prevent women not only from ever attaining their highest levels of organisation and temperament, but they destroy effectually their power to love profoundly and whole-heartedly. They rob them, accordingly, of the greatest transfiguring potence and happiness of life.

III

Odious and startling evidence that because of woman's vital emotionalism and sensitive psychology, her nature retains ineffaceable vestiges of all that has happened to her, is the fact that a woman's children by a second husband may resemble her first husband far more than they resemble their father. A significant and repulsive adulteration of type, and one so intrinsic that a woman who had been previously wife to a negro or a Chinaman will present her second husband, typically European, with offspring of negroid or of Mongolian type. That husbands and wives come to resemble one another in physiognomy and characteristics, is further indication of the subtle and potent temperamental fusion and implications of the mysterious sex-union.

The adulteration of type which may thus repulsively mar the offspring of women twice-mated is seen, at first hand, in that adulteration of personality which results from sex-promiscuity. Not only is the individuality both of mind and character obliterated, but the individuality both of form and feature is obliterated too. The features of persons of irregular life become blurred and more or less mongrel; character and expression so degenerating as to produce eventually that which has been styled a "composite face"—the face resulting when a number of portraits of different persons are printed one over another on the same photographic plate.

The degree to which in the sex-union—howsoever lightly entered on—they twain become intrinsically and remain irrevocably one, in the vital records of individualism and character, is wholly unsuspected. But in this—which is a complex phenomenon of Hypnosis—indelible undying images, such as are impressed upon the Subconscious mind in every other form of Hypnosis, remain impressed thereon; to inspire and fructify, or to weaken and vitiate nature and faculty.

That vigilant supervision of her young daughters for which the early Victorian mother is now decried, secured a purity of racial type, in fine physique and constitution, in notable talent and enterprise, in rare womanly beauty and virile handsomeness, which proves the unique potentialities inherent in our Anglo-Saxon stock. No merely material service a woman can render to the State approaches in value the all-potent one of safeguarding the virtue of its young daughters.

Each sex has its own morale to sustain. And personal virtue is woman's. The desire for equal liberty in this respect is added proof of the ascendancy, in modern women, of Male over their own natural Woman-traits. It springs not from an intensification of passion, but, on the contrary, from a waning of that power to love which holds a woman true to one mate.

Last and most cogent of reasons: In view of those long centuries of suffering and aspiration, by way of which the evolution of the Woman-traits of love and purity has been achieved in blood and tears—albeit the monogamous ideal is far yet from attainment—beyond all else, the sex should strive toward this, both personally and socially.

It is the soul of Love and Life, the impulse of Human advance. With decline of this ideal, the emotions cease to centre in the Home and Family, and civilisation relapses to barbarism.

IV

Ellen Key, in Love and Marriage, observes: "Few propositions are so lacking in proof as that monogamy is the form of sexual life which is indispensable to the vitality and culture of nations." And further: "all the progress that is ascribed to Christian civilisation has taken place while monogamy was indeed the law, but polygamy the custom."

She overlooks the portentous truth that a law is the expression of a general aspiration toward an ideal for which a people is striving. That a law is broken proves that the higher in man moves him to set a standard beyond his power—or beside his inclination—to sustain undeviatingly. Yet although he may not act up to it undeviatingly, it stands, nevertheless, for the ideal he realises that he should reach.

Abolition of a good and elevating law proves, therefore, not only the serious lapse of a community from an established standard of conduct, but it inevitably lowers the level of conduct by removing barriers—self-respect and self-restraint, public opinion and so forth—standing in the way of laxity. Despite the death-penalty, murders are committed. But were the death-penalty to be abolished, murder would increase by leaps and bounds. The human mind is strangely susceptible. And the power of habits acquired under fear of penalties is an invaluable force for good. The higher minds of a community evolve and establish codes for lesser minds to shape by. And undoubtedly the subconscious as well as the conscious shaping toward such standards furthers development in the directions thereof. To make honesty a matter of personal choice, with no penalties attaching to theft, would be in itself an incentive to theft.

Comparison with polygamous countries, of countries in which monogamy is the law, refutes straightway Miss Key's discredit of monogamy; showing the polygamous uncivilised, unenlightened, unprogressive, subject to monogamous races, and in every sense, both materially and morally decadent. And if, with a notion of establishing equality in all things between the sexes by emancipating woman from the higher moral code, leasehold marriage or other forms of wedded laxity should be substituted—not only would national purity, but personal character and happiness too would suffer grievously.

If men have not kept the monogamous law, the instinct of jealousy, reinforced by repugnance to supporting alien offspring, has seen to it that wives should trespass as seldom, at all events, as was possible to be guarded against. Custom and public opinion, furthered by personal fear and fear of divorce, have all contributed toward advancing ideals of womanly honour and conduct. And from monogamous mothers—whether voluntarily or involuntarily so—progress has derived immense impulse. Apart from biological considerations, the benefit to the family of the mother's influence centred in her home and kept from straying thence, either by her own aspirations, by public opinion, or by fear of the husband, has been incalculable.

During and since the War, crime among children has increased by 50 per cent., largely owing to absence of mothers from their homes, working or drinking, or otherwise dissipating, while their children have been left to run wild in the streets.

Our reformatories are full to overflowing with these neglected unfortunates; deprived thus of the haven of homes and maternal control. As a man is responsible to the State for the support of his family, so a woman should be held responsible to the State for the proper care and supervision of its future citizens, who, without due care and disciplinary influence, become a burden and scourge to the community.

In all these vitally-momentous issues, let us free our minds alike of sex-bias and false sentiment, in order that we may see clearly, and may act honestly and wisely in the interests not only of women themselves, but in those of the Race.

V

The sex-instinct in woman having had its origin in surrender, retains much still of this primal element. And both middle-class men of lower evolutionary grade, and men of the working classes, exercise still, to considerable degree, the brute-trait of terrorism over women—moral rather than physical terrorism.

In rescuing young girls from molestation in the streets, one may see in them the panic of such intimidation. They are pale and trembling, with pupils widely dilated. In full daylight, it may be in a crowded thoroughfare, with police at hand, primal instinctive emotionalism paralyses reason, resource and will-power. Weak-minded women, who lack their due share of masculine combativeness to stiffen resistance in them, frequently marry, or otherwise yield to such men, far more because they are afraid than because they are fond of them. And the terrorism husbands have exercised over wives has nerved wives against the terrorism exercised over them by other men; and has thus served to protect them from their own weaknesses.

The Woman-traits, always at a disadvantage in concrete affairs against superior strength, have been buttressed thus and coerced—often cruelly and tyrannously, 'tis true. But they have nevertheless been greatly furthered in development by a mate who, if he did not recognise the higher calibre of woman's nature, nor himself aspired to the code he exacted from her, recognised, at all events, that this higher code he exacted of her was that best adapted to progress. Thus has poor mortality been beaten and shapen on the anvils of compulsion and exigency. And always the woman has most suffered—to be beautiful of nature.

Were it not that an advance-guard of higher and chivalrous men stand, by force of the laws they have made, between women and the lower and coarser masculine orders, no woman's life would be worth the living because of perpetual affront. With existing laws, indeed, which protect even the most degraded of the sex, the women of the poorer classes are everywhere subject to insult and unseemly jest, open or covert. Because to many men of crude order, the eternal mystery of Sex shows mainly as subject for levity. The crass and unimaginative frequently deride thus things too high for their dense understanding.

Women have come to take their chivalrous protection by law as mere matter-of-course, precisely as they take it as matter-of-course that men should labour, and should endow them with the benefits of their industry. These things are by no means matter-of-course, however, but are matter of chivalry—chivalry so innate as to have become convention.

It would be occasion for laughter, were it not cause for profoundest regret, that the hypertrophy of male-traits in woman has engendered to-day a sex-antagonism which has set her in open revolt against man, from whom, if she has suffered and suffers, and will continue to suffer at the hands of his defects, she nevertheless derives, and has always derived from his chivalries her most gracious human privileges.

That the obligations and the recompenses of the sexes are reciprocal, is true. It is equally true, however, that the choice has lain with men to have ignored the nobler issues of the compact. As the seraglio-imprisoned women of the less manly and progressive peoples prove.

All our civilisation, with its complex sociological, intellectual, and moral developments, rests on a basis of Force. Men must still prove their right to each and all of their laboriously-won achievements by arms and the valours of war. In peace, the laws—which alone make life tolerable—rest equally upon the powers of masculine will and strength to inflict due punishment for violation thereof.

And laws having been made by men, it was clearly optional with them to have left women unprotected, or far less protected than the other sex; in place of having extended special protection to their more delicate attributes.

In safeguarding women in general, men safeguard their own individual women, of course. Human motive is involved; is the product of a number of factors. That this is so is reason for eliminating no single one of these factors, lest the resultant undergo a wholly unexpected and disastrous transformation.

The Plan sets most women at the mercy of most men, by reason of the greater physical strength of males, and by temptation of their more urgent sex-instinct. In view of her inherent disabilities, it would have seemed, a priori, that no woman could in ruder days have attained to womanhood, inviolate.

And yet that her very disabilities have served for her increasing protection is shown by the fact of her increasing protection as, with the evolution of her higher organisation, her disabilities have intensified.

Civilised woman, with her more delicate organisation, is far more defenceless than was savage woman. But in response to the claims of her increasing defencelessness, the instinctive chivalry of the stronger male, her natural protector, has become progressively the intelligent and moral chivalry of higher man. No strength or capability of woman's own to defend herself could so have served her; nor could so have served the other sex for fine incentive.

To free woman of her highly specialised and inspiring disabilities by substituting in her, powers, muscular and mental, that would fit her to meet the male on equal terms, would be to frustrate the method of the male evolutionary ascent, by eliminating the humanising and uplifting appeal to his manhood of these her inspiring unfitnesses.

The deplorable decadence in masculine regard for and bearing toward women, which has resulted in direct proportion as the sex has substituted male efficiencies for womanly ineptitudes, serves for one of many other valuable object-lessons of the War.

VI

Among other Feminist fallacies, the demi-mondaine has come to be regarded as victim merely, on the one hand, of an unjust, man-administered economic system, on the other, of masculine libertinism. The truth is that the vast majority of immoral women are under no compulsion, but voluntarily adopt this mode of life either to escape work, or because of a natural vicious proclivity. A number are mental defectives; some actually feeble-minded, others only morally deficient.

It must always be remembered, moreover, that, biologically speaking, the separation of the genus woman into the folds, respectively, of sheep and goats is of signal racial and social service. That some goats are in the sheep-fold, some lambs among the goats, is not to be denied. Fatalities, injustices, and incongruities are inevitable to all broad human classifications. In the main, however, the women who resist temptation and remain virtuous are obviously better fitted to be the wives and mothers of the Race than are they who fall.

And although this is not, of course, the calculated purpose of this lamentable under-world, the rough division of the sex thereby into two main classes has been of service, by supplying a sociological backwater wherein the worst of our racial derelicts—mental and moral defectives—are segregated; and are precluded, for the most part, from perpetuating their mental and moral defectiveness.

Women, like men, must uphold and battle for their standards in the teeth of circumstance. The most notable types of parasite-women, selfish, slothful, worthless, venal, vicious, whose standards are jewels and clothes, their goals luxury and pleasure and the evasion of all that is difficult and distasteful in life, are found among the aristocratic and the plutocratic orders; safely secured against economic necessity or lack of scope and outlet for their powers.

The Feminist fallacy that prostitution is almost entirely a product of male economics has been strikingly refuted, too, by War-conditions, which opened numerous well-remunerated employments for the sex. Yet, coincident with a sad deficit of women to fill these, prostitution has waxed rampant.

Wise and discreet were those early Victorians, with their uncompromising ostracism of loose women. Apart altogether from such salutary expression of their condemnation of impure living, they were vastly too clever and far-seeing to admit persons of notoriously evil habit, peeress or actress, to association with their clean young girls, as modern mothers do; to meet and to mix freely with them socially or at Charity Bazaars, on Flag-Days, and so forth. With the result that girls all the world over have become increasingly lax and decadent in tone and manner, in dress and morale, from confusion of their young standards by social tolerance and recognition of such persons, as also from corruption by demoralising contact with and observation of such.

Intolerance? Pharisaism? By no means!

The strong and straight, uncompromising moral standards of its women serve as landmarks of, and impulse to a nation's progress. Clear and definite lines of demarcation between good and evil, between possible and impossible modes of conduct, point the moral of advance, and turn the scale in the upward direction for the weak, the hesitating, and the imitative.

Dread of consequences went far, in less sophisticated days, to safeguard and foster womanly virtue. Modern expedients have, unfortunately, removed all cause for fear in this relation; permitting an impunity of action demoralising to the weak in will or principle, who require every possible aid and check to guide them aright. In simpler days, girls who had lapsed were steadied and strengthened in character and self-restraint by the compulsion to support, as too by their natural fondness for the unwanted child. Now the first step—having cost them nothing—predisposes to further backslidings. And both character and self-control degenerate increasingly.

VII

To weaken the marriage-bond by setting it for a term of years only, or by making it terminable by consent, would virtually destroy marriage and family-life. The fact that the bond would not be binding would make persons more careless even than they are at present in selection of the mate, and would thus multiply the number of mis-matings. Which would be still further to deteriorate species, since the finer types of children are born only of well-mated parents.

The finality of the bond, if it does not always prevent one or both from meeting some other they prefer, prevents the scrupulous, at all events, from seeking such. Or having found, it keeps many from fostering and from yielding to temptation. Were marriage terminable, or, as is sometimes proposed, were it abolished wholly, and love the only bond between the sexes, there would be no confidence, no sense of security between the partners, no stability of family life; no centring of interests in this, and but small endeavour to retain affections which for the many could be easily replaced—and replaced, moreover, with the zest of novelty. On the contrary, a curse of unrest would afflict the vast majority of married folk with the unsettling—mayhap with the alluring—prospect of meeting their further "Fate"; perhaps their second, possibly their third, it might be, their seventh "Fate."

Only the few are strong enough of heart or stable enough of character to remain steadfast for a lifetime in any undertaking, unless bound stringently thereto by authorised obligations, incentives, and penalties. Only the few are deep enough of nature to love for a lifetime; or are deep enough of nature to love so intensely as to justify altering the marriage-code in order to spare these few suffering. The wane of nine out of ten honeymoons impresses the value of an inflexible decree that declines to reckon with disillusion, but sternly bids the disillusioned take up their burden and make the best of it. And having no choice, many do this and make a success of it—on new, and, it may be, on far higher lines than those they had set out upon.

That but few love so deeply as to love for life by no means implies that marriage for less than a lifetime should be substituted. It shows, on the contrary, that the majority of persons would prove as incapable of loving No. Two for long as they had been incapable of loving No. One; or as they would be incapable of loving No. Three, or No. Ten. A bond that rivets them for life to No. One therefore, and entails loss or suffering when they fail to abide by it, is safeguard for them against such a succession of loves as would be as demoralising to the individual as it must be destructive of society.

Examples of this tendency to amorous licence have been furnished by the complications of War-"widows," who, on report of the death of soldier-husbands, remarried in unseemly haste—only to find the husband return. So too, by the widespread infidelity of wives to absent soldier-husbands. If the grave and moving circumstance of a husband facing death or mutilation in the trenches, for his country's defence, was not grave nor moving enough to keep his wife faithful to him, then we should congratulate ourselves upon a marriage-law which, by exacting penalties whereby such a wife suffers material damage, supplies the only argument likely to stiffen the morale of so light-minded and callous a creature.

Nothing less binding than a lifelong contract is coercive enough or is sufficiently chastening to bridle woman's native changefulness and curb her instinctive emotionalism. The realisation that there is no way out of a situation is her finest incentive to nobility. She bruises her impulses against the iron of circumstance, and the essences of her intrinsic Woman-soul distil in patience and in sweetness. Under the harrow of sacrifice, she feels herself martyred. And yet without the sense of martyrdom, as may be also without the conditions thereof, no true woman is ever wholly content that she is fulfilling her destiny.

Ellen Key writes of "all the impurity that the sexual life shuts up within the whited sepulchre of legal marriage." She falls here into the common error of assuming such evil to be restricted solely to the state of marriage. Whereas the higher interests, the duties and affections of the family life—purifying and inspiring influences lacking in unsanctioned unions—make inevitably for the uplifting of the relation. That some husbands and wives fall short of the pure intensity of passion possible to some others between whom love is the sole bond, is true, of course. But as are most other human developments, this is a matter of the character of individuals rather than of the terms of the bond uniting them. Certainly, high and tender passion is scarcely to be expected in a union for no better reason than that this is illicit.

VIII

Were life designed for happiness and pleasure merely, the case would be different. Were one life our sole portion, it might be different too. Having one life only, we might be justified in claiming for it the joy of the best love available. An unhappy or a less than happy marriage is only one, however, of the many expedients for the evolution of faculty.

If the evolution of the individual progresses by way of countless earth-existences strung upon a thread of spiritual continuity, one life is but a brief and single page of everybody's great Life-serial. That is, doubtless, why all feel their lot to be an episode merely—unexplained, and incomplete, rather than a finished story. And in our innumerable pages and innumerable episodes, we must resign ourselves to sundry matrimonial vicissitudes.

Says the author of The World-Soul, "The more function is specialised in either sex the less able either is to stand alone." This is argument for further and fuller specialisation of their respective functions, in both sexes, because so great is the happiness of fulfilling for that other his or her great need of us, and of being blessed by that other in our own need. But too, it raises the voluntary surrender of such happiness for honour's sake, for holiness' sake, for God's sake, or for children's sake, to the height of a renunciation which transfigures human life and character, and proportionally ennobles both.

That both man and woman should be entitled to divorce for infidelity, for incorrigible drunkenness, criminality or insanity on the part of the mate, would be just and reasonable clauses in the marriage-code. Because, apart from the unmerited cruelty and shame of such bondages, is the risk of entailing degenerate offspring. Otherwise, it appears that relaxation of the Divorce-Law would result in evils far worse than any it would remedy. And these evils would re-act inevitably far more cruelly—both temperamentally and materially—upon women and children than upon men.

The conjugal and the paternal instincts being traits the sex has acquired by long ages of developmental progress, for men to lose these would be as easy as the loss would be degenerative to themselves and to those others. Folly to suppose that having reached a certain stage of human character-building, we can, with impunity, kick away the foundations whereon our house of evolution has been raised; and on which it must rest for all time.

The irrevocability of the marriage-contract is woman's greatest security. Realisation of that sex-lawlessness which is an innate Male-trait—relic of the promiscuous and cursory nature of the primal male-instinct—should set us on guard against weakening, in the least degree, this covenant, which is the best among those privileges whereby man, in the teeth of his inherent instincts, has chivalrously protected woman and the family. In the teeth of these, he has applied his natural intelligent bent for Conformity in concrete affairs to the repression and regulation of his impulses by the institution of Marriage. And this—the apotheosis of masculine conformity to the exactions of Progress—is now menaced by the native Non-conformity of woman, exploited by Feminism.

It is notable that men are but seldom truly fond of, nor are they faithful to the wife who works outside the home. In France, where the clever, industrious wife of the middle and lower classes is more a business-partner than she is a wife, conjugal fidelity is not expected.

Not only is a house without a woman in it to devote her best interests and powers to the arts of home-making, not a home, but the bond of that fraction of interest and affection left over to her from her work outside it is a thing too slight to bind her husband to her. He finds no difficulty in substituting—should he seek this—a haven with more atmosphere of home and sentiment in it, companionship with more of temperament in it, more resiliency and freshness, than that of the industrious and wage-earning, but fatigued and jaded working-wife.

The children of such a union—if such there be—supply no bond either to draw together and unite their parents. Children reared by servants, without understanding or affection, are but seldom affectionate or charming. Moreover, the children of hard-working mothers are but seldom true children. They bring to the home nothing of the freshness, the vitality or charm of natural childhood.

If father and mother possess Æsthetic sensibilities, these are offended probably by the plainness and the lack of graces in their offspring—bye-products merely of their economic assiduities. Perhaps the big spectacles through which the young eyes gaze forth like doleful prisoners from behind bars, make them feel strangely uncomfortable; as in the presence of weird and reproachful intelligences.

Neither derives interest or joy enough from the family circle to repay them for their parental obligations and responsibilities.

IX

Love between the sexes, being a need alike of souls and biogenesis, is regarded by some as reason enough in itself for relaxing the Marriage-law—even for the abolition of Marriage; making affection the sole bond between the lovers.

We cannot, logically, abolish the legal contract uniting two persons in marriage, however, without at the same time abolishing every other form of legal contract, and the legal liabilities thereof. Logically, we cannot make conjugal duty and family responsibility mere matters of personal conscience, unless we are assured that the human species has reached such a phase of moral integrity as to need no other incentive than its own integrity to secure fulfilment of its obligations, moral and material. If we abolish the legal factor in marriage, to be consistent we must abolish the legal factor in business partnerships and in all other sociological compacts. We must make the payment of rent, of rates and taxes, of tradesmen's bills and so forth, debts of conscience and of honour merely; for the discharge whereof conscience and honour must alone suffice.

It may be objected that these are purely material obligations, while the bond between the sexes is an emotional one. And yet—Have we reached such a stage of development that emotional considerations are more binding on us than material ones are?

Moreover, if we are to make love the sole bond—clearly the waning of love must release from the bondage. Further, when we sift out the purely emotional element in the vast majority of unions, we shall find it but a very slender factor among other more binding reciprocities. Certainly a far more slender thread to trust to in the safeguarding of a contract than is, for example, the factor of commercial honesty. Commercial honesty is not, perhaps, a conspicuous virtue of the times. Nevertheless, the sense of honesty in business is a good deal stronger in most men than is their sense of honour with regard to love. And their sense of honour in love has developed mainly as a direct consequence of those legal compulsions and responsibilities of love which have been exacted and fostered by the legality of marriage.

How many men are there, for example, who, having come to care for some other, hold themselves bound in the least by an illicit tie; howsoever much they may have cared at one time for the woman in the case? Lightly come—lightly go! And if the terms, marriage and love, are by no means necessarily synonymous, it has been, nevertheless, greatly by way of the obstacles and compulsions and the social penalties attaching to violation of the marriage vows that the love-passion has been purified and uplifted out of the barbarism of mere instinct and promiscuity, into the graces of emotion and the virtues of monogamy.

Had any man and woman, reciprocally attracted at their first meeting, been free always to have carried this attraction straightway to its biological conclusion, the sex-relation would be still the merely physiological incident it was in primal forests. The circumstance that such attraction has been debarred from ready consummation by the obligations and the obstacles engendered by a recognised and legalised bond between the sexes, has been debarred, moreover, in innumerable cases, by one of the attracted couple being subject to this bond—all of this has preserved the nascent emotion from straightway relapsing to the basic level whence it sprang, and has fostered the evolution of love in the higher reaches of emotion; of imagination, of controlled and chastened passion.

It may be said that modern men and women, loving one another with the more highly-evolved passion of our enlightened epoch, would love as devotedly and would remain as constant in an illicit as in a legalised union. If so, such constancy would be an echo mainly of the long-dignified state of wedded constancy; and the greatest of all tributes to the values of this. Nevertheless—For how long after the clarion-note of aspiration sounded by Marriage should have ceased to vibrate, would the echo of it last?

Should woman, in her short-sighted efforts to "emancipate" herself still further, release herself wholly (as she now inclines to do) from the marriage-bond, she will have thrown back in man's face the very tenderest guerdon of his worth and of his high regard for her. And she will have destroyed, at a blow, his most vital incentive to further advance, her own and her children's most powerful safeguard, and the main buttress not alone of national but, as well, of Natural human progress.