Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume Vi Part 21

[242]

Much harm has been done in some countries by the foolish and mischievous practice of friendly societies and sick clubs of ignoring venereal diseases, and not according free medical aid or sick pay to those members who suffer from them. This practice prevailed, for instance, in Vienna until 1907, when a more humane and enlightened policy was inaugurated, venereal diseases being placed on the same level as other diseases.

[243]

Active measures against venereal disease were introduced in Sweden early in the last century, and compulsory and gratuitous treatment established. Compulsory notification was introduced many years ago in Norway, and by 1907 there was a great diminution in the prevalence of venereal diseases; there is compulsory treatment.

[244]

See, e.g., Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage, Ch. x.x.xVII.

[245]

A committee of the Medical Society of New York, appointed in 1902 to consider this question, reported in favor of notification without giving names and addresses, and Dr. C. R. Drysdale, who took an active part in the Brussels International Conference of 1899, advocated a similar plan in England, British Medical Journal, February 3, 1900.

[246]

Thus in Munich, in 1908, a man who had given gonorrha to a servant-girl was sent to prison for ten months on this ground. The state of German opinion to-day on this subject is summarized by Bloch, s.e.xualleben unserer Zeit, p. 424.

[247]

A. Despres, La Prost.i.tution a Paris, p. 191.

[248]

F. Aurientis, Etude Medico-legale sur la jurisprudence actuelle a propos de la Transmission des Maladies Veneriennes, These 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 a.s.sault 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 prost.i.tute merely because she is diseased. But there can be no reasonable doubt whatever that if a diseased prost.i.tute 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 prost.i.tute 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 Medicale, May, 1896).

[252]

The large volume, ent.i.tled s.e.xualpadagogik, 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 s.e.xual 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-prost.i.tute girls of their own cla.s.s willing to enter into amorous relations with them which result in s.e.xual intercourse, and they are therefore less exposed to the danger of infection than those men who have recourse almost exclusively to prost.i.tutes" (see also Bloch, s.e.xualleben 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, s.e.xualpadagogik, 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.

s.e.xUAL MORALITY.

Prost.i.tution 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-s.e.xual Morality in the Past an Application of Economic Morality-The Combined Rigidity and Laxity of This Morality-The Growth of a Specific s.e.xual Morality and the Evolution of Moral Ideals-Manifestations of s.e.xual 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 Vanis.h.i.+ng Subjection of Woman-Inapt.i.tude 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 s.e.xual Responsibility of Women and Its Consequences-The Alleged Moral Inferiority of Women-The "Self-Sacrifice" of Women-Society Not Concerned with s.e.xual Relations.h.i.+ps-Procreation the Sole s.e.xual Concern of the State-The Supreme Importance of Maternity.

It has been necessary to deal fully with the phenomena of prost.i.tution because, however aloof we may personally choose to hold ourselves from those phenomena, they really bring us to the heart of the s.e.xual question in so far as it const.i.tutes a social problem. If we look at prost.i.tution 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 prost.i.tutional phenomena. There is, however, more than this to be said. Not only is prost.i.tution to-day, as it has been for more than two thousand years, the b.u.t.tress of our marriage system, but if we look at marriage, not from the outside as a formal inst.i.tution, but from the inside with relation to the motives that const.i.tute it, we find that marriage in a large proportion of cases is itself in certain respects a form of prost.i.tution. 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 s.e.xual 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 prost.i.tution 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 fas.h.i.+onable form of prost.i.tution," that is to say, a mode of obtaining, or disposing of, for monetary considerations, a s.e.xual commodity. Marriage is, indeed, not merely a more fas.h.i.+onable form of prost.i.tution, 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 prost.i.tution 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 prost.i.tution considered by itself. The most plausible ground is that of those[257] who, bringing marriage down to the level of prost.i.tution, maintain that the prost.i.tute is a "blackleg" who is accepting less than the "market rate of wages," i.e., marriage, for the s.e.xual services she renders. But even this low ground is quite unsafe. The prost.i.tute 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 prost.i.tute. The prost.i.tute never signs away the right over her own person, as the wife is compelled to do; the prost.i.tute, 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 prost.i.tute 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 sanct.i.ty. "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 s.e.x 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 Prost.i.tution-a remarkable book which Bloch, with little exaggeration, describes as possessing an epoch-marking significance-vigorously showed that the problem of prost.i.tution is in reality the problem of marriage, and that we can only reform away prost.i.tution by reforming marriage, regarded as a compulsory inst.i.tution 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 a.n.a.lyzed the morality of his time, with a brutal frankness, indeed, that seemed to his contemporaries a revoltingly cynical att.i.tude towards their sacred inst.i.tutions, 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 appet.i.te 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 appet.i.te 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 pa.s.sions, and the more he wallows in l.u.s.t 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 s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p to considerations of money and of l.u.s.t. That is precisely the essence of prost.i.tution.

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 s.e.xual selection, effected in accordance with the laws of s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual selection should be permitted to affect the choice of conjugal partners, for in so far as wholesome s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual relations.h.i.+ps 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 s.e.xual 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 prost.i.tution" 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 dest.i.tute.

Our discussion of the psychic facts of s.e.x has thus, it will be seen, brought us up to the question of morality. Over and over again, in setting forth the phenomena of prost.i.tution, 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 s.e.xual 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 prost.i.tution; traditional morality defends prost.i.tution, 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 prost.i.tution, and looks forward to progressive changes in the marriage system which will modify and diminish prost.i.tution.

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 ???? 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 ma.s.s, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 ma.s.s of a community actually do, which const.i.tutes 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 const.i.tuted 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 t.i.tle. 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 Dependance de la Morale et l'Independance des Murs (1907), has a.n.a.lyzed 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 Levy-Bruhl's La Morale et la Science des Murs (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 a.s.sist 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 relations.h.i.+ps, to replace older and desiccated traditions.

There is clearly an intimate relations.h.i.+p 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, r.e.t.a.r.ding 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 prost.i.tution 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 s.e.xual 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 ma.s.ses of a community, and only secondarily with anterior morality or with posterior morality.

s.e.xual morality, like all other kinds of morality, is necessarily const.i.tuted by inherited traditions modified by new adaptations to the changing social environment. If the influence of tradition becomes unduly p.r.o.nounced 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 s.e.x.

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 s.e.xual 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 cla.s.sic 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 G.o.d. Our s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual morality at all.[266] That may seem surprising at first to one who reflects on the immense weight which is usually attached to "s.e.xual morality." And it is undoubtedly true that we have a morality which we apply to the sphere of s.e.x. 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 ill.u.s.trated it with a wealth of historical material. We have as yet no generally recognized s.e.xual morality which has been based on the specific s.e.xual facts of life. That becomes clear at once when we realize the central fact that the s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p is based on love, at the very least on s.e.xual desire, and that that basis is so deep as to be even physiological, for in the absence of such s.e.xual desire it is physiologically impossible for a man to effect intercourse with a woman. Any specific s.e.xual morality must be based on that fact. But our so-called "s.e.xual morality," so far from being based on that fact, attempts to ignore it altogether. It makes contracts, it arranges s.e.xual relations.h.i.+ps beforehand, it offers to guarantee permanency of s.e.xual 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 s.e.x to which they have solemnly been applied. The economic relations.h.i.+ps of life, in the large sense, are, as we shall see, extremely important in the evolution of any sound s.e.xual morality, but they belong to the conditions of its development and do not const.i.tute 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 ill.u.s.trated by the English divorce law to-day. According to this law, if a woman has s.e.xual intercourse with any man beside her husband, he is ent.i.tled to divorce her; if, however, the husband has intercourse with another woman beside his wife, she is not ent.i.tled 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 s.e.xual 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 Stocker truly points out ("Verschiedenheit im Liebesleben des Weibes und des Mannes," Zeitschrift fur s.e.xualwissenschaft, 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.)