STUDIES

IN THE

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX

The Child's Right to Choose Its Ancestry—How This is Effected—The Mother the Child's Supreme Parent—Motherhood and the Woman Movement—The Immense Importance of Motherhood—Infant Mortality and Its Causes—The Chief Cause in the Mother—The Need of Rest During Pregnancy—Frequency of Premature Birth—The Function of the State—Recent Advance in Puericulture—The Question of Coitus During Pregnancy—The Need of Rest During Lactation—The Mother's Duty to Suckle Her Child—The Economic Question—The Duty of the State—Recent Progress in the Protection of the Mother—The Fallacy of State Nurseries.

Nurture Necessary as Well as Breed—Precocious Manifestations of the Sexual Impulse—Are they to be Regarded as Normal?—The Sexual Play of Children—The Emotion of Love in Childhood—Are Town Children More Precocious Sexually Than Country Children?—Children's Ideas Concerning the Origin of Babies—Need for Beginning the Sexual Education of Children in Early Years—The Importance of Early Training in Responsibility—Evil of the Old Doctrine of Silence in Matters of Sex—The Evil Magnified When Applied to Girls—The Mother the Natural and Best Teacher—The Morbid Influence of Artificial Mystery in Sex Matters—Books on Sexual Enlightenment of the Young—Nature of the Mother's Task—Sexual Education in the School—The Value of Botany—Zoölogy—Sexual Education After Puberty—The Necessity of Counteracting Quack Literature—Danger of Neglecting to Prepare for the First Onset of Menstruation—The Right Attitude Towards Woman's Sexual Life—The Vital Necessity of the Hygiene of Menstruation During Adolescence—Such Hygiene Compatible with the Educational and Social Equality of the Sexes—The Invalidism of Women Mainly Due to Hygienic Neglect—Good Influence of Physical Training on Women and Bad Influence of Athletics—The Evils of Emotional Suppression—Need of Teaching the Dignity of Sex—Influence of These Factors on a Woman's Fate in Marriage—Lectures and Addresses on Sexual Hygiene—The Doctor's Part in Sexual Education—Pubertal Initiation Into the Ideal World—The Place of the Religious and Ethical Teacher—The Initiation Rites of Savages Into Manhood and Womanhood—The Sexual Influence of Literature—The Sexual Influence of Art.

The Greek Attitude Towards Nakedness—How the Romans Modified That Attitude—The Influence of Christianity—Nakedness in Mediæval Times—Evolution of the Horror of Nakedness—Concomitant Change in the Conception of Nakedness—Prudery—The Romantic Movement—Rise of a New Feeling in Regard to Nakedness—The Hygienic Aspect of Nakedness—How Children May Be Accustomed to Nakedness—Nakedness Not Inimical to Modesty—The Instinct of Physical Pride—The Value of Nakedness in Education—The Æsthetic Value of Nakedness—The Human Body as One of the Prime Tonics of Life—How Nakedness May Be Cultivated—The Moral Value of Nakedness.

The Conception of Sexual Love—The Attitude of Mediæval Asceticism—St. Bernard and St. Odo of Cluny—The Ascetic Insistence on the Proximity of the Sexual and Excretory Centres—Love as a Sacrament of Nature—The Idea of the Impurity of Sex in Primitive Religions Generally—Theories of the Origin of This Idea—The Anti-Ascetic Element in the Bible and Early Christianity—Clement of Alexandria—St. Augustine's Attitude—The Recognition of the Sacredness of the Body by Tertullian, Rufinus and Athanasius—The Reformation—The Sexual Instinct Regarded as Beastly—The Human Sexual Instinct Not Animal-like—Lust and Love—The Definition of Love—Love and Names for Love Unknown in Some Parts of the World—Romantic Love of Late Development in the White Race—The Mystery of Sexual Desire—Whether Love is a Delusion—The Spiritual as Well as the Physical Structure of the World in Part Built up on Sexual Love The Testimony of Men of Intellect to the Supremacy of Love.

Chastity Essential to the Dignity of Love—The Eighteenth Century Revolt Against the Ideal of Chastity—Unnatural Forms of Chastity—The Psychological Basis of Asceticism—Asceticism and Chastity as Savage Virtues—The Significance of Tahiti—Chastity Among Barbarous Peoples—Chastity Among the Early Christians—Struggles of the Saints with the Flesh—The Romance of Christian Chastity—Its Decay in Mediæval Times—Aucassin et Nicolette and the New Romance of Chaste Love—The Unchastity of the Northern Barbarians—The Penitentials—Influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation—The Revolt Against Virginity as a Virtue—The Modern Conception of Chastity as a Virtue—The Influences That Favor the Virtue of Chastity—Chastity as a Discipline—The Value of Chastity for the Artist—Potency and Impotence in Popular Estimation—The Correct Definitions of Asceticism and Chastity.

The Influence of Tradition—The Theological Conception of Lust—Tendency of These Influences to Degrade Sexual Morality—Their Result in Creating the Problem of Sexual Abstinence—The Protests Against Sexual Abstinence—Sexual Abstinence and Genius—Sexual Abstinence in Women—The Advocates of Sexual Abstinence—Intermediate Attitude—Unsatisfactory Nature of the Whole Discussion—Criticism of the Conception of Sexual Abstinence—Sexual Abstinence as Compared to Abstinence from Food—No Complete Analogy—The Morality of Sexual Abstinence Entirely Negative—Is It the Physician's Duty to Advise Extra-Conjugal Sexual Intercourse?—Opinions of Those Who Affirm or Deny This Duty—The Conclusion Against Such Advice—The Physician Bound by the Social and Moral Ideas of His Age—The Physician as Reformer—Sexual Abstinence and Sexual Hygiene—Alcohol—The Influence of Physical and Mental Exercise—The Inadequacy of Sexual Hygiene in This Field—The Unreal Nature of the Conception of Sexual Abstinence—The Necessity of Replacing It by a More Positive Ideal.

The Orgy:—The Religious Origin of the Orgy—The Feast of Fools—Recognition of the Orgy by the Greeks and Romans—The Orgy Among Savages—The Drama—The Object Subserved by the Orgy.

The Origin and Development of Prostitution:—The Definition of Prostitution—Prostitution Among Savages—The Conditions Under Which Professional Prostitution Arises—Sacred Prostitution—The Rite of Mylitta—The Practice of Prostitution to Obtain a Marriage Portion—The Rise of Secular Prostitution in Greece—Prostitution in the East—India, China, Japan, etc.—Prostitution in Rome—The Influence of Christianity on Prostitution—The Effort to Combat Prostitution—The Mediæval Brothel—The Appearance of the Courtesan—Tullia D'Aragona—Veronica Franco—Ninon de Lenclos—Later Attempts to Eradicate Prostitution—The Regulation of Prostitution—Its Futility Becoming Recognized.

The Causes of Prostitution:—Prostitution as a Part of the Marriage System—The Complex Causation of Prostitution—The Motives Assigned by Prostitutes—(1) Economic Factor of Prostitution—Poverty Seldom the Chief Motive for Prostitution—But Economic Pressure Exerts a Real Influence—The Large Proportion of Prostitutes Recruited from Domestic Service—Significance of This Fact—(2) The Biological Factor of Prostitution—The So-called Born-Prostitute—Alleged Identity with the Born-Criminal—The Sexual Instinct in Prostitutes—The Physical and Psychic Characters of Prostitutes—(3) Moral Necessity as a Factor in the Existence of Prostitution—The Moral Advocates of Prostitution—The Moral Attitude of Christianity Towards Prostitution—The Attitude of Protestantism—Recent Advocates of the Moral Necessity of Prostitution—(4) Civilizational Value as a Factor of Prostitution—The Influence of Urban Life—The Craving for Excitement—Why Servant-girls so Often Turn to Prostitution—The Small Part Played by Seduction—Prostitutes Come Largely from the Country—The Appeal of Civilization Attracts Women to Prostitution—The Corresponding Attraction Felt by Men—The Prostitute as Artist and Leader of Fashion—The Charm of Vulgarity.

The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution:—The Decay of the Brothel—The Tendency to the Humanization of Prostitution—The Monetary Aspects of Prostitution—The Geisha—The Hetaira—The Moral Revolt Against Prostitution—Squalid Vice Based on Luxurious Virtue—The Ordinary Attitude Towards Prostitutes—Its Cruelty Absurd—The Need of Reforming Prostitution—The Need of Reforming Marriage—These Two Needs Closely Correlated—The Dynamic Relationships Involved.

The Significance of the Venereal Diseases—The History of Syphilis—The Problem of Its Origin—The Social Gravity of Syphilis—The Social Dangers of Gonorrhœa—The Modern Change in the Methods of Combating Venereal Diseases—Causes of the Decay of the System of Police Regulation—Necessity of Facing the Facts—The Innocent Victims of Venereal Diseases—Diseases Not Crimes—The Principle of Notification—The Scandinavian System—Gratuitous Treatment—Punishment For Transmitting Venereal Diseases—Sexual Education in Relation to Venereal Diseases—Lectures, Etc.—Discussion in Novels and on the Stage—The "Disgusting" Not the "Immoral".

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.

The Definition of Marriage—Marriage Among Animals—The Predominance of Monogamy—The Question of Group Marriage—Monogamy a Natural Fact, Not Based on Human Law—The Tendency to Place the Form of Marriage Above the Fact of Marriage—The History of Marriage—Marriage in Ancient Rome—Germanic Influence on Marriage—Bride-Sale—The Ring—The Influence of Christianity on Marriage—The Great Extent of this Influence—The Sacrament of Matrimony—Origin and Growth of the Sacramental Conception—The Church Made Marriage a Public Act—Canon Law—Its Sound Core—Its Development—Its Confusions and Absurdities—Peculiarities of English Marriage Law—Influence of the Reformation on Marriage—The Protestant Conception of Marriage as a Secular Contract—The Puritan Reform of Marriage—Milton as the Pioneer of Marriage Reform—His Views on Divorce—The Backward Position of England in Marriage Reform—Criticism of the English Divorce Law—Traditions of the Canon Law Still Persistent—The Question of Damages for Adultery—Collusion as a Bar to Divorce—Divorce in France, Germany, Austria, Russia, etc.—The United States—Impossibility of Deciding by Statute the Causes for Divorce—Divorce by Mutual Consent—Its Origin and Development—Impeded by the Traditions of Canon Law—Wilhelm von Humboldt—Modern Pioneer Advocates of Divorce by Mutual Consent—The Arguments Against Facility of Divorce—The Interests of the Children—The Protection of Women—The Present Tendency of the Divorce Movement—Marriage Not a Contract—The Proposal of Marriage for a Term of Years—Legal Disabilities and Disadvantages in the Position of the Husband and the Wife—Marriage Not a Contract But a Fact—Only the Non-Essentials of Marriage, Not the Essentials, a Proper Matter for Contract—The Legal Recognition of Marriage as a Fact Without Any Ceremony—Contracts of the Person Opposed to Modern Tendencies—The Factor of Moral Responsibility—Marriage as an Ethical Sacrament—Personal Responsibility Involves Freedom—Freedom the Best Guarantee of Stability—False Ideas of Individualism—Modern Tendency of Marriage—With the Birth of a Child Marriage Ceases to be a Private Concern—Every Child Must Have a Legal Father and Mother—How This Can be Effected—The Firm Basis of Monogamy—The Question of Marriage Variations—Such Variations Not Inimical to Monogamy—The Most Common Variations—The Flexibility of Marriage Holds Variations in Check—Marriage Variations versus Prostitution—Marriage on a Reasonable and Humane Basis—Summary and Conclusion.

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

The Relationship of the Science of Procreation to the Art of Love—Sexual Desire and Sexual Pleasure as the Conditions of Conception—Reproduction Formerly Left to Caprice and Lust—The Question of Procreation as a Religious Question—The Creed of Eugenics—Ellen Key and Sir Francis Galton—Our Debt to Posterity—The Problem of Replacing Natural Selection—The Origin and Development of Eugenics—The General Acceptance of Eugenical Principles To-day—The Two Channels by Which Eugenical Principles are Becoming Embodied in Practice—The Sense of Sexual Responsibility in Women—The Rejection of Compulsory Motherhood—The Privilege of Voluntary Motherhood—Causes of the Degradation of Motherhood—The Control of Conception—Now Practiced by the Majority of the Population in Civilized Countries—The Fallacy of "Racial Suicide"—Are Large Families a Stigma of Degeneration?—Procreative Control the Outcome of Natural and Civilized Progress—The Growth of Neo-Malthusian Beliefs and Practices—Facultative Sterility as Distinct from Neo-Malthusianism—The Medical and Hygienic Necessity of Control of Conception—Preventive Methods—Abortion—The New Doctrine of the Duty to Practice Abortion—How Far is this Justifiable?—Castration as a Method of Controlling Procreation—Negative Eugenics and Positive Eugenics—The Question of Certificates for Marriage—The Inadequacy of Eugenics by Act of Parliament—The Quickening of the Social Conscience in Regard to Heredity—Limitations to the Endowment of Motherhood—The Conditions Favorable to Procreation—Sterility—The Question of Artificial Fecundation—The Best Age of Procreation—The Question of Early Motherhood—The Best Time for Procreation—The Completion of the Divine Cycle of Life.

The Child's Right to Choose Its Ancestry—How This is Effected—The Mother the Child's Supreme Parent—Motherhood and the Woman Movement—The Immense Importance of Motherhood—Infant Mortality and Its Causes—The Chief Cause in the Mother—The Need of Rest During Pregnancy—Frequency of Premature Birth—The Function of the State—Recent Advance in Puericulture—The Question of Coitus During Pregnancy—The Need of Rest During Lactation—The Mother's Duty to Suckle Her Child—The Economic Question—The Duty of the State—Recent Progress in the Protection of the Mother—The Fallacy of State Nurseries.

It would be out of place, and would lead us too far, to discuss here these various practical outcomes of the foolish attempt to belittle the immense racial importance of motherhood. It is enough here to touch on the one point of the excess of infantile mortality.

In England—which is not from the social point of view in a very much worse condition than most countries, for in Austria and Russia the infant mortality is higher still, though in Australia and New Zealand much lower, but still excessive—more than one-fourth of the total number of deaths every year is of infants under one year of age. In the opinion of medical officers of health who are in the best position to form an opinion, about one-half of this mortality, roughly speaking, is absolutely preventable. Moreover, it is doubtful whether there is any real movement of decrease in this mortality; during the past half century it has sometimes slightly risen and sometimes slightly fallen, and though during the past few years the general movement of mortality for children under five in England and Wales has shown a tendency to decrease, in London (according to J. F. J. Sykes, although Sir Shirley Murphy has attempted to minimize the significance of these figures) the infantile mortality rate for the first three months of life actually rose from 69 per 1,000 in the period 1888-1892 to 75 per 1,000 in the period 1898-1901. (This refers, it must be remembered, to the period before the introduction of the Notification of Births Act.) In any case, although the general mortality shows a marked tendency to improvement there is certainly no adequately corresponding improvement in the infantile mortality. This is scarcely surprising, when we realize that there has been no change for the better, but rather for the worse, in the conditions under which our infants are born and reared. Thus William Hall, who has had an intimate knowledge extending over fifty-six years of the slums of Leeds, and has weighed and measured many thousands of slum children, besides examining over 120,000 boys and girls as to their fitness for factory labor, states (British Medical Journal, October 14, 1905) that "fifty years ago the slum mother was much more sober, cleanly, domestic, and motherly than she is to-day; she was herself better nourished and she almost always suckled her children, and after weaning they received more nutritious bone-making food, and she was able to prepare more wholesome food at home." The system of compulsory education has had an unfortunate influence in exerting a strain on the parents and worsening the conditions of the home. For, excellent as education is in itself, it is not the primary need of life, and has been made compulsory before the more essential things of life have been made equally compulsory. How absolutely unnecessary this great mortality is may be shown, without evoking the good example of Australia and New Zealand, by merely comparing small English towns; thus while in Guildford the infantile death rate is 65 per thousand, in Burslem it is 205 per thousand.

It is sometimes said that infantile mortality is an economic question, and that with improvement in wages it would cease. This is only true to a limited extent and under certain conditions. In Australia there is no grinding poverty, but the deaths of infants under one year of age are still between 80 and 90 per thousand, and one-third of this mortality, according to Hooper (British Medical Journal, 1908, vol. ii, p. 289), being due to the ignorance of mothers and the dislike to suckling, is easily preventable. The employment of married women greatly diminishes the poverty of a family, but nothing can be worse for the welfare of the woman as mother, or for the welfare of her child. Reid, the medical officer of health for Staffordshire, where there are two large centres of artisan population with identical health conditions, has shown that in the northern centre, where a very large number of women are engaged in factories, still-births are three times as frequent as in the southern centre, where there are practically no trade employments for women; the frequency of abnormalities is also in the same ratio. The superiority of Jewish over Christian children, again, and their lower infantile mortality, seem to be entirely due to the fact that Jewesses are better mothers. "The Jewish children in the slums," says William Hall (British Medical Journal, October 14, 1905), speaking from wide and accurate knowledge, "were superior in weight, in teeth, and in general bodily development, and they seemed less susceptible to infectious disease. Yet these Jews were overcrowded, they took little exercise, and their unsanitary environment was obvious. The fact was, their children were much better nourished. The pregnant Jewess was more cared for, and no doubt supplied better nutriment to the fœtus. After the children were born 90 per cent. received breast-milk, and during later childhood they were abundantly fed on bone-making material; eggs and oil, fish, fresh vegetables, and fruit entered largely into their diet." G. Newman, in his important and comprehensive book on Infant Mortality, emphasizes the conclusion that "first of all we need a higher standard of physical motherhood." The problem of infantile mortality, he declares (page 259), is not one of sanitation alone, or housing, or indeed of poverty as such, "but is mainly a question of motherhood."

Pinard, who must always be honored as one of the founders of eugenics, has, together with his pupils, done much to prepare the way for the acceptance of this simple but important principle by making clear the grounds on which it is based. From prolonged observations on the pregnant women of all classes Pinard has shown conclusively that women who rest during pregnancy have finer children than women who do not rest. Apart from the more general evils of work during pregnancy, Pinard found that during the later months it had a tendency to press the uterus down into the pelvis, and so cause the premature birth of undeveloped children, while labor was rendered more difficult and dangerous (see, e.g., Pinard, Gazette des Hôpitaux, Nov. 28, 1895, Id., Annales de Gynécologie, Aug., 1898).

Letourneux has studied the question whether repose during pregnancy is necessary for women whose professional work is only slightly fatiguing. He investigated 732 successive confinements at the Clinique Baudelocque in Paris. He found that 137 women engaged in fatiguing occupations (servants, cooks, etc.) and not resting during pregnancy, produced children with an average weight of 3,081 grammes; 115 women engaged in only slightly fatiguing occupations (dressmakers, milliners, etc.) and also not resting during pregnancy, had children with an average weight of 3,130 grammes, a slight but significant difference, in view of the fact that the women of the first group were large and robust, while those of the second group were of slight and elegant build. Again, comparing groups of women who rested during pregnancy, it was found that the women accustomed to fatiguing work had children with an average weight of 3,319 grammes, while those accustomed to less fatiguing work had children with an average weight of 3,318 grammes. The difference between repose and non-repose is thus considerable, while it also enables robust women exercising a fatiguing occupation to catch up, though not to surpass, the frailer women exercising a less fatiguing occupation. We see, too, that even in the comparatively unfatiguing occupations of milliners, etc., rest during pregnancy still remains important, and cannot safely be dispensed with. "Society," Letourneux concludes, "must guarantee rest to women not well off during a part of pregnancy. It will be repaid the cost of doing so by the increased vigor of the children thus produced" (Letourneux, De l'Influence de la Profession de la Mère sur le Poids de l'Enfant, Thèse de Paris, 1897).

Dr. Dweira-Bernson (Revue Pratique d'Obstétrique et de Pédiatrie, 1903, p. 370), compared four groups of pregnant women (servants with light work, servants with heavy work, farm girls, dressmakers) who rested for three months before confinement with four groups similarly composed who took no rest before confinement. In every group he found that the difference in the average weight of the child was markedly in favor of the women who rested, and it was notable that the greatest difference was found in the case of the farm girls who were probably the most robust and also the hardest worked.

The usual time of gestation ranges between 274 and 280 days (or 280 to 290 days from the last menstrual period), and occasionally a few days longer, though there is dispute as to the length of the extreme limit, which some authorities would extend to 300 days, or even to 320 days (Pinard, in Richet's Dictionnaire de Physiologie, vol. vii, pp. 150-162; Taylor, Medical Jurisprudence, fifth edition, pp. 44, 98 et seq.; L. M. Allen, "Prolonged Gestation," American Journal Obstetrics, April, 1907). It is possible, as Müller suggested in 1898 in a Thèse de Nancy, that civilization tends to shorten the period of gestation, and that in earlier ages it was longer than it is now. Such a tendency to premature birth under the exciting nervous influences of civilization would thus correspond, as Bouchacourt has pointed out (La Grossesse, p. 113), to the similar effect of domestication in animals. The robust countrywoman becomes transformed into the more graceful, but also more fragile, town woman who needs a degree of care and hygiene which the countrywoman with her more resistant nervous system can to some extent dispense with, although even she, as we see, suffers in the person of her child, and probably in her own person, from the effects of work during pregnancy. The serious nature of this civilized tendency to premature birth—of which lack of rest in pregnancy is, however, only one of several important causes—is shown by the fact that Séropian (Fréquence Comparée des Causes de l'Accouchement Prémature, Thèse de Paris, 1907) found that about one-third of French births (32.28 per cent.) are to a greater or less extent premature. Pregnancy is not a morbid condition; on the contrary, a pregnant woman is at the climax of her most normal physiological life, but owing to the tension thus involved she is specially liable to suffer from any slight shock or strain.

It must be remarked that the increased tendency to premature birth, while in part it may be due to general tendencies of civilization, is also in part due to very definite and preventable causes. Syphilis, alcoholism, and attempts to produce abortion are among the not uncommon causes of premature birth (see, e.g., G. F. McCleary, "The Influence of Antenatal Conditions on Infantile Mortality," British Medical Journal, Aug. 13, 1904).

Premature birth ought to be avoided, because the child born too early is insufficiently equipped for the task before him. Astengo, dealing with nearly 19,000 cases at the Lariboisière Hospital in Paris and the Maternité, found, that reckoning from the date of the last menstruation, there is a direct relation between the weight of the infant at birth and the length of the pregnancy. The longer the pregnancy, the finer the child (Astengo, Rapport du Poids des Enfants à la Durée de la Grossesse, Thèse de Paris, 1905).

The frequency of premature birth is probably as great in England as in France. Ballantyne states (Manual of Antenatal Pathology; The Fœtus, p. 456) that for practical purposes the frequency of premature labors in maternity hospitals may be put at 20 per cent., but that if all infants weighing less than 3,000 grammes are to be regarded as premature, it rises to 41.5 per cent. That premature birth is increasing in England seems to be indicated by the fact that during the past twenty-five years there has been a steady rise in the mortality rate from premature birth. McCleary, who discusses this point and considers the increase real, concludes that "it would appear that there has been a diminution in the quality as well as in the quantity of our output of babies" (see also a discussion, introduced by Dawson Williams, on "Physical Deterioration," British Medical Journal, Oct. 14, 1905).

It need scarcely be pointed out that not only is immaturity a cause of deterioration in the infants that survive, but that it alone serves enormously to decrease the number of infants that are able to survive. Thus G. Newman states (loc. cit.) that in most large English urban districts immaturity is the chief cause of infant mortality, furnishing about 30 per cent. of the infant deaths; even in London (Islington) Alfred Harris (British Medical Journal, Dec. 14, 1907) finds that it is responsible for nearly 17 per cent. of the infantile deaths. It is estimated by Newman that about half of the mothers of infants dying of immaturity suffer from marked ill-health and poor physique; they are not, therefore, fitted to be mothers.

Rest during pregnancy is a very powerful agent in preventing premature birth. Thus Dr. Sarraute-Lourié has compared 1,550 pregnant women at the Asile Michelet who rested before confinement with 1,550 women confined at the Hôpital Lariboisière who had enjoyed no such period of rest. She found that the average duration of pregnancy was at least twenty days shorter in the latter group (Mme. Sarraute-Lourié, De l'Influence du Repos sur la Durée de la Gestation, Thèse de Paris, 1899).

Leyboff has insisted on the absolute necessity of rest during pregnancy, as well for the sake of the woman herself as the burden she carries, and shows the evil results which follow when rest is neglected. Railway traveling, horse-riding, bicycling, and sea-voyages are also, Leyboff believes, liable to be injurious to the course of pregnancy. Leyboff recognizes the difficulties which procreating women are placed under by present industrial conditions, and concludes that "it is urgently necessary to prevent women, by law, from working during the last three months of pregnancy; that in every district there should be a maternity fund; that during this enforced rest a woman should receive the same salary as during work." He adds that the children of unmarried mothers should be cared for by the State, that there should be an eight-hours' day for all workers, and that no children under sixteen should be allowed to work (E. Leyboff, L'Hygiène de la Grossesse, Thèse de Paris, 1905).

Perruc states that at least two months' rest before confinement should be made compulsory, and that during this period the woman should receive an indemnity regulated by the State. He is of opinion that it should take the form of compulsory assurance, to which the worker, the employer, and the State alike contributed (Perruc, Assistance aux Femmes Enceintes, Thèse de Paris, 1905).

It is probable that during the earlier months of pregnancy, work, if not excessively heavy and exhausting, has little or no bad effect; thus Bacchimont (Documents pour servir a l'Histoire de la Puériculture Intra-utérine, Thèse de Paris, 1898) found that, while there was a great gain in the weight of children of mothers who had rested for three months, there was no corresponding gain in the children of those mothers who had rested for longer periods. It is during the last three months that freedom, repose, the cessation of the obligatory routine of employment become necessary. This is the opinion of Pinard, the chief authority on this matter. Many, however, fearing that economic and industrial conditions render so long a period of rest too difficult of practical attainment, are, with Clappier and G. Newman, content to demand two months as a minimum; Salvat only asks for one month's rest before confinement, the woman, whether married or not, receiving a pecuniary indemnity during this period, with medical care and drugs free. Ballantyne (Manual of Antenatal Pathology: The Fœtus, p. 475), as well as Niven, also asks only for one month's compulsory rest during pregnancy, with indemnity. Arthur Helme, however, taking a more comprehensive view of all the factors involved, concludes in a valuable paper on "The Unborn Child: Its Care and Its Rights" (British Medical Journal, Aug. 24, 1907), "The important thing would be to prohibit pregnant women from going to work at all, and it is as important from the standpoint of the child that this prohibition should include the early as the late months of pregnancy."

In England little progress has yet been made as regards this question of rest during pregnancy, even as regards the education of public opinion. Sir William Sinclair, Professor of Obstetrics at the Victoria University of Manchester, has published (1907) A Plea for Establishing Municipal Maternity Homes. Ballantyne, a great British authority on the embryology of the child, has published a "Plea for a Pre-Maternity Hospital" (British Medical Journal, April 6, 1901), has since given an important lecture on the subject (British Medical Journal, Jan. 11, 1908), and has further discussed the matter in his Manual of Ante-Natal Pathology: The Fœtus (Ch. XXVII); he is, however, more interested in the establishment of hospitals for the diseases of pregnancy than in the wider and more fundamental question of rest for all pregnant women. In England there are, indeed, a few institutions which receive unmarried women, with a record of good conduct, who are pregnant for the first time, for, as Bouchacourt remarks, ancient British prejudices are opposed to any mercy being shown to women who are recidivists in committing the crime of conception.

At present, indeed, it is only in France that the urgent need of rest during the latter months of pregnancy has been clearly realized, and any serious and official attempts made to provide for it. In an interesting Paris thesis (De la Puériculture avant le Naissance, 1907) Clappier has brought together much information bearing on the efforts now being made to deal practically with this question. There are many Asiles in Paris for pregnant women. One of the best is the Asile Michelet, founded in 1893 by the Assistance Publique de Paris. This is a sanatorium for pregnant women who have reached a period of seven and a half months. It is nominally restricted to the admission of French women who have been domiciled for a year in Paris, but, in practice, it appears that women from all parts of France are received. They are employed in light and occasional work for the institution, being paid for this work, and are also occupied in making clothes for the expected baby. Married and unmarried women are admitted alike, all women being equal from the point of view of motherhood, and indeed the majority of the women who come to the Asile Michelet are unmarried, some being girls who have even trudged on foot from Brittany and other remote parts of France, to seek concealment from their friends in the hospitable seclusion of these refuges in the great city. It is not the least advantage of these institutions that they shield unmarried mothers and their offspring from the manifold evils to which they are exposed, and thus tend to decrease crime and suffering. In addition to the maternity refuges, there are institutions in France for assisting with help and advice those pregnant women who prefer to remain at home, but are thus enabled to avoid the necessity for undue domestic labor.

There ought to be no manner of doubt that when, as is the case to-day in our own and some other supposedly civilized countries, motherhood outside marriage is accounted as almost a crime, there is the very greatest need for adequate provision for unmarried women who are about to become mothers, enabling them to receive shelter and care in secrecy, and to preserve their self-respect and social position. This is necessary not only in the interests of humanity and public economy, but also, as is too often forgotten, in the interests of morality, for it is certain that by the neglect to furnish adequate provision of this nature women are driven to infanticide and prostitution. In earlier, more humane days, the general provision for the secret reception and care of illegitimate infants was undoubtedly most beneficial. The suppression of the mediæval method, which in France took place gradually between 1833 and 1862, led to a great increase in infanticide and abortion, and was a direct encouragement to crime and immorality. In 1887 the Conseil Général of the Seine sought to replace the prevailing neglect of this matter by the adoption of more enlightened ideas and founded a bureau secret d'admission for pregnant women. Since then both the abandonment of infants and infanticide have greatly diminished, though they are increasing in those parts of France which possess no facilities of this kind. It is widely held that the State should unify the arrangements for assuring secret maternity, and should, in its own interests, undertake the expense. In 1904 French law ensured the protection of unmarried mothers by guaranteeing their secret, but it failed to organize the general establishment of secret maternities, and has left to doctors the pioneering part in this great and humane public work (A. Maillard-Brune, Refuges, Maternités, Bureaux d'Admission Secrets, comme Moyens Préservatives des Infanticide, Thèse de Paris, 1908). It is not among the least benefits of the falling birth rate that it has helped to stimulate this beneficent movement.

The Talmud is unfavorable to coitus during pregnancy, and the Koran prohibits it during the whole of the period, as well as during suckling. Among the Hindus, on the other hand, intercourse is continued up to the last fortnight of pregnancy, and it is even believed that the injected semen helps to nourish the embryo (W. D. Sutherland, "Ueber das Alltagsleben und die Volksmedizin unter den Bauern Britischostindiens," Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift, Nos. 12 and 13, 1906). The great Indian physician Susruta, however, was opposed to coitus during pregnancy, and the Chinese are emphatically on the same side.

Pinard, the greatest of authorities on puericulture, asserts that there must be complete cessation of sexual intercourse during the whole of pregnancy, and in his consulting room at the Clinique Baudelocque he has placed a large placard with an "Important Notice" to this effect. Féré was strongly of opinion that sexual relations during pregnancy, especially when recklessly carried out, play an important part in the causation of nervous troubles in children who are of sound heredity and otherwise free from all morbid infection during gestation and development; he recorded in detail a case which he considered conclusive ("L'Influence de l'Incontinence Sexuelle pendant la Gestation sur la Descendance," Archives de Neurologie, April, 1905). Bouchacourt discusses the subject fully (La Grossesse, pp. 177-214), and thinks that sexual intercourse during pregnancy should be avoided as much as possible. Fürbringer (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 226) recommends abstinence from the sixth or seventh month, and throughout the whole of pregnancy where there is any tendency to miscarriage, while in all cases much care and gentleness should be exercised.

The whole subject has been investigated in a Paris Thesis by H. Brénot (De L'Influence de la Copulation pendant la Grossesse, 1903); he concludes that sexual relations are dangerous throughout pregnancy, frequently provoking premature confinement or abortion, and that they are more dangerous in primiparæ than in multiparæ.

In Germany women are not allowed to work for four weeks after confinement, nor during the following two weeks except by medical certificate. The obligatory insurance against disease which covers women at confinement assures them an indemnity at this time equivalent to a large part of their wages. Married and unmarried mothers benefit alike. The Austrian law is founded on the same model. This measure has led to a very great decrease in infantile mortality, and, therefore, a great increase in health among those who survive. It is, however, regarded as very inadequate, and there is a movement in Germany for extending the time, for applying the system to a larger number of women, and for making it still more definitely compulsory.

In Switzerland it has been illegal since 1877 for any woman to be received into a factory after confinement, unless she has rested in all for eight weeks, six weeks at least of this period being after confinement. Since 1898 Swiss working women have been protected by law from exercising hard work during pregnancy, and from various other influences likely to be injurious. But this law is evaded in practice, because it provides no compensatory indemnity for the woman. An attempt, in 1899, to amend the law by providing for such indemnity was rejected by the people.

In Belgium and Holland there are laws against women working immediately after confinement, but no indemnity is provided, so that employers and employed combine to evade the law. In France there is no such law, although its necessity has often been emphatically asserted (see, e.g., Salvat, La Dépopulation de la France, Thèse de Lyon, 1903).

In England it is illegal to employ a woman "knowingly" in a work-shop within four weeks of the birth of her child, but no provision is made by the law for the compensation of the woman who is thus required to sacrifice herself to the interests of the State. The woman evades the law in tacit collusion with her employers, who can always avoid "knowing" that a birth has taken place, and so escape all responsibility for the mother's employment. Thus the factory inspectors are unable to take action, and the law becomes a dead letter; in 1906 only one prosecution for this offense could be brought into court. By the insertion of this "knowingly" a premium is placed on ignorance. The unwisdom of thus beforehand placing a premium on ignorance has always been more or less clearly recognized by the framers of legal codes even as far back as the days of the Ten Commandments and the laws of Hamurabi. It is the business of the Court, of those who administer the law, to make allowance for ignorance where such allowance is fairly called for; it is not for the law-maker to make smooth the path of the law-breaker. There are evidently law-makers nowadays so scrupulous, or so simple-minded, that they would be prepared to exact that no pickpocket should be prosecuted if he was able to declare on oath that he had no "knowledge" that the purse he had taken belonged to the person he extracted it from.

The annual reports of the English factory inspectors serve to bring ridicule on this law, which looks so wisely humane and yet means nothing, but have so far been powerless to effect any change. These reports show, moreover, that the difficulty is increasing in magnitude. Thus Miss Martindale, a factory inspector, states that in all the towns she visits, from a quiet cathedral city to a large manufacturing town, the employment of married women is rapidly increasing; they have worked in mills or factories all their lives and are quite unaccustomed to cooking, housework and the rearing of children, so that after marriage, even when not compelled by poverty, they prefer to go on working as before. Miss Vines, another factory inspector, repeats the remark of a woman worker in a factory. "I do not need to work, but I do not like staying at home," while another woman said, "I would rather be at work a hundred times than at home. I get lost at home" (Annual Report Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for 1906, pp. 325, etc.).

It may be added that not only is the English law enjoining four weeks' rest on the mother after childbirth practically inoperative, but the period itself is absurdly inadequate. As a rest for the mother it is indeed sufficient, but the State is still more interested in the child than in its mother, and the child needs the mother's chief care for a much longer period than four weeks. Helme advocates the State prohibition of women's work for at least six months after confinement. Where nurseries are attached to factories, enabling the mother to suckle her infant in intervals of work, the period may doubtless be shortened.

It is important to remember that it is by no means only the women in factories who are induced to work as usual during the whole period of pregnancy, and to return to work immediately after the brief rest of confinement. The Research Committee of the Christian Social Union (London Branch) undertook, in 1905, an inquiry into the employment of women after childbirth. Women in factories and workshops were excluded from the inquiry which only had reference to women engaged in household duties, in home industries, and in casual work. It was found that the majority carry on their employment right up to the time of confinement and resume it from ten to fourteen days later. The infantile death rate for the children of women engaged only in household duties was greatly lower than that for the children of the other women, while, as ever, the hand-fed infants had a vastly higher death rate than the breast-fed infants (British Medical Journal, Oct. 24, 1908, p. 1297).

In the great French gun and armour-plate works at Creuzot (Saône et Loire) the salaries of expectant mothers among the employees are raised; arrangements are made for giving them proper advice and medical attendance; they are not allowed to work after the middle of pregnancy or to return to work after confinement without a medical certificate of fitness. The results are said to be excellent, not only on the health of the mothers, but in the diminution of premature births, the decrease of infantile deaths, and the general prevalence of breast-feeding. It would probably be hopeless to expect many employers in Anglo-Saxon lands to adopt this policy. They are too "practical," they know how small is the money-value of human lives. With us it is necessary for the State to intervene.

There can be no doubt that, on the whole, modern civilized communities are beginning to realize that under the social and economic conditions now tending more and more to prevail, they must in their own interests insure that the mother's best energy and vitality are devoted to the child, both before and after its birth. They are also realizing that they cannot carry out their duty in this respect unless they make adequate provision for the mothers who are thus compelled to renounce their employment in order to devote themselves to their children. We here reach a point at which Individualism is at one with Socialism. The individualist cannot fail to see that it is at all cost necessary to remove social conditions which crush out all individuality; the Socialist cannot fail to see that a society which neglects to introduce order at this central and vital point, the production of the individual, must speedily perish.

No woman is sound, healthy, and complete unless she possesses breasts that are beautiful enough to hold the promise of being functional when the time for their exercise arrives, and nipples that can give suck. The gravity of this question to-day is shown by the frequency with which women are lacking in this essential element of womanhood, and the young man of to-day, it has been said, often in taking a wife, "actually marries but part of a woman, the other part being exhibited in the chemist's shop window, in the shape of a glass feeding-bottle." Blacker found among a thousand patients from the maternity department of University College Hospital that thirty-nine had never suckled at all, seven hundred and forty-seven had suckled all their children, and two hundred and fourteen had suckled only some. The chief reason given for not suckling was absence or insufficiency of milk; other reasons being inability or disinclination to suckle, and refusal of the child to take the breast (Blacker, Medical Chronicle, Feb., 1900). These results among the London poor are certainly very much better than could be found in many manufacturing towns where women work after marriage. In the other large countries of Europe equally unsatisfactory results are found. In Paris Madame Dluska has shown that of 209 women who came for their confinement to the Clinique Baudelocque, only 74 suckled their children; of the 135 who did not suckle, 35 were prevented by pathological causes or absence of milk, 100 by the necessities of their work. Even those who suckled could seldom continue more than seven months on account of the physiological strain of work (Dluska, Contribution à l'Etude de l'Allaitement Maternel, Thèse de Paris, 1894). Many statistics have been gathered in the German countries. Thus Wiedow (Centralblatt für Gynäkologie, No. 29, 1895) found that of 525 women at the Freiburg Maternity only half could suckle thoroughly during the first two weeks; imperfect nipples were noted in 49 cases, and it was found that the development of the nipple bore a direct relation to the value of the breast as a secretory organ. At Munich Escherich and Büller found that nearly 60 per cent. of women of the lower class were unable to suckle their children, and at Stuttgart three-quarters of the child-bearing women were in this condition.

The inability to suckle acquires great significance if we realize that it is associated, probably in a large measure as a direct cause, with infantile mortality. The mortality of artificially-fed infants during the first year of life is seldom less than double that of the breast-fed, sometimes it is as much as three times that of the breast-fed, or even more; thus at Derby 51.7 per cent. of hand-fed infants die under the age of twelve months, but only 8.6 per cent. of breast-fed infants. Those who survive are by no means free from suffering. At the end of the first year they are found to weigh about 25 per cent. less than the breast-fed, and to be much shorter; they are more liable to tuberculosis and rickets, with all the evil results that flow from these diseases; and there is some reason to believe that the development of their teeth is injuriously affected. The degenerate character of the artificially-fed is well indicated by the fact that of 40,000 children who were brought for treatment to the Children's Hospital in Munich, 86 per cent. had been brought up by hand, and the few who had been suckled had usually only had the breast for a short time. The evil influence persists even up to adult life. In some parts of France where the wet-nurse industry flourishes so greatly that nearly all the children are brought up by hand, it has been found that the percentage of rejected conscripts is nearly double that for France generally. Corresponding results have been found by Friedjung in a large German athletic association. Among 155 members, 65 per cent. were found on inquiry to have been breast-fed as infants (for an average of six months); but among the best athletes the percentage of breast-fed rose to 72 per cent. (for an average period of nine or ten months), while for the group of 56 who stood lowest in athletic power the percentage of breast-fed fell to 57 (for an average of only three months).

The advantages for an infant of being suckled by its mother are greater than can be accounted for by the mere fact of being suckled rather than hand-fed. This has been shown by Vitrey (De la Mortalité Infantile, Thèse de Lyon, 1907), who found from the statistics of the Hôtel-Dieu at Lyons, that infants suckled by their mothers have a mortality of only 12 per cent., but if suckled by strangers, the mortality rises to 33 per cent. It may be added that, while suckling is essential to the complete well-being of the child, it is highly desirable for the sake of the mother's health also. (Some important statistics are summarized in a paper on "Infantile Mortality" in British Medical Journal, Nov. 2, 1907), while the various aspects of suckling have been thoroughly discussed by Bollinger, "Ueber Säuglings-Sterblichkeit und die Erbliche functionelle Atrophie der menschlichen Milchdrüse" (Correspondenzblatt Deutschen Gesellschaft Anthropologie, Oct., 1899).

It appears that in Sweden, in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was a punishable offense for a woman to give her baby the bottle when she was able to suckle it. In recent years Prof. Anton von Menger, of Vienna, has argued (in his Burgerliche Recht und die Besitzlosen Klassen) that the future generation has the right to make this claim, and he proposes that every mother shall be legally bound to suckle her child unless her inability to do so has been certified by a physician. E. A. Schroeder (Das Recht in der Geschlechtlichen Ordnung, 1893, p. 346) also argued that a mother should be legally bound to suckle her infant for at least nine months, unless solid grounds could be shown to the contrary, and this demand, which seems reasonable and natural, since it is a mother's privilege as well as her duty to suckle her infant when able to do so, has been insistently made by others also. It has been supported from the legal side by Weinberg (Mutterschutz, Sept., 1907). In France the Loi Roussel forbids a woman to act as a wet-nurse until her child is seven months old, and this has had an excellent effect in lowering infantile mortality (A. Allée, Puériculture et la Loi Roussel, Thèse de Paris, 1908). In some parts of Germany manufacturers are compelled to set up a suckling-room in the factory, where mothers can give the breast to the child in the intervals of work. The control and upkeep of these rooms, with provision of doctors and nurses, is undertaken by the municipality (Sexual-Probleme, Sept., 1908, p. 573).

The Huddersfield scheme may be said to be the origin of the English Notification of Births Act, which came into operation in 1908. This Act represents, in England, the national inauguration of a scheme for the betterment of the race, the ultimate results of which it is impossible to foresee. When this Act comes into universal action every baby of the land will be entitled—legally and not by individual caprice or philanthropic condescension—to medical attention from the day of birth, and every mother will have at hand the counsel of an educated woman in touch with the municipal authorities. There could be no greater triumph for medical science, for national efficiency, and the cause of humanity generally. Even on the lower financial plane, it is easy to see that an enormous saving of public and private money will thus be effected. The Act is adoptive, and not compulsory. This was a wise precaution, for an Act of this kind cannot be effectual unless it is carried out thoroughly by the community adopting it, and it will not be adopted until a community has clearly realized its advantages and the methods of attaining them.

An important adjunct of this organization is the School for Mothers. Such schools, which are now beginning to spring up everywhere, may be said to have their origins in the Consultations de Nourrissons (with their offshoot the Goutte de Lait), established by Professor Budin in 1892, which have spread all over France and been widely influential for good. At the Consultations infants are examined and weighed weekly, and the mothers advised and encouraged to suckle their children. The Gouttes are practically milk dispensaries where infants for whom breast-feeding is impossible are fed with milk under medical supervision. Schools for Mothers represent an enlargement of the same scheme, covering a variety of subjects which it is necessary for a mother to know. Some of the first of these schools were established at Bonn, at the Bavarian town of Weissenberg, and in Ghent. At some of the Schools for Mothers, and notably at Ghent (described by Mrs. Bertrand Russell in the Nineteenth Century, 1906), the important step has been taken of giving training to young girls from fourteen to eighteen; they receive instruction in infant anatomy and physiology, in the preparation of sterilized milk, in weighing children, in taking temperatures and making charts, in managing crêches, and after two years are able to earn a salary. In various parts of England, schools for young mothers and girls on these lines are now being established, first in London, under the auspices of Dr. F. J. Sykes, Medical Officer of Health for St. Pancreas (see, e.g., A School For Mothers, 1908, describing an establishment of this kind at Somers Town, with a preface by Sir Thomas Barlow; an account of recent attempts to improve the care of infants in London will also be found in the Lancet, Sept. 26, 1908). It may be added that some English municipalities have established depôts for supplying mothers cheaply with good milk. Such depôts are, however, likely to be more mischievous than beneficial if they promote the substitution of hand-feeding for suckling. They should never be established except in connection with Schools for Mothers, where an educational influence may be exerted, and no mother should be supplied with milk unless she presents a medical certificate showing that she is unable to nourish her child (Byers, "Medical Women and Public Health Questions," British Medical Journal, Oct. 6, 1906). It is noteworthy that in England the local authorities will shortly be empowered by law to establish Schools for Mothers.

The great benefits produced by these institutions in France, both in diminishing the infant mortality and in promoting the education of mothers and their pride and interest in their children, have been set forth in two Paris theses by G. Chaignon (Organisation des Consultations de Nourrissons à la Campagne, 1908), and Alcide Alexandre (Consultation de Nourrissons et Goutte de Lait d'Arques, 1908).

The movement is now spreading throughout Europe, and an International Union has been formed, including all the institutions specially founded for the protection of child life and the promotion of puericulture. The permanent committee is in Brussels, and a Congress of Infant Protection (Goutte de Lait) is held every two years.

Ellen Key (in her Century of the Child, and elsewhere) has advocated for all young women a year of compulsory "service," analogous to the compulsory military service imposed in most countries on young men. During this period the girl would be trained in rational housekeeping, in the principles of hygiene, in the care of the sick, and especially in the care of infants and all that concerns the physical and psychic development of children. The principle of this proposal has since been widely accepted. Marie von Schmid (in her Mutterdienst, 1907) goes so far as to advocate a general training of young women in such duties, carried on in a kind of enlarged and improved midwifery school. The service would last a year, and the young woman would then be for three years in the reserves, and liable to be called up for duty. There is certainly much to be said for such a proposal, considerably more than is to be said for compulsory military service. For while it is very doubtful whether a man will ever be called on to fight, most women are liable to be called on to exercise household duties or to look after children, whether for themselves or for other people.

Nurture Necessary as Well as Breed—Precocious Manifestations of the Sexual Impulse—Are They to be Regarded as Normal?—The Sexual Play of Children—The Emotion of Love in Childhood—Are Town Children More Precocious Sexually Than Country Children?—Children's Ideas Concerning the Origin of Babies—Need for Beginning the Sexual Education of Children in Early Years—The Importance of Early Training in Responsibility—Evil of the Old Doctrine of Silence in Matters of Sex—The Evil Magnified When Applied to Girls—The Mother the Natural and Best Teacher—The Morbid Influence of Artificial Mystery in Sex Matters—Books on Sexual Enlightenment of the Young—Nature of the Mother's Task—Sexual Education in the School—The Value of Botany—Zoölogy—Sexual Education After Puberty—The Necessity of Counteracting Quack Literature—Danger of Neglecting to Prepare for the First Onset of Menstruation—The Right Attitude Towards Woman's Sexual Life—The Vital Necessity of the Hygiene of Menstruation During Adolescence—Such Hygiene Compatible with the Educational and Social Equality of the Sexes—The Invalidism of Women Mainly Due to Hygienic Neglect—Good Influence of Physical Training on Women and Bad Influence of Athletics—The Evils of Emotional Suppression—Need of Teaching the Dignity of Sex—Influence of These Factors on a Woman's Fate in Marriage—Lectures and Addresses on Sexual Hygiene—The Doctor's Part in Sexual Education—Pubertal Initiation Into the Ideal World—The Place of the Religious and Ethical Teacher—The Initiation Rites of Savages Into Manhood and Womanhood—The Sexual Influence of Literature—The Sexual Influence of Art.

It must, of course, be remembered that the influences of both breed and nurture are alike influential on the fate of the individual. The influence of nurture is so obvious that few are likely to under-rate it. The influence of breed, however, is less obvious, and we may still meet with persons so ill informed, and perhaps so prejudiced, as to deny it altogether. The growth of our knowledge in this matter, by showing how subtle and penetrative is the influence of heredity, cannot fail to dispel this mischievous notion. No sound civilization is possible except in a community which in the mass is not only well-nurtured but well-bred. And in no part of life so much as in the sexual relationships is the influence of good breeding more decisive. An instructive illustration may be gleaned from the minute and precise history of his early life furnished to me by a highly cultured Russian gentleman. He was brought up in childhood with his own brothers and sisters and a little girl of the same age who had been adopted from infancy, the child of a prostitute who had died soon after the infant's birth. The adopted child was treated as one of the family, and all the children supposed that she was a real sister. Yet from early years she developed instincts unlike those of the children with whom she was nurtured; she lied, she was cruel, she loved to make mischief, and she developed precociously vicious sexual impulses; though carefully educated, she adopted the occupation of her mother, and at the age of twenty-two was exiled to Siberia for robbery and attempt to murder. The child of a chance father and a prostitute mother is not fatally devoted to ruin; but such a child is ill-bred, and that fact, in some cases, may neutralize all the influences of good nurture.

Precocious physical development occurs as a somewhat rare variation. W. Roger Williams ("Precocious Sexual Development with Abstracts of over One Hundred Cases," British Gynæcological Journal, May, 1902) has furnished an important contribution to the knowledge of this anomaly which is much commoner in girls than in boys. Roger Williams's cases include only twenty boys to eighty girls, and precocity is not only more frequent but more pronounced in girls, who have been known to conceive at eight, while thirteen is stated to be the earliest age at which boys have proved able to beget children. This, it may be remarked, is also the earliest age at which spermatozoa are found in the seminal fluid of boys; before that age the ejaculations contain no spermatozoa, and, as Fürbringer and Moll have found, they may even be absent at sixteen, or later. In female children precocious sexual development is less commonly associated with general increase of bodily development than in boys. (An individual case of early sexual development in a girl of five has been completely described and figured in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1896, Heft 4, p. 262.)

Precocious sexual impulses are generally vague, occasional, and more or less innocent. A case of rare and pronounced character, in which a child, a boy, from the age of two had been sexually attracted to girls and women, and directed all his thoughts and actions to sexual attempts on them, has been described by Herbert Rich, of Detroit (Alienist and Neurologist, Nov., 1905). General evidence from the literature of the subject as to sexual precocity, its frequency and significance, has been brought together by L. M. Terman ("A Study in Precocity," American Journal Psychology, April, 1905).

The erections that are liable to occur in male infants have usually no sexual significance, though, as Moll remarks, they may acquire it by attracting the child's attention; they are merely reflex. It is believed by some, however, and notably by Freud, that certain manifestations of infant activity, especially thumb-sucking, are of sexual causation, and that the sexual impulse constantly manifests itself at a very early age. The belief that the sexual instinct is absent in childhood, Freud regards as a serious error, so easy to correct by observation that he wonders how it can have arisen. "In reality," he remarks, "the new-born infant brings sexuality with it into the world, sexual sensations accompany it through the days of lactation and childhood, and very few children can fail to experience sexual activities and feelings before the period of puberty" (Freud, "Zur Sexuellen Aufklärung der Kinder," Soziale Medizin und Hygiene, Bd. ii, 1907; cf., for details, the same author's Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 1905). Moll, on the other hand, considers that Freud's views on sexuality in infancy are exaggerations which must be decisively rejected, though he admits that it is difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate the feelings in childhood (Moll, Das Sexualleben des Kindes, p. 154). Moll believes also that psycho-sexual manifestations appearing after the age of eight are not pathological; children who are weakly or of bad heredity are not seldom sexually precocious, but, on the other hand, Moll has known children of eight or nine with strongly developed sexual impulses, who yet become finely developed men.

Rudimentary sexual activities in childhood, accompanied by sexual feelings, must indeed—when they are not too pronounced or too premature—be regarded as coming within the normal sphere, though when they occur in children of bad heredity they are not without serious risks. But in healthy children, after the age of seven or eight, they tend to produce no evil results, and are strictly of the nature of play. Play, both in animals and men, as Groos has shown with marvelous wealth of illustration, is a beneficent process of education; the young creature is thereby preparing itself for the exercise of those functions which in later life it must carry out more completely and more seriously. In his Spiele der Menschen, Groos applies this idea to the sexual play of children, and brings forward quotations from literature in evidence. Keller, in his "Romeo und Juliet auf dem Dorfe," has given an admirably truthful picture of these childish love-relationships. Emil Schultze-Malkowsky (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. ii, p. 370) reproduces some scenes from the life of a little girl of seven clearly illustrating the exact nature of the sexual manifestation at this age.

A kind of rudimentary sexual intercourse between children, as Bloch has remarked (Beiträge, etc., Bd. ii, p. 254), occurs in many parts of the world, and is recognized by their elders as play. This is, for instance, the case among the Bawenda of the Transvaal (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1896, Heft 4, p. 364), and among the Papuans of Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land, with the approval of the parents, although much reticence is observed (id., 1889, Heft 1, p. 16). Godard (Egypte et Palestine, 1867, p. 105) noted the sexual play of the boys and girls in Cairo. In New Mexico W. A. Hammond (Sexual Impotence, p. 107) has seen boys and girls attempting a playful sexual conjunction with the encouragement of men and women, and in New York he has seen boys and girls of three and four doing the same in the presence of their parents, with only a laughing rebuke. "Playing at pa and ma" is indeed extremely common among children in genuine innocence, and with a complete absence of viciousness; and is by no means confined to children of low social class. Moll remarks on its frequency (Libido Sexualis, Bd. i, p. 277), and the committee of evangelical pastors, in their investigation of German rural morality (Die Geschlechtliche-sittliche Verhältnisse, Bd. i, p. 102) found that children who are not yet of school age make attempts at coitus. The sexual play of children is by no means confined to father and mother games; frequently there are games of school with the climax in exposure and smackings, and occasionally there are games of being doctors and making examinations. Thus a young English woman says: "Of course, when we were at school [at the age of twelve and earlier] we used to play with one another, several of us girls; we used to go into a field and pretend we were doctors and had to examine one another, and then we used to pull up one another's clothes and feel each other."

These games do not necessarily involve the coöperation of the sexual impulse, and still less have they any element of love. But emotions of love, scarcely if at all distinguishable from adult sexual love, frequently appear at equally early ages. They are of the nature of play, in so far as play is a preparation for the activities of later life, though, unlike the games, they are not felt as play. Ramdohr, more than a century ago (Venus Urania, 1798), referred to the frequent love of little boys for women. More usually the love is felt towards individuals of the opposite or the same sex who are not widely different in age, though usually older. The most comprehensive study of the matter has been made by Sanford Bell in America on a basis of as many as 2,300 cases (S. Bell, "A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love Between the Sexes," American Journal Psychology, July, 1902). Bell finds that the presence of the emotion between three and eight years of age is shown by such actions as hugging, kissing, lifting each other, scuffling, sitting close to each other, confessions to each other and to others, talking about each other when apart, seeking each other and excluding the rest, grief at separation, giving gifts, showing special courtesies to each other, making sacrifices for each other, exhibiting jealousy. The girls are, on the whole, more aggressive than the boys, and less anxious to keep the matter secret. After the age of eight, the girls increase in modesty and the boys become still more secretive. The physical sensations are not usually located in the sexual organs; erection of the penis and hyperæmia of the female sexual parts Bell regards as marking undue precocity. But there is diffused vascular and nervous tumescence and a state of exaltation comparable, though not equal, to that experienced in adolescent and adult age. On the whole, as Bell soundly concludes, "love between children of opposite sex bears much the same relation to that between adults as the flower does to the fruit, and has about as little of physical sexuality in it as an apple-blossom has of the apple that develops from it." Moll also (op. cit. p. 76) considers that kissing and other similar superficial contacts, which he denominates the phenomena of contrectation, constitute most frequently the first and sole manifestation of the sexual impulse in childhood.

It is often stated that it is easier for children to preserve their sexual innocence in the country than in the town, and that only in cities is sexuality rampant and conspicuous. This is by no means true, and in some respects it is the reverse of the truth. Certainly, hard work, a natural and simple life, and a lack of alert intelligence often combine to keep the rural lad chaste in thought and act until the period of adolescence is completed. Ammon, for instance, states, though without giving definite evidence, that this is common among the Baden conscripts. Certainly, also, all the multiple sensory excitements of urban life tend to arouse the nervous and cerebral excitability of the young at a comparatively early age in the sexual as in other fields, and promote premature desires and curiosities. But, on the other hand, urban life offers the young no gratification for their desires and curiosities. The publicity of a city, the universal surveillance, the studied decorum of a population conscious that it is continually exposed to the gaze of strangers, combine to spread a veil over the esoteric side of life, which, even when at last it fails to conceal from the young the urban stimuli of that life, effectually conceals, for the most part, the gratifications of those stimuli. In the country, however, these restraints do not exist in any corresponding degree; animals render the elemental facts of sexual life clear to all; there is less need or regard for decorum; speech is plainer; supervision is impossible, and the amplest opportunities for sexual intimacy are at hand. If the city may perhaps be said to favor unchastity of thought in the young, the country may certainly be said to favor unchastity of act.

The elaborate investigations of the Committee of Lutheran pastors into sexual morality (Die Geschlechtich-sittliche Verhältnisse im Deutschen Reiche), published a few years ago, demonstrate amply the sexual freedom in rural Germany, and Moll, who is decidedly of opinion that the country enjoys no relative freedom from sexuality, states (op. cit., pp. 137-139, 239) that even the circulation of obscene books and pictures among school-children seems to be more frequent in small towns and the country than in large cities. In Russia, where it might be thought that urban and rural conditions offered less contrast than in many countries, the same difference has been observed. "I do not know," a Russian correspondent writes, "whether Zola in La Terre correctly describes the life of French villages. But the ways of a Russian village, where I passed part of my childhood, fairly resemble those described by Zola. In the life of the rural population into which I was plunged everything was impregnated with erotism. One was surrounded by animal lubricity in all its immodesty. Contrary to the generally received opinion, I believe that a child may preserve his sexual innocence more easily in a town than in the country. There are, no doubt, many exceptions to this rule. But the functions of the sexual life are generally more concealed in the towns than in the fields. Modesty (whether or not of the merely superficial and exterior kind) is more developed among urban populations. In speaking of sexual things in the towns people veil their thought more; even the lower class in towns employ more restraint, more euphemisms, than peasants. Thus in the towns a child may easily fail to comprehend when risky subjects are talked of in his presence. It may be said that the corruption of towns, though more concealed, is all the deeper. Maybe, but that concealment preserves children from it. The town child sees prostitutes in the street every day without distinguishing them from other people. In the country he would every day hear it stated in the crudest terms that such and such a girl has been found at night in a barn or a ditch making love with such and such a youth, or that the servant girl slips every night into the coachman's bed, the facts of sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and childbirth being spoken of in the plainest terms. In towns the child's attention is solicited by a thousand different objects; in the country, except fieldwork, which fails to interest him, he hears only of the reproduction of animals and the erotic exploits of girls and youths. When we say that the urban environment is more exciting we are thinking of adults, but the things which excite the adult have usually no erotic effect on the child, who cannot, however, long remain asexual when he sees the great peasant girls, as ardent as mares in heat, abandoning themselves to the arms of robust youths. He cannot fail to remark these frank manifestations of sexuality, though the subtle and perverse refinements of the town would escape his notice. I know that in the countries of exaggerated prudery there is much hidden corruption, more, one is sometimes inclined to think, than in less hypocritical countries. But I believe that that is a false impression, and am persuaded that precisely because of all these little concealments which excite the malicious amusement of foreigners, there are really many more young people in England who remain chaste than in the countries which treat sexual relations more frankly. At all events, if I have known Englishmen who were very debauched and very refined in vice, I have also known young men of the same nation, over twenty, who were as innocent as children, but never a young Frenchman, Italian, or Spaniard of whom this could be said." There is undoubtedly truth in this statement, though it must be remembered that, excellent as chastity is, if it is based on mere ignorance, its possessor is exposed to terrible dangers.

Stanley Hall ("Contents of Children's Minds on Entering School," Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1891) has collected some of the beliefs of young children as to the origin of babies. "God makes babies in heaven, though the Holy Mother and even Santa Claus make some. He lets them down and drops them, and the women or doctors catch them, or He leaves them on the sidewalk, or brings them down a wooden ladder backwards and pulls it up again, or mamma or the doctor or the nurse go up and fetch them, sometimes in a balloon, or they fly down and lose off their wings in some place or other and forget it, and jump down to Jesus, who gives them around. They were also often said to be found in flour-barrels, and the flour sticks ever so long, you know, or they grew in cabbages, or God puts them in water, perhaps in the sewer, and the doctor gets them out and takes them to sick folks that want them, or the milkman brings them early in the morning; they are dug out of the ground, or bought at the baby store."

In England and America the inquisitive child is often told that the baby was found in the garden, under a gooseberry bush or elsewhere; or more commonly it is said, with what is doubtless felt to be a nearer approach to the truth, that the doctor brought it. In Germany the common story told to children is that the stork brings the baby. Various theories, mostly based on folk-lore, have been put forward to explain this story, but none of them seem quite convincing (see, e.g., G. Herman, "Sexual-Mythen," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, vol. i, Heft 5, 1906, p. 176, and P. Näcke, Neurologische Centralblatt, No. 17, 1907). Näcke thinks there is some plausibility in Professor Petermann's suggestion that a frog writhing in a stork's bill resembles a tiny human creature.

In Iceland, according to Max Bartels ("Isländischer Brauch und Volksglaube," etc., Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1900, Heft 2 and 3) we find a transition between the natural and the fanciful in the stories told to children of the origin of babies (the stork is here precluded, for it only extends to the southern border of Scandinavian lands). In North Iceland it is said that God made the baby and the mother bore it, and on that account is now ill. In the northwest it is said that God made the baby and gave it to the mother. Elsewhere it is said that God sent the baby and the midwife brought it, the mother only being in bed to be near the baby (which is seldom placed in a cradle). It is also sometimes said that a lamb or a bird brought the baby. Again it is said to have entered during the night through the window. Sometimes, however, the child is told that the baby came out of the mother's breasts, or from below her breasts, and that is why she is not well.

Even when children learn that babies come out of the mother's body this knowledge often remains very vague and inaccurate. It very commonly happens, for instance, in all civilized countries that the navel is regarded as the baby's point of exit from the body. This is a natural conclusion, since the navel is seemingly a channel into the body, and a channel for which there is no obvious use, while the pudendal cleft would not suggest itself to girls (and still less to boys) as the gate of birth, since it already appears to be monopolized by the urinary excretion. This belief concerning the navel is sometimes preserved through the whole period of adolescence, especially in girls of the so-called educated class, who are too well-bred to discuss the matter with their married friends, and believe indeed that they are already sufficiently well informed. At this age the belief may not be altogether harmless, in so far as it leads to the real gate of sex being left unguarded. In Elsass where girls commonly believe, and are taught, that babies come through the navel, popular folk-tales are current (Anthropophyteia, vol. iii, p. 89) which represent the mistakes resulting from this belief as leading to the loss of virginity.

Freud, who believes that children give little credit to the stork fable and similar stories invented for their mystification, has made an interesting psychological investigation into the real theories which children themselves, as the result of observation and thought, reach concerning the sexual facts of life (S. Freud, "Ueber Infantile Sexualtheorien," Sexual-Probleme, Dec., 1908). Such theories, he remarks, correspond to the brilliant, but defective hypotheses which primitive peoples arrive at concerning the nature and origin of the world. There are three theories, which, as Freud quite truly concludes, are very commonly formed by children. The first, and the most widely disseminated, is that there is no real anatomical difference between boys and girls; if the boy notices that his little sister has no obvious penis he even concludes that it is because she is too young, and the little girl herself takes the same view. The fact that in early life the clitoris is relatively larger and more penis-like helps to confirm this view which Freud connects with the tendency in later life to erotic dream of women furnished with a penis. This theory, as Freud also remarks, favors the growth of homosexuality when its germs are present. The second theory is the fæcal theory of the origin of babies. The child, who perhaps thinks his mother has a penis, and is in any case ignorant of the vagina, concludes that the baby is brought into the world by an action analogous to the action of the bowels. The third theory, which is perhaps less prevalent than the others, Freud terms the sadistic theory of coitus. The child realizes that his father must have taken some sort of part in his production. The theory that sexual intercourse consists in violence has in it a trace of truth, but seems to be arrived at rather obscurely. The child's own sexual feelings are often aroused for the first time when wrestling or struggling with a companion; he may see his mother, also, resisting more or less playfully a sudden caress from his father, and if a real quarrel takes place, the impression may be fortified. As to what the state of marriage consists in, Freud finds that it is usually regarded as a state which abolishes modesty; the most prevalent theory being that marriage means that people can make water before each other, while another common childish theory is that marriage is when people can show each other their private parts.

"All the love and solicitude parental yearning can bestow," writes Dr. G. F. Butler, of Chicago (Love and its Affinities, 1899, p. 83), "all that the most refined religious influence can offer, all that the most cultivated associations can accomplish, in one fatal moment may be obliterated. There is no room for ethical reasoning, indeed oftentimes no consciousness of wrong, but only Margaret's 'Es war so süss'." The same writer adds (as had been previously remarked by Mrs. Craik and others) that among church members it is the finer and more sensitive organizations that are the most susceptible to sexual emotions. So far as boys are concerned, we leave instruction in matters of sex, the most sacred and central fact in the world, as Canon Lyttelton remarks, to "dirty-minded school-boys, grooms, garden-boys, anyone, in short, who at an early age may be sufficiently defiled and sufficiently reckless to talk of them." And, so far as girls are concerned, as Balzac long ago remarked, "a mother may bring up her daughter severely, and cover her beneath her wings for seventeen years; but a servant-girl can destroy that long work by a word, even by a gesture."

The great part played by servant-girls of the lower class in the sexual initiation of the children of the middle class has been illustrated in dealing with "The Sexual Impulse in Women" in vol. iii, of these Studies, and need not now be further discussed. I would only here say a word, in passing, on the other side. Often as servant-girls take this part, we must not go so far as to say that it is the case with the majority. As regards Germany, Dr. Alfred Kind has lately put on record his experience: "I have never, in youth, heard a bad or improper word on sex-relationships from a servant-girl, although servant-girls followed one another in our house like sunshine and showers in April, and there was always a relation of comradeship between us children and the servants." As regards England, I can add that my own youthful experiences correspond to Dr. Kind's. This is not surprising, for one may say that in the ordinary well-conditioned girl, though her virtue may not be developed to heroic proportions, there is yet usually a natural respect for the innocence of children, a natural sexual indifference to them, and a natural expectation that the male should take the active part when a sexual situation arises.

It is difficult nowadays to find any serious arguments against the desirability of early sexual enlightenment, and it is almost with amusement that we read how the novelist Alphonse Daudet, when asked his opinion of such enlightenment, protested—in a spirit certainly common among the men of his time—that it was unnecessary, because boys could learn everything from the streets and the newspapers, while "as to young girls—no! I would teach them none of the truths of physiology. I can only see disadvantages in such a proceeding. These truths are ugly, disillusioning, sure to shock, to frighten, to disgust the mind, the nature, of a girl." It is as much as to say that there is no need to supply sources of pure water when there are puddles in the street that anyone can drink of. A contemporary of Daudet's, who possessed a far finer spiritual insight, Coventry Patmore, the poet, in the essay on "Ancient and Modern Ideas of Purity" in his beautiful book, Religio Poetæ, had already finely protested against that "disease of impurity" which comes of "our modern undivine silences" for which Daudet pleaded. And Metchnikoff, more recently, from the scientific side, speaking especially as regards women, declares that knowledge is so indispensable for moral conduct that "ignorance must be counted the most immoral of acts" (Essais Optimistes, p. 420).

The distinguished Belgian novelist, Camille Lemonnier, in his L'Homme en Amour, deals with the question of the sexual education of the young by presenting the history of a young man, brought up under the influence of the conventional and hypocritical views which teach that nudity and sex are shameful and disgusting things. In this way he passes by the opportunities of innocent and natural love, to become hopelessly enslaved at last to a sensual woman who treats him merely as the instrument of her pleasure, the last of a long succession of lovers. The book is a powerful plea for a sane, wholesome, and natural education in matters of sex. It was, however, prosecuted at Bruges, in 1901, though the trial finally ended in acquittal. Such a verdict is in harmony with the general tendency of feeling at the present time.

The old ideas, expressed by Daudet, that the facts of sex are ugly and disillusioning, and that they shock the mind of the young, are both alike entirely false. As Canon Lyttelton remarks, in urging that the laws of the transmission of life should be taught to children by the mother: "The way they receive it with native reverence, truthfulness of understanding and guileless delicacy, is nothing short of a revelation of the never-ceasing beauty of nature. People sometimes speak of the indescribable beauty of children's innocence. But I venture to say that no one quite knows what it is who has foregone the privilege of being the first to set before them the true meaning of life and birth and the mystery of their own being. Not only do we fail to build up sound knowledge in them, but we put away from ourselves the chance of learning something that must be divine." In the same way, Edward Carpenter, stating that it is easy and natural for the child to learn from the first its physical relation to its mother, remarks (Love's Coming of Age, p. 9): "A child at the age of puberty, with the unfolding of its far-down emotional and sexual nature, is eminently capable of the most sensitive, affectional and serene appreciation of what sex means (generally more so as things are to-day, than its worldling parent or guardian); and can absorb the teaching, if sympathetically given, without any shock or disturbance to its sense of shame—that sense which is so natural and valuable a safeguard of early youth."

How widespread, even some years ago, had become the conviction that the sexual facts of life should be taught to girls as well as boys, was shown when the opinions of a very miscellaneous assortment of more or less prominent persons were sought on the question ("The Tree of Knowledge," New Review, June, 1894). A small minority of two only (Rabbi Adler and Mrs. Lynn Lynton) were against such knowledge, while among the majority in favor of it were Mme. Adam, Thomas Hardy, Sir Walter Besant, Björnson, Hall Caine, Sarah Grand, Nordau, Lady Henry Somerset, Baroness von Suttner, and Miss Willard. The leaders of the woman's movement are, of course, in favor of such knowledge. Thus a meeting of the Bund für Mutterschutz at Berlin, in 1905, almost unanimously passed a resolution declaring that the early sexual enlightenment of children in the facts of the sexual life is urgently necessary (Mutterschutz, 1905, Heft 2, p. 91). It may be added that medical opinion has long approved of this enlightenment. Thus in England it was editorially stated in the British Medical Journal some years ago (June 9, 1894): "Most medical men of an age to beget confidence in such affairs will be able to recall instances in which an ignorance, which would have been ludicrous if it had not been so sad, has been displayed on matters regarding which every woman entering on married life ought to have been accurately informed. There can, we think, be little doubt that much unhappiness and a great deal of illness would be prevented if young people of both sexes possessed a little accurate knowledge regarding the sexual relations, and were well impressed with the profound importance of selecting healthy mates. Knowledge need not necessarily be nasty, but even if it were, it certainly is not comparable in that respect with the imaginings of ignorance." In America, also, where at an annual meeting of the American Medical Association, Dr. Denslow Lewis, of Chicago, eloquently urged the need of teaching sexual hygiene to youths and girls, all the subsequent nine speakers, some of them physicians of worldwide fame, expressed their essential agreement (Medico-Legal Journal, June-Sept., 1903). Howard, again, at the end of his elaborate History of Matrimonial Institutions (vol. iii, p. 257) asserts the necessity for education in matters of sex, as going to the root of the marriage problem. "In the future educational programme," he remarks, "sex questions must hold an honorable place."

Among the best authorities, both men and women, in all the countries where this matter is attracting attention, there seems now to be unanimity of opinion in favor of the elementary facts of the baby's relationship to its mother being explained to the child by the mother as soon as the child begins to ask questions. Thus in Germany Moll has repeatedly argued in this sense; he insists that sexual enlightenment should be mainly a private and individual matter; that in schools there should be no general and personal warnings about masturbation, etc. (though at a later age he approves of instruction in regard to venereal diseases), but that the mother is the proper person to impart intimate knowledge to the child, and that any age is suitable for the commencement of such enlightenment, provided it is put into a form fitted for the age (Moll, op. cit., p. 264).

At the Mannheim meeting of the Congress of the German Society for Combating Venereal Disease, when the question of sexual enlightenment formed the sole subject of discussion, the opinion in favor of early teaching by the mother prevailed. "It is the mother who must, in the first place, be made responsible for the child's clear understanding of sexual things, so often lacking," said Frau Krukenberg ("Die Aufgabe der Mutter," Sexualpädagogik, p. 13), while Max Enderlin, a teacher, said on the same occasion ("Die Sexuelle Frage in die Volksschule," id., p. 35): "It is the mother who has to give the child his first explanations, for it is to his mother that he first naturally comes with his questions." In England, Canon Lyttelton, who is distinguished among the heads of public schools not least by his clear and admirable statements on these questions, states (Mothers and Sons, p. 99) that the mother's part in the sexual enlightenment and sexual guardianship of her son is of paramount importance, and should begin at the earliest years. J. H. Badley, another schoolmaster ("The Sex Difficulty," Broad Views, June, 1904), also states that the mother's part comes first. Northcote (Christianity and Sex Problems, p. 25) believes that the duty of the parents is primary in this matter, the family doctor and the schoolmaster coming in at a later stage. In America, Dr. Mary Wood Allen, who occupies a prominent and influential position in women's social movements, urges (in Child-Confidence Rewarded, and other pamphlets) that a mother should begin to tell her child these things as soon as he begins to ask questions, the age of four not being too young, and explains how this may be done, giving examples of its happy results in promoting a sweet confidence between the child and his mother.

There can be no doubt that, more especially in highly intelligent children with vague and unspecialized yet insistent sexual impulses, the artificial mystery with which sex is too often clothed not only accentuates the natural curiosity but also tends to favor the morbid intensity and even prurience of the sexual impulse. This has long been recognized. Dr. Beddoes wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century: "It is in vain that we dissemble to ourselves the eagerness with which children of either sex seek to satisfy themselves concerning the conformation of the other. No degree of reserve in the heads of families, no contrivances, no care to put books of one description out of sight and to garble others, has perhaps, with any one set of children, succeeded in preventing or stifling this kind of curiosity. No part of the history of human thought would perhaps be more singular than the stratagems devised by young people in different situations to make themselves masters or witnesses of the secret. And every discovery, due to their own inquiries, can but be so much oil poured upon an imagination in flames" (T. Beddoes, Hygeia, 1802, vol. iii, p. 59). Kaan, again, in one of the earliest books on morbid sexuality, sets down mystery as one of the causes of psychopathia sexualis. Marro (La Pubertà, p. 299) points out how the veil of mystery thrown over sexual matters merely serves to concentrate attention on them. The distinguished Dutch writer Multatuli, in one of his letters (quoted with approval by Freud), remarks on the dangers of hiding things from boys and girls in a veil of mystery, pointing out that this must only heighten the curiosity of children, and so far from keeping them pure, which mere ignorance can never do, heats and perverts their imaginations. Mrs. Mary Wood Allen, also, warns the mother (op. cit., p. 5) against the danger of allowing any air of embarrassing mystery to creep over these things. "If the instructor feels any embarrassment in answering the queries of the child, he is not fitted to be the teacher, for the feeling of embarrassment will, in some subtle way, communicate itself to the child, and he will experience an indefinable sense of offended delicacy which is both unnecessary and undesirable. Purification of one's own thought is, then, the first step towards teaching the truth purely. Why," she adds, "is death, the gateway out of life, any more dignified or pathetic than birth, the gateway into life? Or why is the taking of earthly life a more awful fact than the giving of life?" Mrs. Ennis Richmond, in a book of advice to mothers which contains many wise and true things, says: "I want to insist, more strongly than upon anything else, that it is the secrecy that surrounds certain parts of the body and their functions that gives them their danger in the child's thought. Little children, from earliest years, are taught to think of these parts of their body as mysterious, and not only so, but that they are mysterious because they are unclean. Children have not even a name for them. If you have to speak to your child, you allude to them mysteriously and in a half-whisper as 'that little part of you that you don't speak of,' or words to that effect. Before everything it is important that your child should have a good working name for these parts of his body, and for their functions, and that he should be taught to use and to hear the names, and that as naturally and openly as though he or you were speaking of his head or his foot. Convention has, for various reasons, made it impossible to speak in this way in public. But you can, at any rate, break through this in the nursery. There this rule of convention has no advantage, and many a serious disadvantage. It is easy to say to a child, the first time he makes an 'awkward' remark in public: 'Look here, laddie, you may say what you like to me or to daddy, but, for some reason or other, one does not talk about these' (only say what things) 'in public.' Only let your child make the remark in public before you speak (never mind the shock to your caller's feelings), don't warn him against doing so" (Ennis Richmond, Boyhood, p. 60). Sex must always be a mystery, but, as Mrs. Richmond rightly says, "the real and true mysteries of generation and birth are very different from the vulgar secretiveness with which custom surrounds them."

The question as to the precise names to be given to the more private bodily parts and functions is sometimes a little difficult to solve. Every mother will naturally follow her own instincts, and probably her own traditions, in this matter. I have elsewhere pointed out (in the study of "The Evolution of Modesty") how widespread and instinctive is the tendency to adopt constantly new euphemisms in this field. The ancient and simple words, which in England a great poet like Chaucer could still use rightly and naturally, are so often dropped in the mud by the vulgar that there is an instinctive hesitation nowadays in applying them to beautiful uses. They are, however, unquestionably the best, and, in their origin, the most dignified and expressive words. Many persons are of opinion that on this account they should be rescued from the mud, and their sacredness taught to children. A medical friend writes that he always taught his son that the vulgar sex names are really beautiful words of ancient origin, and that when we understand them aright we cannot possibly see in them any motive for low jesting. They are simple, serious and solemn words, connoting the most central facts of life, and only to ignorant and plebeian vulgarity can they cause obscene mirth. An American man of science, who has privately and anonymously printed some pamphlets on sex questions, also takes this view, and consistently and methodically uses the ancient and simple words. I am of opinion that this is the ideal to be sought, but that there are obvious difficulties at present in the way of attaining it. In any case, however, the mother should be in possession of a very precise vocabulary for all the bodily parts and acts which it concerns her children to know.

The number of little books and pamphlets dealing with the question of the sexual enlightenment of the young—whether intended to be read by the young or offering guidance to mothers and teachers in the task of imparting knowledge—has become very large indeed during recent years in America, England, and especially Germany, where there has been of late an enormous production of such literature. The late Ben Elmy, writing under the pseudonym of "Ellis Ethelmer," published two booklets, Baby Buds, and The Human Flower (issued by Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy, Buxton House, Congleton), which state the facts in a simple and delicate manner, though the author was not a notably reliable guide on the scientific aspects of these questions. A charming conversation between a mother and child, from a French source, is reprinted by Edward Carpenter at the end of his Love's Coming of Age. How We Are Born, by Mrs. N. J. (apparently a Russian lady writing in English), prefaced by J. H. Badley, is satisfactory. Mention may also be made of The Wonder of Life, by Mary Tudor Pole. Margaret Morley's Song of Life, an American book, which I have not seen, has been highly praised. Most of these books are intended for quite young children, and while they explain more or less clearly the origin of babies, nearly always starting with the facts of plant life, they touch very slightly, if at all, on the relations of the sexes.

Mrs. Ennis Richmond's books, largely addressed to mothers, deal with these questions in a very sane, direct, and admirable manner, and Canon Lyttelton's books, discussing such questions generally, are also excellent. Most of the books now to be mentioned are intended to be read by boys and girls who have reached the age of puberty. They refer more or less precisely to sexual relationships, and they usually touch on masturbation. The Story of Life, written by a very accomplished woman, the late Ellice Hopkins, is somewhat vague, and introduces too many exalted religious ideas. Arthur Trewby's Healthy Boyhood is a little book of wholesome tendency; it deals specially with masturbation. A Talk with Boys About Themselves and A Talk with Girls About Themselves, both by Edward Bruce Kirk (the latter book written in conjunction with a lady) deal with general as well as sexual hygiene. There could be no better book to put into the hands of a boy or girl at puberty than M. A. Warren's Almost Fourteen, written by an American school teacher in 1892. It was a most charming and delicately written book, which could not have offended the innocence of the most sensitive maiden. Nothing, however, is sacred to prurience, and it was easy for the prurient to capture the law and obtain (in 1897) legal condemnation of this book as "obscene." Anything which sexually excites a prurient mind is, it is true, "obscene" for that mind, for, as Mr. Theodore Schroeder remarks, obscenity is "the contribution of the reading mind," but we need such books as this in order to diminish the number of prurient minds, and the condemnation of so entirely admirable a book makes, not for morality, but for immorality. I am told that the book was subsequently issued anew with most of its best portions omitted, and it is stated by Schroeder (Liberty of Speech and Press Essential to Purity Propaganda, p. 34) that the author was compelled to resign his position as a public school principal. Maria Lischnewska's Geschlechtliche Belehrung der Kinder (reprinted from Mutterschutz, 1905, Heft 4 and 5) is a most admirable and thorough discussion of the whole question of sexual education, though the writer is more interested in the teacher's share in this question than in the mother's. Suggestions to mothers are contained in Hugo Salus, Wo kommen die Kinder her?, E. Stiehl, Eine Mutterpflicht, and many other books. Dr. Alfred Kind strongly recommends Ludwig Gurlitt's Der Verkehr mit meinem Kindern, more especially in its combination of sexual education with artistic education. Many similar books are referred to by Bloch, in his Sexual Life of Our Time, Ch. xxvi.

I have enumerated the names of these little books because they are frequently issued in a semi-private manner, and are seldom easy to procure or to hear of. The propagation of such books seems to be felt to be almost a disgraceful action, only to be performed by stealth. And such a feeling seems not unnatural when we see, as in the case of the author of Almost Fourteen, that a nominally civilized country, instead of loading with honors a man who has worked for its moral and physical welfare, seeks so far as it can to ruin him.

I may add that while it would usually be very helpful to a mother to be acquainted with a few of the booklets I have named, she would do well, in actually talking to her children, to rely mainly on her own knowledge and inspiration.

The great though capricious educator, Basedow, to some extent a pupil of Rousseau, was an early pioneer in both the theory and the practice of giving school children instruction in the facts of the sexual life, from the age of ten onwards. He insists much on this subject in his great treatise, the Elementarwerk (1770-1774). The questions of children are to be answered truthfully, he states, and they must be taught never to jest at anything so sacred and serious as the sexual relations. They are to be shown pictures of childbirth, and the dangers of sexual irregularities are to be clearly expounded to them at the outset. Boys are to be taken to hospitals to see the results of venereal disease. Basedow is aware that many parents and teachers will be shocked at his insistence on these things in his books and in his practical pedagogic work, but such people, he declares, ought to be shocked at the Bible (see, e.g., Pinloche, La Rèforme de l'Education en Allemagne au dixhuitième siècle: Basedow et le Philanthropinisme, pp. 125, 256, 260, 272). Basedow was too far ahead of his own time, and even of ours, to exert much influence in this matter, and he had few immediate imitators.

Somewhat later than Basedow, a distinguished English physician, Thomas Beddoes, worked on somewhat the same lines, seeking to promote sexual knowledge by lectures and demonstrations. In his remarkable book, Hygeia, published in 1802 (vol. i, Essay IV) he sets forth the absurdity of the conventional requirement that "discretion and ignorance should lodge in the same bosom," and deals at length with the question of masturbation and the need of sexual education. He insists on the great importance of lectures on natural history which, he had found, could be given with perfect propriety to a mixed audience. His experiences had shown that botany, the amphibia, the hen and her eggs, human anatomy, even disease and sometimes the sight of it, are salutary from this point of view. He thinks it is a happy thing for a child to gain his first knowledge of sexual difference from anatomical subjects, the dignity of death being a noble prelude to the knowledge of sex and depriving it forever of morbid prurience. It is scarcely necessary to remark that this method of teaching children the elements of sexual anatomy in the post-mortem room has not found many advocates or followers; it is undesirable, for it fails to take into account the sensitiveness of children to such impressions, and it is unnecessary, for it is just as easy to teach the dignity of life as the dignity of death.

The duty of the school to impart education in matters of sex to children has in recent years been vigorously and ably advocated by Maria Lischnewska (op. cit.), who speaks with thirty years' experience as a teacher and an intimate acquaintance with children and their home life. She argues that among the mass of the population to-day, while in the home-life there is every opportunity for coarse familiarity with sexual matters, there is no opportunity for a pure and enlightened introduction to them, parents being for the most part both morally and intellectually incapable of aiding their children here. That the school should assume the leading part in this task is, she believes, in accordance with the whole tendency of modern civilized life. She would have the instruction graduated in such a manner that during the fifth or sixth year of school life the pupil would receive instruction, with the aid of diagrams, concerning the sexual organs and functions of the higher mammals, the bull and cow being selected by preference. The facts of gestation would of course be included. When this stage was reached it would be easy to pass on to the human species with the statement: "Just in the same way as the calf develops in the cow so the child develops in the mother's body."

It is difficult not to recognize the force of Maria Lischnewska's argument, and it seems highly probable that, as she asserts, the instruction proposed lies in the course of our present path of progress. Such instruction would be formal, unemotional, and impersonal; it would be given not as specific instruction in matters of sex, but simply as a part of natural history. It would supplement, so far as mere knowledge is concerned, the information the child had already received from its mother. But it would by no means supplant or replace the personal and intimate relationship of confidence between mother and child. That is always to be aimed at, and though it may not be possible among the ill-educated masses of to-day, nothing else will adequately take its place.

An early educational authority, Salzmann, in 1785 advocated the sexual enlightenment of children by first teaching them botany, to be followed by zoölogy. In modern times the method of imparting sex knowledge to children by means, in the first place, of botany, has been generally advocated, and from the most various quarters. Thus Marro (La Pubertà, p. 300) recommends this plan. J. Hudrey-Menos ("La Question du Sexe dans l'Education," Revue Socialiste, June, 1895), gives the same advice. Rudolf Sommer, in a paper entitled "Mädchenerziehung oder Menschenbildung?" (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Jahrgang I, Heft 3) recommends that the first introduction of sex knowledge to children should be made by talking to them on simple natural history subjects; "there are endless opportunities," he remarks, "over a fairy-tale, or a walk, or a fruit, or an egg, the sowing of seed or the nest-building of birds." Canon Lyttelton (Training of the Young in Laws of Sex, pp. 74 et seq.) advises a somewhat similar method, though laying chief stress on personal confidence between the child and his mother; "reference is made to the animal world just so far as the child's knowledge extends, so as to prevent the new facts from being viewed in isolation, but the main emphasis is laid on his feeling for his mother and the instinct which exists in nearly all children of reverence due to the maternal relation;" he adds that, however difficult the subject may seem, the essential facts of paternity must also be explained to boys and girls alike. Keyes, again (New York Medical Journal, Feb. 10, 1906), advocates teaching children from an early age the sexual facts of plant life and also concerning insects and other lower animals, and so gradually leading up to human beings, the matter being thus robbed of its unwholesome mystery. Mrs. Ennis Richmond (Boyhood, p. 62) recommends that children should be sent to spend some of their time upon a farm, so that they may not only become acquainted with the general facts of the natural world, but also with the sexual lives of animals, learning things which it is difficult to teach verbally. Karina Karin ("Wie erzieht man ein Kind zür wissenden Keuschheit?" Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Jahrgang I, Heft 4), reproducing some of her talks with her nine-year old son, from the time that he first asked her where children came from, shows how she began with telling him about flowers, to pass on to fish and birds, and finally to the facts of human pregnancy, showing him pictures from an obstetrical manual of the child in its mother's body. It may be added that the advisability of beginning the sex teaching of children with the facts of botany was repeatedly emphasized by various speakers at the special meeting of the German Congress for Combating Venereal Disease devoted to the subject of sexual instruction (Sexualpädagogik, especially pp. 36, 47, 76).

A doctor of philosophy, prominent in his profession, wrote to Stanley Hall (Adolescence, vol. i, p. 452): "My entire youth, from six to eighteen, was made miserable from lack of knowledge that any one who knew anything of the nature of puberty might have given; this long sense of defect, dread of operation, shame and worry, has left an indelible mark." There are certainly many men who could say the same. Lancaster ("Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence," Pedagogical Seminary, July, 1897, pp. 123-5) speaks strongly regarding the evils of ignorance of sexual hygiene, and the terrible fact that millions of youths are always in the hands of quacks who dupe them into the belief that they are on the road to an awful destiny merely because they have occasional emissions during sleep. "This is not a light matter," Lancaster declares. "It strikes at the very foundation of our inmost life. It deals with the reproductory part of our natures, and must have a deep hereditary influence. It is a natural result of the foolish false modesty shown regarding all sex instruction. Every boy should be taught the simple physiological facts before his life is forever blighted by this cause." Lancaster has had in his hands one thousand letters, mostly written by young people, who were usually normal, and addressed to quacks who were duping them. From time to time the suicides of youths from this cause are reported, and in many mysterious suicides this has undoubtedly been the real cause. "Week after week," writes the British Medical Journal in an editorial ("Dangerous Quack Literature: The Moral of a Recent Suicide," Oct. 1, 1892), "we receive despairing letters from those victims of foul birds of prey who have obtained their first hold on those they rob, torture and often ruin, by advertisements inserted by newspapers of a respectable, nay, even of a valuable and respected, character." It is added that the wealthy proprietors of such newspapers, often enjoying a reputation for benevolence, even when the matter is brought before them, refuse to interfere as they would thereby lose a source of income, and a censorship of advertisements is proposed. This, however, is difficult, and would be quite unnecessary if youths received proper enlightenment from their natural guardians.

Masturbation, and the fear that by an occasional and perhaps outgrown practice of masturbation they have sometimes done themselves irreparable injury, is a common source of anxiety to boys. It has long been a question whether a boy should be warned against masturbation. At a meeting of the Section of Psychology of the British Medical Association some years ago, four speakers, including the President (Dr. Blandford), were decidedly in favor of parents warning their children against masturbation, while three speakers were decidedly against that course, mainly on the ground that it was possible to pass through even a public school life without hearing of masturbation, and also that the warning against masturbation might encourage the practice. It is, however, becoming more and more clearly realized that ignorance, even if it can be maintained, is a perilous possession, while the teaching that consists, as it should, in a loving mother's counsel to the child from his earliest years to treat his sexual parts with care and respect, can only lead to masturbation in the child who is already irresistibly impelled to it. Most of the sex manuals for boys touch on masturbation, sometimes exaggerating its dangers; such exaggeration should be avoided, for it leads to far worse evils than those it attempts to prevent. It seems undesirable that any warnings about masturbation should form part of school instruction, unless under very special circumstances. The sexual instruction imparted in the school on sexual as on other subjects should be absolutely impersonal and objective.

At this point we approach one of the difficulties in the way of sexual enlightenment: the ignorance or unwisdom of the would-be teachers. This difficulty at present exists both in the home and the school, while it destroys the value of many manuals written for the sexual instruction of the young. The mother, who ought to be the child's confidant and guide in matters of sexual education, and could naturally be so if left to her own healthy instincts, has usually been brought up in false traditions which it requires a high degree of intelligence and character to escape from; the school-teacher, even if only called upon to give instruction in natural history, is oppressed by the same traditions, and by false shame concerning the whole subject of sex; the writer of manuals on sex has often only freed himself from these bonds in order to advocate dogmatic, unscientific, and sometimes mischievous opinions which have been evolved in entire ignorance of the real facts. As Moll says (Das Sexualleben des Kindes, p. 276), necessary as sexual enlightenment is, we cannot help feeling a little skeptical as to its results so long as those who ought to enlighten are themselves often in need of enlightenment. He refers also to the fact that even among competent authorities there is difference of opinion concerning important matters, as, for instance, whether masturbation is physiological at the first development of the sexual impulse and how far sexual abstinence is beneficial. But it is evident that the difficulties due to false tradition and ignorance will diminish as sound traditions and better knowledge become more widely diffused.

Conversations dealing with the important mysteries of human nature, Obici and Marchesini were told by ladies who had formerly been pupils in Italian Normal Schools, are the order of the day in schools and colleges, and specially circle around procreation, the most difficult mystery of all. In England, even in the best and most modern colleges, in which games and physical exercise are much cultivated, I am told that "the majority of the girls are entirely ignorant of all sexual matters, and understand nothing whatever about them. But they do wonder about them, and talk about them constantly" (see Appendix D, "The School Friendships of Girls," in the second volume of these Studies). "The restricted life and fettered mind of girls," wrote a well-known physician some years ago (J. Milner Fothergill, Adolescence, 1880, pp. 20, 22) "leave them with less to actively occupy their thoughts than is the case with boys. They are studiously taught concealment, and a girl may be a perfect model of outward decorum and yet have a very filthy mind. The prudishness with which she is brought up leaves her no alternative but to view her passions from the nasty side of human nature. All healthy thought on the subject is vigorously repressed. Everything is done to darken her mind and foul her imagination by throwing her back on her own thoughts and a literature with which she is ashamed to own acquaintance. It is opposed to a girl's best interests to prevent her from having fair and just conceptions about herself and her nature. Many a fair young girl is irredeemably ruined on the very threshold of life, herself and her family disgraced, from ignorance as much as from vice. When the moment of temptation comes she falls without any palpable resistance; she has no trained educated power of resistance within herself; her whole future hangs, not upon herself, but upon the perfection of the social safeguards by which she is hedged and surrounded." Under the free social order of America to-day much the same results are found. In an instructive article ("Why Girls Go Wrong," Ladies' Home Journal, Jan., 1907) B. B. Lindsey, who, as Judge of the Juvenile Court of Denver, is able to speak with authority, brings forward ample evidence on this head. Both girls and boys, he has found, sometimes possess manuscript books in which they had written down the crudest sexual things. These children were often sweet-faced, pleasant, refined and intelligent, and they had respectable parents; but no one had ever spoken to them of sex matters, except the worst of their school-fellows or some coarse-minded and reckless adult. By careful inquiry Lindsey found that only in one in twenty cases had the parents ever spoken to the children of sexual subjects. In nearly every case the children acknowledged that it was not from their parents, but in the street or from older companions, that they learnt the facts of sex. The parents usually imagined that their children were absolutely ignorant of these matters, and were astonished to realize their mistake; "parents do not know their children, nor have they the least idea of what their children know, or what their children talk about and do when away from them." The parents guilty of this neglect to instruct their children, are, Lindsey declares, traitors to their children. From his own experience he judges that nine-tenths of the girls who "go wrong," whether or not they sink in the world, do so owing to the inattention of their parents, and that in the case of most prostitutes the mischief is really done before the age of twelve; "every wayward girl I have talked to has assured me of this truth." He considers that nine-tenths of school-boys and school-girls, in town or country, are very inquisitive regarding matters of sex, and, to his own amazement, he has found that in the girls this is as marked as in the boys.

"I know of no large girl's school," wrote a distinguished gynæcologist, Sir W. S. Playfair ("Education and Training of Girls at Puberty," British Medical Journal, Dec. 7, 1895), "in which the absolute distinction which exists between boys and girls as regards the dominant menstrual function is systematically cared for and attended to. Indeed, the feeling of all schoolmistresses is distinctly antagonistic to such an admission. The contention is that there is no real difference between an adolescent male and female, that what is good for one is good for the other, and that such as there is is due to the evil customs of the past which have denied to women the ambitions and advantages open to men, and that this will disappear when a happier era is inaugurated. If this be so, how comes it that while every practical physician of experience has seen many cases of anæmia and chlorosis in girls, accompanied by amenorrhæa or menorrhagia, headaches, palpitations, emaciation, and all the familiar accompaniments of breakdown, an analogous condition in a school-boy is so rare that it may well be doubted if it is ever seen at all?"

It is, however, only the excuses for this almost criminal negligence, as it ought to be considered, which are new; the negligence itself is ancient. Half a century earlier, before the new era of feminine education, another distinguished gynæcologist, Tilt (Elements of Health and Principles of Female Hygiene, 1852, p. 18) stated that from a statistical inquiry regarding the onset of menstruation in nearly one thousand women he found that "25 per cent. were totally unprepared for its appearance; that thirteen out of the twenty-five were much frightened, screamed, or went into hysterical fits; and that six out of the thirteen thought themselves wounded and washed with cold water. Of those frightened ... the general health was seriously impaired."

Engelmann, after stating that his experience in America was similar to Tilt's in England, continues ("The Health of the American Girl," Transactions of the Southern Surgical and Gynæcological Society, 1890): "To innumerable women has fright, nervous and emotional excitement, exposure to cold, brought injury at puberty. What more natural than that the anxious girl, surprised by the sudden and unexpected loss of the precious life-fluid, should seek to check the bleeding wound—as she supposes? For this purpose the use of cold washes and applications is common, some even seek to stop the flow by a cold bath, as was done by a now careful mother, who long lay at the point of death from the result of such indiscretion, and but slowly, by years of care, regained her health. The terrible warning has not been lost, and mindful of her own experience she has taught her children a lesson which but few are fortunate enough to learn—the individual care during periods of functional activity which is needful for the preservation of woman's health."

In a study of one hundred and twenty-five American high school girls Dr. Helen Kennedy refers to the "modesty" which makes it impossible even for mothers and daughters to speak to each other concerning the menstrual functions. "Thirty-six girls in this high school passed into womanhood with no knowledge whatever, from a proper source, of all that makes them women. Thirty-nine were probably not much wiser, for they stated that they had received some instruction, but had not talked freely on the matter. From the fact that the curious girl did not talk freely on what naturally interested her, it is possible she was put off with a few words as to personal care, and a reprimand for her curiosity. Less than half of the girls felt free to talk with their mothers of this most important matter!" (Helen Kennedy, "Effects of High School Work upon Girls During Adolescence," Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1896.)

The same state of things probably also prevails in other countries. Thus, as regards France, Edmond de Goncourt in Chérie (pp. 137-139) described the terror of his young heroine at the appearance of the first menstrual period for which she had never been prepared. He adds: "It is very seldom, indeed, that women speak of this eventuality. Mothers fear to warn their daughters, elder sisters dislike confidences with their younger sisters, governesses are generally mute with girls who have no mothers or sisters."

Sometimes this leads to suicide or to attempts at suicide. Thus a few years ago the case was reported in the French newspapers of a young girl of fifteen, who threw herself into the Seine at Saint-Ouen. She was rescued, and on being brought before the police commissioner said that she had been attacked by an "unknown disease" which had driven her to despair. Discreet inquiry revealed that the mysterious malady was one common to all women, and the girl was restored to her insufficiently punished parents.

In Germany Tobler has investigated the menstrual histories of over one thousand women (Monatsschrift für Geburtshülfe und Gynäkologie, July, 1905). He finds that in the great majority of women at the present day menstruation is associated with distinct deterioration of the general health, and diminution of functional energy. In 26 per cent. local pain, general malaise, and mental and nervous anomalies coexisted; in larger proportion come the cases in which local pain, general weak health or psychic abnormality was experienced alone at this period. In 16 per cent. only none of these symptoms were experienced. In a very small separate group the physical and mental functions were stronger during this period, but in half of these cases there was distinct disturbance during the intermenstrual period. Tobler concludes that, while menstruation itself is physiological, all these disturbances are pathological.

As far as England is concerned, at a discussion of normal and painful menstruation at a meeting of the British Association of Registered Medical Women on the 7th of July, 1908, it was stated by Miss Bentham that 50 per cent. of girls in good position suffered from painful menstruation. Mrs. Dunnett said it usually occurred between the ages of twenty-four and thirty, being frequently due to neglect to rest during menstruation in the earlier years, and Mrs. Grainger Evans had found that this condition was very common among elementary school teachers who had worked hard for examinations during early girlhood.

In America various investigations have been carried out, showing the prevalence of disturbance in the sexual health of school girls and young women. Thus Dr. Helen P. Kennedy obtained elaborate data concerning the menstrual life of one hundred and twenty-five high school girls of the average age of eighteen ("Effect of High School Work upon Girls During Adolescence," Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1896). Only twenty-eight felt no pain during the period; half the total number experienced disagreeable symptoms before the period (such as headache, malaise, irritability of temper), while forty-four complained of other symptoms besides pain during the period (especially headache and great weakness). Jane Kelley Sabine (quoted in Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, Sept. 15, 1904) found in New England schools among two thousand girls that 75 per cent. had menstrual troubles, 90 per cent. had leucorrhœa and ovarian neuralgia, and 60 per cent. had to give up work for two days during each month. These results seem more than usually unfavorable, but are significant, as they cover a large number of cases. The conditions in the Pacific States are not much better. Dr. Mary Ritter (in a paper read before the California State Medical Society in 1903) stated that of 660 Freshmen girls at the University of California, 67 per cent. were subject to menstrual disorders, 27 per cent. to headaches, 30 per cent. to backaches, 29 per cent. were habitually constipated, 16 per cent. had abnormal heart sounds; only 23 per cent. were free from functional disturbances. Dr. Helen MacMurchey, in an interesting paper on "Physiological Phenomena Preceding or Accompanying Menstruation" (Lancet, Oct. 5, 1901), by inquiries among one hundred medical women, nurses, and women teachers in Toronto concerning the presence or absence of twenty-one different abnormal menstrual phenomena, found that between 50 and 60 per cent. admitted that they were liable at this time to disturbed sleep, to headache, to mental depression, to digestive disturbance, or to disturbance of the special senses, while about 25 to 50 per cent. were liable to neuralgia, to vertigo, to excessive nervous energy, to defective nervous and muscular power, to cutaneous hyperæsthesia, to vasomotor disturbances, to constipation, to diarrhœa, to increased urination, to cutaneous eruption, to increased liability to take cold, or to irritating watery discharges before or after the menstrual discharge. This inquiry is of much interest, because it clearly brings out the marked prevalence at menstruation of conditions which, though not necessarily of any gravity, yet definitely indicate decreased power of resistance to morbid influences and diminished efficiency for work.

How serious an impediment menstrual troubles are to a woman is indicated by the fact that the women who achieve success and fame seem seldom to be greatly affected by them. To that we may, in part, attribute the frequency with which leaders of the women's movement have treated menstruation as a thing of no importance in a woman's life. Adele Gerhard, and Helene Simon, also, in their valuable and impartial work, Mutterschaft und Geistige Arbeit (p. 312), failed to find, in their inquiries among women of distinguished ability, that menstruation was regarded as seriously disturbing to work.

Of late the suggestion that adolescent girls shall not only rest from work during two days of the menstrual period, but have an entire holiday from school during the first year of sexual life, has frequently been put forward, both from the medical and the educational side. At the meeting of the Association of Registered Medical Women, already referred to, Miss Sturge spoke of the good results obtained in a school where, during the first two years after puberty, the girls were kept in bed for the first two days of each menstrual period. Some years ago Dr. G. W. Cook ("Some Disorders of Menstruation," American Journal of Obstetrics, April, 1896), after giving cases in point, wrote: "It is my deliberate conviction that no girl should be confined at study during the year of her puberty, but she should live an outdoor life." In an article on "Alumna's Children," by "An Alumna" (Popular Science Monthly, May, 1904), dealing with the sexual invalidism of American women and the severe strain of motherhood upon them, the author, though she is by no means hostile to education, which is not, she declares, at fault, pleads for rest for the pubertal girl. "If the brain claims her whole vitality, how can there be any proper development? Just as very young children should give all their strength for some years solely to physical growth before the brain is allowed to make any considerable demands, so at this critical period in the life of the woman nothing should obstruct the right of way of this important system. A year at the least should be made especially easy for her, with neither mental nor nervous strain; and throughout the rest of her school days she should have her periodical day of rest, free from any study or overexertion." In another article on the same subject in the same journal ("The Health of American Girls," Sept., 1907), Nellie Comins Whitaker advocates a similar course. "I am coming to be convinced, somewhat against my wish, that there are many cases when the girl ought to be taken out of school entirely for some months or for a year at the period of puberty." She adds that the chief obstacle in the way is the girl's own likes and dislikes, and the ignorance of her mother who has been accustomed to think that pain is a woman's natural lot.

Such a period of rest from mental strain, while it would fortify the organism in its resistance to any reasonable strain later, need by no means be lost for education in the wider sense of the word, for the education required in classrooms is but a small part of the education required for life. Nor should it by any means be reserved merely for the sickly and delicate girl. The tragic part of the present neglect to give girls a really sound and fitting education is that the best and finest girls are thereby so often ruined. Even the English policeman, who admittedly belongs in physical vigor and nervous balance to the flower of the population, is unable to bear the strain of his life, and is said to be worn out in twenty-five years. It is equally foolish to submit the finest flowers of girlhood to a strain which is admittedly too severe.

"It seems evident," A. E. Giles concludes ("Some Points of Preventive Treatment in the Diseases of Women," The Hospital, April 10, 1897) "that dysmenorrhœa might be to a large extent prevented by attention to general health and education. Short hours of work, especially of standing; plenty of outdoor exercise—tennis, boating, cycling, gymnastics, and walking for those who cannot afford these; regularity of meals and food of the proper quality—not the incessant tea and bread and butter with variation of pastry; the avoidance of overexertion and prolonged fatigue; these are some of the principal things which require attention. Let girls pursue their study, but more leisurely; they will arrive at the same goal, but a little later." The benefit of allowing free movement and exercise to the whole body is undoubtedly very great, both as regards the sexual and general physical health and the mental balance; in order to insure this it is necessary to avoid heavy and constricting garments, more especially around the chest, for it is in respiratory power and chest expansion more than in any other respect that girls fall behind boys (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, Ch. IX). In old days the great obstacle to the free exercise of girls lay in an ideal of feminine behavior which involved a prim restraint on every natural movement of the body. At the present day that ideal is not so fervently preached as of old, but its traditional influence still to some extent persists, while there is the further difficulty that adequate time and opportunity and encouragement are by no means generally afforded to girls for the cultivation and training of the romping instincts which are really a serious part of education, for it is by such free exercise of the whole body that the neuro-muscular system, the basis of all vital activity, is built up. The neglect of such education is to-day clearly visible in the structure of our women. Dr. F. May Dickinson Berry, Medical Examiner to the Technical Education Board of the London County Council, found (British Medical Journal, May 28, 1904) among over 1,500 girls, who represent the flower of the schools, since they had obtained scholarships enabling them to proceed to higher grade schools, that 22 per cent, presented some degree, not always pronounced, of lateral curvature of the spine, though such cases were very rare among the boys. In the same way among a very similar class of select girls at the Chicago Normal School, Miss Lura Sanborn (Doctors' Magazine, Dec., 1900) found 17 per cent, with spinal curvature, in some cases of a very pronounced degree. There is no reason why a girl should not have as straight a back as a boy, and the cause can only lie in the defective muscular development which was found in most of the cases, sometimes accompanied by anæmia. Here and there nowadays, among the better social classes, there is ample provision for the development of muscular power in girls, but in any generalized way there is no adequate opportunity for such exercise, and among the working class, above all, in the section of it which touches the lower middle class, although their lives are destined to be filled with a constant strain on the neuro-muscular system from work at home or in shops, etc., there is usually a minimum of healthy exercise and physical development. Dr. W. A. B. Sellman, of Baltimore ("Causes of Painful Menstruation in Unmarried Women," American Journal Obstetrics, Nov., 1907), emphasizes the admirable results obtained by moderate physical exercise for young women, and in training them to care for their bodies and to rest their nervous systems, while Dr. Charlotte Brown, of San Francisco, rightly insists on the establishment in all towns and villages alike of outdoor gymnastic fields for women and girls, and of a building, in connection with every large school, for training in physical, manual, and domestic science. The provision of special playgrounds is necessary where the exercising of girls is so unfamiliar as to cause an embarrassing amount of attention from the opposite sex, though when it is an immemorial custom it can be carried out on the village green without attracting the slightest attention, as I have seen in Spain, where one cannot fail to connect it with the physical vigor of the women. In boys' schools games are not only encouraged, but made compulsory; but this is by no means a universal rule in girls' schools. It is not necessary, and is indeed highly undesirable, that the games adopted should be those of boys. In England especially, where the movements of women are so often marked by awkwardness, angularity and lack of grace, it is essential that nothing should be done to emphasize these characteristics, for where vigor involves violence we are in the presence of a lack of due neuro-muscular coördination. Swimming, when possible, and especially some forms of dancing, are admirably adapted to develop the bodily movements of women both vigorously and harmoniously (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, Ch. VII). At the International Congress of School Hygiene in 1907 (see, e.g., British Medical Journal, Aug. 24, 1907) Dr. L. H. Gulick, formerly Director of Physical Training in the Public Schools of New York City, stated that after many experiments it had been found in the New York elementary and high schools that folk-dancing constituted the very best exercise for girls. "The dances selected involved many contractions of the large muscular masses of the body and had therefore a great effect on respiration, circulation and nutrition. Such movements, moreover, when done as dances, could be carried on three or four times as long without producing fatigue as formal gymnastics. Many folk-dances were imitative, sowing and reaping dance, dances expressing trade movements (the shoemaker's dance), others illustrating attack and defense, or the pursuit of game. Such neuro-muscular movements were racially old and fitted in with man's expressive life, and if it were accepted that the folk-dances really expressed an epitome of man's neuro-muscular history, as distinguished from mere permutation of movements, the folk-dance combinations should be preferred on these biological grounds to the unselected, or even the physiologically selected. From the æsthetic point of view the sense of beauty as shown in dancing was far commoner than the power to sing, paint or model."

The fact that it is stress and strain in general, and not necessarily educational studies, that are injurious to adolescent women, is sufficiently proved, if proof is necessary, by the fact that sexual arrest, and physical or nervous breakdown, occur with extreme frequency in girls who work in shops or mills, even in girls who have never been to school at all. Even excesses in athletics—which now not infrequently occur as a reaction against woman's indifference to physical exercise—are bad. Cycling is beneficial for women who can ride without pain or discomfort, and, according to Watkins, it is even beneficial in many diseased and disordered pelvic conditions, but excessive cycling is evil in its results on women, more especially by inducing rigidity of the perineum to an extent which may even prevent childbirth and necessitate operation. I may add that the same objection applies to much horse-riding. In the same way everything which causes shocks to the body is apt to be dangerous to women, since in the womb they possess a delicately poised organ which varies in weight at different times, and it would, for instance, be impossible to commend football as a game for girls. "I do not believe," wrote Miss H. Ballantine, Director of Vassar College Gymnasium, to Prof. W. Thomas (Sex and Society, p. 22) "women can ever, no matter what the training, approach men in their physical achievements; and," she wisely adds, "I see no reason why they should." There seem, indeed, as has already been indicated, to be reasons why they should not, especially if they look forward to becoming mothers. I have noticed that women who have lived a very robust and athletic outdoor life, so far from always having the easy confinements which we might anticipate, sometimes have very seriously difficult times, imperilling the life of the child. On making this observation to a distinguished obstetrician, the late Dr. Engelmann, who was an ardent advocate of physical exercise for women (in e.g. his presidential address, "The Health of the American Girl," Transactions Southern Surgical and Gynæcological Association, 1890), he replied that he had himself made the same observation, and that instructors in physical training, both in America and England, had also told him of such cases among their pupils. "I hold," he wrote, "precisely the opinion you express [as to the unfavorable influence of muscular development in women]. Athletics, i.e., overdone physical training, causes the girl's system to approximate to the masculine; this is so whether due to sport or necessity. The woman who indulges in it approximates to the male in her attributes; this is marked in diminished sexual intensity, and in increased difficulty of childbirth, with, in time, lessened fecundity. Healthy habits improve, but masculine muscular development diminishes, womanly qualities, although it is true that the peasant and the laboring woman have easy labor. I have never advocated muscular development for girls, only physical training, but have perhaps said too much for it and praised it too unguardedly. In schools and colleges, so far, however, it is insufficient rather than too much; only the wealthy have too much golf and athletic sports. I am collecting new material, but from what I already have seen I am impressed with the truth of what you say. I am studying the point, and shall elaborate the explanation." Any publication on this subject was, however, prevented by Engelmann's death a few years later.

Thus Boris Sidis has recorded a case illustrating the disastrous results of inculcating on a morbidly sensitive girl the doctrine of the impurity of women. She was educated in a convent. "While there she was impressed with the belief that woman is a vessel of vice and impurity. This seemed to have been imbued in her by one of the nuns who was very holy and practiced self-mortification. With the onset of her periods, and with the observation of the same in the other girls, this doctrine of female impurity was all the stronger impressed on her sensitive mind." It lapsed, however, from conscious memory and only came to the foreground in subsequent years with the exhaustion and fatigue of prolonged office work. Then she married. Now "she has an extreme abhorrence of women. Woman, to the patient, is impurity, filth, the very incarnation of degradation and vice. The house wash must not be given to a laundry where women work. Nothing must be picked up in the street, not even the most valuable object, perchance it might have been dropped by a woman" (Boris Sidis, "Studies in Psychopathology," Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, April 4, 1907). That is the logical outcome of much of the traditional teaching which is given to girls. Fortunately, the healthy mind offers a natural resistance to its complete acceptation, yet it usually, in some degree, persists and exerts a mischievous influence.

Stanley Hall, after remarking that sexual education should be chiefly from fathers to sons and from mothers to daughters, adds: "It may be that in the future this kind of initiation will again become an art, and experts will tell us with more confidence how to do our duty to the manifold exigencies, types and stages of youth, and instead of feeling baffled and defeated, we shall see that this age and theme is the supreme opening for the highest pedagogy to do its best and most transforming work, as well as being the greatest of all opportunities for the teacher of religion" (Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. i, p. 469). "At Williams College, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Clark," the same distinguished teacher observes (ib., p. 465), "I have made it a duty in my departmental teaching to speak very briefly, but plainly to young men under my instruction, personally if I deemed it wise, and often, though here only in general terms, before student bodies, and I believe I have nowhere done more good, but it is a painful duty. It requires tact and some degree of hard and strenuous common sense rather than technical knowledge."

It is scarcely necessary to say that the ordinary teacher of either sex is quite incompetent to speak of sexual hygiene. It is a task to which all, or some, teachers must be trained. A beginning in this direction has been made in Germany by the delivery to teachers of courses of lectures on sexual hygiene in education. In Prussia the first attempt was made in Breslau when the central school authorities requested Dr. Martin Chotzen to deliver such a course to one hundred and fifty teachers who took the greatest interest in the lectures, which covered the anatomy of the sexual organs, the development of the sexual instinct, its chief perversions, venereal diseases, and the importance of the cultivation of self-control. In Geschlecht und Gesellschaft (Bd. i, Heft 7) Dr. Fritz Reuther gives the substance of lectures which he has delivered to a class of young teachers; they cover much the same ground as Chotzen's.

There is no evidence that in England the Minister of Education has yet taken any steps to insure the delivery of lectures on sexual hygiene to the pupils who are about to leave school. In Prussia, however, the Ministry of Education has taken an active interest in this matter, and such lectures are beginning to be commonly delivered, though attendance at them is not usually obligatory. Some years ago (in 1900), when it was proposed to deliver a series of lectures on sexual hygiene to the advanced pupils in Berlin schools, under the auspices of a society for the improvement of morals, the municipal authorities withdrew their permission to use the classrooms, on the ground that "such lectures would be extremely dangerous to the moral sense of an audience of the young." The same objection has been made by municipal officials in France. In Germany, at all events, however, opinion is rapidly growing more enlightened. In England little or no progress has yet been made, but in America steps are being taken in this direction, as by the Chicago Society for Social Hygiene. It must, indeed, be said that those who oppose the sexual enlightenment of youth in large cities are directly allying themselves, whether or not they know it, with the influences that make for vice and immorality.

Such lectures are also given to girls on leaving school, not only girls of the well-to-do, but also those of the poor class, who need them fully as much, and in some respects more. Thus Dr. A. Heidenhain has published a lecture (Sexuelle Belehrung der aus den Volksschule entlassenen Mädchen, 1907), accompanied by anatomical tables, which he has delivered to girls about to leave school, and which is intended to be put into their hands at this time. Salvat, in a Lyons thesis (La Dépopulation de la France, 1903), insists that the hygiene of pregnancy and the care of infants should form part of the subject of such lectures. These subjects might well be left, however, to a somewhat later period.

Ceremonies of initiation into manhood at puberty—involving physical and mental discipline, as well as instruction, lasting for weeks or months, and never identical for both sexes—are common among savages in all parts of the world. They nearly always involve the endurance of a certain amount of pain and hardship, a wise measure of training which the softness of civilization has too foolishly allowed to drop, for the ability to endure hardness is an essential condition of all real manhood. It is as a corrective to this tendency to flabbiness in modern education that the teaching of Nietzsche is so invaluable.

The initiation of boys among the natives of Torres Straits has been elaborately described by A. C. Haddon (Reports Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. v, Chs. VII and XII). It lasts a month, involves much severe training and power of endurance, and includes admirable moral instruction. Haddon remarks that it formed "a very good discipline," and adds, "it is not easy to conceive of a more effectual means for a rapid training."

Among the aborigines of Victoria, Australia, the initiatory ceremonies, as described by R. H. Mathews ("Some Initiation Ceremonies," Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1905, Heft 6), last for seven months, and constitute an admirable discipline. The boys are taken away by the elders of the tribe, subjected to many trials of patience and endurance of pain and discomfort, sometimes involving even the swallowing of urine and excrement, brought into contact with strange tribes, taught the laws and folk-lore, and at the end meetings are held at which betrothals are arranged.

Among the northern tribes of Central Australia the initiation ceremonies involve circumcision and urethral subincision, as well as hard manual labor and hardships. The initiation of girls into womanhood is accompanied by cutting open of the vagina. These ceremonies have been described by Spencer and Gillen (Northern Tribes of Central Australia, Ch. XI). Among various peoples in British East Africa (including the Masai) pubertal initiation is a great ceremonial event extending over a period of many months, and it includes circumcision in boys, and in girls clitoridectomy, as well as, among some tribes, removal of the nymphæ. A girl who winces or cries out during the operation is disgraced among the women and expelled from the settlement. When the ceremony has been satisfactorily completed the boy or girl is marriageable (C. Marsh Beadnell, "Circumcision and Clitoridectomy as Practiced by the Natives of British East Africa," British Medical Journal, April 29, 1905).

Initiation among the African Bawenda, as described by a missionary, is in three stages: (1) A stage of instruction and discipline during which the traditions and sacred things of the tribe are revealed, the art of warfare taught, self-restraint and endurance borne; then the youths are counted as full-grown. (2) In the next stage the art of dancing is practiced, by each sex separately, during the day. (3) In the final stage, which is that of complete sexual initiation, the two sexes dance together by night; the scene, in the opinion of the good missionary, "does not bear description;" the initiated are now complete adults, with all the privileges and responsibilities of adults (Rev. E. Gottschling, "The Bawenda," Journal Anthropological Institution, July to Dec., 1905, p. 372. Cf., an interesting account of the Bawenda Tondo schools by another missionary, Wessmann, The Bawenda, pp. 60 et seq.).

The initiation of girls in Azimba Land, Central Africa, has been fully and interestingly described by H. Crawford Angus ("The Chensamwali' or Initiation Ceremony of Girls," Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1898, Heft 6). At the first sign of menstruation the girl is taken by her mother out of the village to a grass hut prepared for her where only the women are allowed to visit her. At the end of menstruation she is taken to a secluded spot and the women dance round her, no men being present. It was only with much difficulty that Angus was enabled to witness the ceremony. The girl is then informed in regard to the hygiene of menstruation. "Many songs about the relations between men and women are sung, and the girl is instructed as to all her duties when she becomes a wife.... The girl is taught to be faithful to her husband, and to try and bear children. The whole matter is looked upon as a matter of course, and not as a thing to be ashamed of or to hide, and being thus openly treated of and no secrecy made about it, you find in this tribe that the women are very virtuous, because the subject of married life has no glamour for them. When a woman is pregnant she is again danced; this time all the dancers are naked, and she is taught how to behave and what to do when the time of her delivery arrives."

Among the Yuman Indians of California, as described by Horatio Rust ("A Puberty Ceremony of the Mission Indians," American Anthropologist, Jan. to March, 1906, p. 28) the girls are at puberty prepared for marriage by a ceremony. They are wrapped in blankets and placed in a warm pit, where they lie looking very happy as they peer out through their covers. For four days and nights they lie here (occasionally going away for food), while the old women of the tribe dance and sing round the pit constantly. At times the old women throw silver coins among the crowd to teach the girls to be generous. They also give away cloth and wheat, to teach them to be kind to the old and needy; and they sow wild seeds broadcast over the girls to cause them to be prolific. Finally, all strangers are ordered away, garlands are placed on the girls' heads, and they are led to a hillside and shown the large and sacred stone, symbolical of the female organs of generation and resembling them, which is said to protect women. Then grain is thrown over all present, and the ceremony is over.

The Thlinkeet Eskimo women were long noted for their fine qualities. At puberty they were secluded, sometimes for a whole year, being kept in darkness, suffering, and filth. Yet defective and unsatisfactory as this initiation was, "Langsdorf suggests," says Bancroft (Native Races of Pacific, vol. i, p. 110), referring to the virtues of the Thlinkeet woman, "that it may be during this period of confinement that the foundation of her influence is laid; that in modest reserve and meditation her character is strengthened, and she comes forth cleansed in mind as well as body."

All great literature touches nakedly and sanely on the central facts of sex. It is always consoling to remember this in an age of petty pruderies. And it is a satisfaction to know that it would not be possible to emasculate the literature of the great ages, however desirable it might seem to the men of more degenerate ages, or to close the avenues to that literature against the young. All our religious and literary traditions serve to fortify the position of the Bible and of Shakespeare. "So many men and women," writes a correspondent, a literary man, "gain sexual ideas in childhood from reading the Old Testament, that the Bible may be called an erotic text-book. Most persons of either sex with whom I have conversed on the subject, say that the Books of Moses, and the stories of Amnon and Tamar, Lot and his daughters, Potiphar's wife and Joseph, etc., caused speculation and curiosity, and gave them information of the sexual relationship. A boy and girl of fifteen, both friends of the writer, and now over thirty years of age, used to find out erotic passages in the Bible on Sunday mornings, while in a Dissenting chapel, and pass their Bibles to one another, with their fingers on the portions that interested them." In the same way many a young woman has borrowed Shakespeare in order to read the glowing erotic poetry of Venus and Adonis, which her friends have told her about.

The Bible, it may be remarked, is not in every respect, a model introduction for the young mind to the questions of sex. But even its frank acceptance, as of divine origin, of sexual rules so unlike those that are nominally our own, such as polygamy and concubinage, helps to enlarge the vision of the youthful mind by showing that the rules surrounding the child are not those everywhere and always valid, while the nakedness and realism of the Bible cannot but be a wholesome and tonic corrective to conventional pruderies.

We must, indeed, always protest against the absurd confusion whereby nakedness of speech is regarded as equivalent to immorality, and not the less because it is often adopted even in what are regarded as intellectual quarters. When in the House of Lords, in the last century, the question of the exclusion of Byron's statue from Westminster Abbey was under discussion, Lord Brougham "denied that Shakespeare was more moral than Byron. He could, on the contrary, point out in a single page of Shakespeare more grossness than was to be found in all Lord Byron's works." The conclusion Brougham thus reached, that Byron is an incomparably more moral writer than Shakespeare, ought to have been a sufficient reductio ad absurdum of his argument, but it does not appear that anyone pointed out the vulgar confusion into which he had fallen.

It may be said that the special attractiveness which the nakedness of great literature sometimes possesses for young minds is unwholesome. But it must be remembered that the peculiar interest of this element is merely due to the fact that elsewhere there is an inveterate and abnormal concealment. It must also be said that the statements of the great writers about natural things are never degrading, nor even erotically exciting to the young, and what Emilia Pardo Bazan tells of herself and her delight when a child in the historical books of the Old Testament, that the crude passages in them failed to send the faintest cloud of trouble across her young imagination, is equally true of most children. It is necessary, indeed, that these naked and serious things should be left standing, even if only to counterbalance the lewdly comic efforts to besmirch love and sex, which are visible to all in every low-class bookseller's shop window.

This point of view was vigorously championed by the speakers on sexual education at the Third Congress of the German Gesellschaft zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten in 1907. Thus Enderlin, speaking as a headmaster, protested against the custom of bowdlerizing poems and folk-songs for the use of children, and thus robbing them of the finest introduction to purified sexual impulses and the highest sphere of emotion, while at the same time they are recklessly exposed to the "psychic infection" of the vulgar comic papers everywhere exposed for sale. "So long as children are too young to respond to erotic poetry it cannot hurt them; when they are old enough to respond it can only benefit them by opening to them the highest and purest channels of human emotion" (Sexualpädagogik, p. 60). Professor Schäfenacker (id., p. 98) expresses himself in the same sense, and remarks that "the method of removing from school-books all those passages which, in the opinion of short-sighted and narrow-hearted schoolmasters, are unsuited for youth, must be decisively condemned." Every healthy boy and girl who has reached the age of puberty may be safely allowed to ramble in any good library, however varied its contents. So far from needing guidance they will usually show a much more refined taste than their elders. At this age, when the emotions are still virginal and sensitive, the things that are realistic, ugly, or morbid, jar on the young spirit and are cast aside, though in adult life, with the coarsening of mental texture which comes of years and experience, this repugnance, doubtless by an equally sound and natural instinct, may become much less acute.

Ellen Key in Ch. VI of her Century of the Child well summarizes the reasons against the practice of selecting for children books that are "suitable" for them, a practice which she considers one of the follies of modern education. The child should be free to read all great literature, and will himself instinctively put aside the things he is not yet ripe for. His cooler senses are undisturbed by scenes that his elders find too exciting, while even at a later stage it is not the nakedness of great literature, but much more the method of the modern novel, which is likely to stain the imagination, falsify reality and injure taste. It is concealment which misleads and coarsens, producing a state of mind in which even the Bible becomes a stimulus to the senses. The writings of the great masters yield the imaginative food which the child craves, and the erotic moment in them is too brief to be overheating. It is the more necessary, Ellen Key remarks, for children to be introduced to great literature, since they often have little opportunity to occupy themselves with it in later life. Many years earlier Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies, had eloquently urged that even young girls should be allowed to range freely in libraries.

Casts of classic nude statues and reproductions of the pictures of the old Venetian and other Italian masters may fittingly be used to adorn schoolrooms, not so much as objects of instruction as things of beauty with which the child cannot too early become familiarized. In Italy it is said to be usual for school classes to be taken by their teachers to the art museums with good results; such visits form part of the official scheme of education.

There can be no doubt that such early familiarity with the beauty of nudity in classic art is widely needed among all social classes and in many countries. It is to this defect of our education that we must attribute the occasional, and indeed in America and England frequent, occurrence of such incidents as petitions and protests against the exhibition of nude statuary in art museums, the display of pictures so inoffensive as Leighton's "Bath of Psyche" in shop windows, and the demand for the draping of the naked personifications of abstract virtues in architectural street decoration. So imperfect is still the education of the multitude that in these matters the ill-bred fanatic of pruriency usually gains his will. Such a state of things cannot but have an unwholesome reaction on the moral atmosphere of the community in which it is possible. Even from the religious point of view, prurient prudery is not justifiable. Northcote has very temperately and sensibly discussed the question of the nude in art from the standpoint of Christian morality. He points out that not only is the nude in art not to be condemned without qualification, and that the nude is by no means necessarily the erotic, but he also adds that even erotic art, in its best and purest manifestations, only arouses emotions that are the legitimate object of man's aspirations. It would be impossible even to represent Biblical stories adequately on canvas or in marble if erotic art were to be tabooed (Rev. H. Northcote, Christianity and Sex Problems, Ch. XIV).

Early familiarity with the nude in classic and early Italian art should be combined at puberty with an equal familiarity with photographs of beautiful and naturally developed nude models. In former years books containing such pictures in a suitable and attractive manner to place before the young were difficult to procure. Now this difficulty no longer exists. Dr. C. H. Stratz, of The Hague, has been the pioneer in this matter, and in a series of beautiful books (notably in Der Körper des Kindes, Die Schönheit des Weiblichen Körpers and Die Rassenschönheit des Weibes, all published by Enke in Stuttgart), he has brought together a large number of admirably selected photographs of nude but entirely chaste figures. More recently Dr. Shufeldt, of Washington (who dedicates his work to Stratz), has published his Studies of the Human Form in which, in the same spirit, he has brought together the results of his own studies of the naked human form during many years. It is necessary to correct the impressions received from classic sources by good photographic illustrations on account of the false conventions prevailing in classic works, though those conventions were not necessarily false for the artists who originated them. The omission of the pudendal hair, in representations of the nude was, for instance, quite natural for the people of countries still under Oriental influence are accustomed to remove the hair from the body. If, however, under quite different conditions, we perpetuate that artistic convention to-day, we put ourselves into a perverse relation to nature. There is ample evidence of this. "There is one convention so ancient, so necessary, so universal," writes Mr. Frederic Harrison (Nineteenth Century and After, Aug., 1907), "that its deliberate defiance to-day may arouse the bile of the least squeamish of men and should make women withdraw at once." If boys and girls were brought up at their mother's knees in familiarity with pictures of beautiful and natural nakedness, it would be impossible for anyone to write such silly and shameful words as these.

There can be no doubt that among ourselves the simple and direct attitude of the child towards nakedness is so early crushed out of him that intelligent education is necessary in order that he may be enabled to discern what is and what is not obscene. To the plough-boy and the country servant-girl all nakedness, including that of Greek statuary, is alike shameful or lustful. "I have a picture of women like that," said a countryman with a grin, as he pointed to a photograph of one of Tintoret's most beautiful groups, "smoking cigarettes." And the mass of people in most northern countries have still passed little beyond this stage of discernment; in ability to distinguish between the beautiful and the obscene they are still on the level of the plough-boy and the servant-girl.

The Greek Attitude Towards Nakedness—How the Romans Modified That Attitude—The Influence of Christianity—Nakedness in Mediæval Times—Evolution of the Horror of Nakedness—Concomitant Change in the Conception of Nakedness—Prudery—The Romantic Movement—Rise of a New Feeling in Regard to Nakedness—The Hygienic Aspect of Nakedness—How Children May Be Accustomed to Nakedness—Nakedness Not Inimical to Modesty—The Instinct of Physical Pride—The Value of Nakedness in Education—The Æsthetic Value of Nakedness—The Human Body as One of the Prime Tonics of Life—How Nakedness May Be Cultivated—The Moral Value of Nakedness.

Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (Part III, Sect II, Mem. II, Subs. IV), referring to the recommendations of Plato, adds: "But Eusebius and Theodoret worthily lash him for it; and well they might: for as one saith, the very sight of naked parts, causeth enormous, exceeding concupiscences, and stirs up both men and women to burning lust." Yet, as Burton himself adds further on in the same section of his work (Mem. V, Subs. III), without protest, "some are of opinion, that to see a woman naked, is able of itself to alter his affection; and it is worthy of consideration, saith Montaigne, the Frenchman, in his Essays, that the skilfullest masters of amorous dalliance appoint for a remedy of venereous passions, a full survey of the body."

There ought to be no question regarding the fact that it is the adorned, the partially concealed body, and not the absolutely naked body, which acts as a sexual excitant. I have brought together some evidence on this point in the study of "The Evolution of Modesty." "In Madagascar, West Africa, and the Cape," says G. F. Scott Elliot (A Naturalist in Mid-Africa, p. 36), "I have always found the same rule. Chastity varies inversely as the amount of clothing." It is now indeed generally held that one of the chief primary objects of ornament and clothing was the stimulation of sexual desire, and artists' models are well aware that when they are completely unclothed, they are most safe from undesired masculine advances. "A favorite model of mine told me," remarks Dr. Shufeldt (Medical Brief, Oct., 1904), the distinguished author of Studies of the Human Form, "that it was her practice to disrobe as soon after entering the artist's studio as possible, for, as men are not always responsible for their emotions, she felt that she was far less likely to arouse or excite them when entirely nude than when only semi-draped." This fact is, indeed, quite familiar to artists' models. If the conquest of sexual desire were the first and last consideration of life it would be more reasonable to prohibit clothing than to prohibit nakedness.

How widespread is the occasional or habitual practice of nakedness in the world generally, and how entirely concordant it is with even a most sensitive modesty, has been set forth in "The Evolution of Modesty," in vol. i of these Studies.

Even during the Christian era the impulse to adopt nudity, often with the feeling that it was an especially sacred practice, has persisted. The Adamites of the second century, who read and prayed naked, and celebrated the sacrament naked, according to the statement quoted by St. Augustine, seem to have caused little scandal so long as they only practiced nudity in their sacred ceremonies. The German Brethren of the Free Spirit, in the thirteenth century, combined so much chastity with promiscuous nakedness that orthodox Catholics believed they were assisted by the Devil. The French Picards, at a much later date, insisted on public nakedness, believing that God had sent their leader into the world as a new Adam to reestablish the law of Nature; they were persecuted and were finally exterminated by the Hussites.

In daily life, however, a considerable degree of nakedness was tolerated during mediæval times. This was notably so in the public baths, frequented by men and women together. Thus Alwin Schultz remarks (in his Höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesänger), that the women of the aristocratic classes, though not the men, were often naked in these baths except for a hat and a necklace.

It is sometimes stated that in the mediæval religious plays Adam and Eve were absolutely naked. Chambers doubts this, and thinks they wore flesh-colored tights, or were, as in a later play of this kind, "apparelled in white leather" (E. K. Chambers, The Mediæval Stage, vol. i, p. 5). It may be so, but the public exposure even of the sexual organs was permitted, and that in aristocratic houses, for John of Salisbury (in a passage quoted by Buckle, Commonplace Book, 541) protests against this custom.

The women of the feminist sixteenth century in France, as R. de Maulde la Clavière remarks (Revue de l'Art, Jan., 1898), had no scruple in recompensing their adorers by admitting them to their toilette, or even their bath. Late in the century they became still less prudish, and many well-known ladies allowed themselves to be painted naked down to the waist, as we see in the portrait of "Gabrielle d'Estrées au Bain" at Chantilly. Many of these pictures, however, are certainly not real portraits.

Even in the middle of the seventeenth century in England nakedness was not prohibited in public, for Pepys tells us that on July 29, 1667, a Quaker came into Westminster Hall, crying, "Repent! Repent!" being in a state of nakedness, except that he was "very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal." (This was doubtless Solomon Eccles, who was accustomed to go about in this costume, both before and after the Restoration. He had been a distinguished musician, and, though eccentric, was apparently not insane.)

In a chapter, "De la Nudité," and in the appendices of his book, De l'Amour (vol. i, p. 221), Sénancour gives instances of the occasional practice of nudity in Europe, and adds some interesting remarks of his own; so, also, Dulaure (Des Divinités Génératrices, Ch. XV). It would appear, as a rule, that though complete nudity was allowed in other respects, it was usual to cover the sexual parts.

We must not, however, under-rate the tenacity with which this horror of nakedness was held. Nothing illustrates more vividly the deeply ingrained hatred which the nineteenth century felt of nakedness than the ferocity—there is no other word for it—with which Christian missionaries to savages all over the world, even in the tropics, insisted on their converts adopting the conventional clothing of Northern Europe. Travellers' narratives abound in references to the emphasis placed by missionaries on this change of custom, which was both injurious to the health of the people and degrading to their dignity. It is sufficient to quote one authoritative witness, Lord Stanmore, formerly Governor of Fiji, who read a long paper to the Anglican Missionary Conference in 1894 on the subject of "Undue Introduction of Western Ways." "In the centre of the village," he remarked in quoting a typical case (and referring not to Fiji but to Tonga), "is the church, a wooden barn-like building. If the day be Sunday, we shall find the native minister arrayed in a greenish-black swallow-tail coat, a neckcloth, once white, and a pair of spectacles, which he probably does not need, preaching to a congregation, the male portion of which is dressed in much the same manner as himself, while the women are dizened out in old battered hats or bonnets, and shapeless gowns like bathing dresses, or it may be in crinolines of an early type. Chiefs of influence and women of high birth, who in their native dress would look, and do look, the ladies and gentlemen they are, are, by their Sunday finery, given the appearance of attendants upon Jack-in-the-Green. If a visit be paid to the houses of the town, after the morning's work of the people is over, the family will be found sitting on chairs, listless and uncomfortable, in a room full of litter. In the houses of the superior native clergy there will be a yet greater aping of the manners of the West. There will be chairs covered with hideous antimacassars, tasteless round worsted-work mats for absent flower jars, and a lot of ugly cheap and vulgar china chimney ornaments, which, there being no fireplace, and consequently no chimney-piece, are set out in order on a rickety deal table. The whole life of these village folk is one piece of unreal acting. They are continually asking themselves whether they are incurring any of the penalties entailed by infraction of the long table of prohibitions, and whether they are living up to the foreign garments they wear. Their faces have, for the most part, an expression of sullen discontent, they move about silently and joylessly, rebels in heart to the restrictive code on them, but which they fear to cast off, partly from a vague apprehension of possible secular results, and partly because they suppose they will cease to be good Christians if they do so. They have good ground for their dissatisfaction. At the time when I visited the villages I have specially in my eye, it was punishable by fine and imprisonment to wear native clothing, punishable by fine and imprisonment to wear long hair or a garland of flowers; punishable by fine or imprisonment to wrestle or to play at ball; punishable by fine and imprisonment to build a native-fashioned house; punishable not to wear shirt and trousers, and in certain localities coat and shoes also; and, in addition to laws enforcing a strictly puritanical observation of the Sabbath, it was punishable by fine and imprisonment to bathe on Sundays. In some other places bathing on Sunday was punishable by flogging; and to my knowledge women have been flogged for no other offense. Men in such circumstances are ripe for revolt, and sometimes the revolt comes."

An obvious result of reducing the feeling about nakedness to an unreasoning but imperative convention is the tendency to prudishness. This, as we know, is a form of pseudo-modesty which, being a convention, and not a natural feeling, is capable of unlimited extension. It is by no means confined to modern times or to Christian Europe. The ancient Hebrews were not entirely free from prudishness, and we find in the Old Testament that by a curious euphemism the sexual organs are sometimes referred to as "the feet." The Turks are capable of prudishness. So, indeed, were even the ancient Greeks. "Dion the philosopher tells us," remarks Clement of Alexandria (Stromates, Bk. IV, Ch. XIX) "that a certain woman, Lysidica, through excess of modesty, bathed in her clothes, and that Philotera, when she was to enter the bath, gradually drew back her tunic as the water covered her naked parts; and then rising by degrees, put it on." Mincing prudes were found among the early Christians, and their ways are graphically described by St. Jerome in one of his letters to Eustochium: "These women," he says, "speak between their teeth or with the edge of the lips, and with a lisping tongue, only half pronouncing their words, because they regard as gross whatever is natural. Such as these," declares Jerome, the scholar in him overcoming the ascetic, "corrupt even language." Whenever a new and artificial "modesty" is imposed upon savages prudery tends to arise. Haddon describes this among the natives of Torres Straits, where even the children now suffer from exaggerated prudishness, though formerly absolutely naked and unashamed (Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. v, p. 271).

We find the importance of the sight of the body—though very narrowly, for the avoidance of fraud in the preliminaries of marriage—set forth as early as the sixteenth century by Sir Thomas More in his Utopia, which is so rich in new and fruitful ideas. In Utopia, according to Sir Thomas More, before marriage, a staid and honest matron "showeth the woman, be she maid or widow, naked to the wooer. And likewise a sage and discreet man exhibiteth the wooer naked to the woman. At this custom we laughed and disallowed it as foolish. But they, on their part, do greatly wonder at the folly of all other nations which, in buying a colt where a little money is in hazard, be so chary and circumspect that though he be almost all bare, yet they will not buy him unless the saddle and all the harness be taken off, lest under these coverings be hid some gall or sore. And yet, in choosing a wife, which shall be either pleasure or displeasure to them all their life after, they be so reckless that all the residue of the woman's body being covered with clothes, they estimate her scarcely by one handsbreadth (for they can see no more but her face) and so join her to them, not without great jeopardy of evil agreeing together, if anything in her body afterward should chance to offend or mislike them. Verily, so foul deformity may be hid under these coverings that it may quite alienate and take away the man's mind from his wife, when it shall not be lawful for their bodies to be separate again. If such deformity happen by any chance after the marriage is consummate and finished, well, there is no remedy but patience. But it were well done that a law were made whereby all such deceits were eschewed and avoided beforehand."

The clear conception of what may be called the spiritual value of nakedness—by no means from More's point of view, but as a part of natural hygiene in the widest sense, and as a high and special aspect of the purifying and ennobling function of beauty—is of much later date. It is not clearly expressed until the time of the Romantic movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We have it admirably set forth in Sénancour's De l'Amour (first edition, 1806; fourth and enlarged edition, 1834), which still remains one of the best books on the morality of love. After remarking that nakedness by no means abolishes modesty, he proceeds to advocate occasional partial or complete nudity. "Let us suppose," he remarks, somewhat in the spirit of Plato, "a country in which at certain general festivals the women should be absolutely free to be nearly or even quite naked. Swimming, waltzing, walking, those who thought good to do so might remain unclothed in the presence of men. No doubt the illusions of love would be little known, and passion would see a diminution of its transports. But is it passion that in general ennobles human affairs? We need honest attachments and delicate delights, and all these we may obtain while still preserving our common-sense.... Such nakedness would demand corresponding institutions, strong and simple, and a great respect for those conventions which belong to all times" (Sénancour, De l'Amour, vol. i, p. 314).

From that time onwards references to the value and desirability of nakedness become more and more frequent in all civilized countries, sometimes mingled with sarcastic allusions to the false conventions we have inherited in this matter. Thus Thoreau writes in his journal on June 12, 1852, as he looks at boys bathing in the river: "The color of their bodies in the sun at a distance is pleasing. I hear the sound of their sport borne over the water. As yet we have not man in Nature. What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties."

Iwan Bloch, in Chapter VII of his Sexual Life of Our Time, discusses this question of nakedness from the modern point of view, and concludes: "A natural conception of nakedness: that is the watchword of the future. All the hygienic, æsthetic, and moral efforts of our time are pointing in that direction."

Stratz, as befits one who has worked so strenuously in the cause of human health and beauty, admirably sets forth the stage which we have now attained in this matter. After pointing out (Die Frauenkleidung, third edition, 1904, p. 30) that, in opposition to the pagan world which worshipped naked gods, Christianity developed the idea that nakedness was merely sexual, and therefore immoral, he proceeds: "But over all glimmered on the heavenly heights of the Cross, the naked body of the Saviour. Under that protection there has gradually disengaged itself from the confusion of ideas a new transfigured form of nakedness made free after long struggle. I would call this artistic nakedness, for as it was immortalized by the old Greeks through art, so also among us it has been awakened to new life by art. Artistic nakedness is, in its nature, much higher than either the natural or the sensual conception of nakedness. The simple child of Nature sees in nakedness nothing at all; the clothed man sees in the uncovered body only a sensual irritation. But at the highest standpoint man consciously returns to Nature, and recognizes that under the manifold coverings of human fabrication there is hidden the most splendid creature that God has created. One may stand in silent, worshipping wonder before the sight; another may be impelled to imitate and show to his fellow-man what in that holy moment he has seen. But both enjoy the spectacle of human beauty with full consciousness and enlightened purity of thought."

Lord Monboddo, the Scotch judge, who was a pioneer in regard to many modern ideas, had already in the eighteenth century realized the hygienic value of "air-baths," and he invented that now familiar name. "Lord Monboddo," says Boswell, in 1777 (Life of Johnson, edited by Hill, vol. iii, p. 168) "told me that he awaked every morning at four, and then for his health got up and walked in his room naked, with the window open, which he called taking an air-bath." It is said also, I know not on what authority, that he made his beautiful daughters take an air-bath naked on the terrace every morning. Another distinguished man of the same century, Benjamin Franklin, used sometimes to work naked in his study on hygienic grounds, and, it is recorded, once affrighted a servant-girl by opening the door in an absent-minded moment, thus unattired.

Rikli seems to have been the apostle of air-baths and sun-baths regarded as a systematic method. He established light-and air-baths over half a century ago at Trieste and elsewhere in Austria. His motto was: "Light, Truth, and Freedom are the motive forces towards the highest development of physical and moral health." Man is not a fish, he declared; light and air are the first conditions of a highly organized life. Solaria for the treatment of a number of different disordered conditions are now commonly established, and most systems of natural therapeutics attach prime importance to light and air, while in medicine generally it is beginning to be recognized that such influences can by no means be neglected. Dr. Fernand Sandoz, in his Introduction à la Thérapeutique Naturiste par les agents Physiques et Dietétiques (1907) sets forth such methods comprehensively. In Germany sun-baths have become widely common; thus Lenkei (in a paper summarized in British Medical Journal, Oct. 31, 1908) prescribes them with much benefit in tuberculosis, rheumatic conditions, obesity, anæmia, neurasthenia, etc. He considers that their peculiar value lies in the action of light. Professor J. N. Hyde, of Chicago, even believes ("Light-Hunger in the Production of Psoriasis," British Medical Journal, Oct. 6, 1906), that psoriasis is caused by deficiency of sunlight, and is best cured by the application of light. This belief, which has not, however, been generally accepted in its unqualified form, he ingeniously supports by the fact that psoriasis tends to appear on the most exposed parts of the body, which may be held to naturally receive and require the maximum of light, and by the absence of the disease in hot countries and among negroes.

The hygienic value of nakedness is indicated by the robust health of the savages throughout the world who go naked. The vigor of the Irish, also, has been connected with the fact that (as Fynes Moryson's Itinerary shows) both sexes, even among persons of high social class, were accustomed to go naked except for a mantle, especially in more remote parts of the country, as late as the seventeenth century. Where-ever primitive races abandon nakedness for clothing, at once the tendency to disease, mortality, and degeneracy notably increases, though it must be remembered that the use of clothing is commonly accompanied by the introduction of other bad habits. "Nakedness is the only condition universal among vigorous and healthy savages; at every other point perhaps they differ," remarks Frederick Boyle in a paper ("Savages and Clothes," Monthly Review, Sept., 1905) in which he brings together much evidence concerning the hygienic advantages of the natural human state in which man is "all face."

It is in Germany that a return towards nakedness has been most ably and thoroughly advocated, notably by Dr. H. Pudor in his Nackt-Cultur, and by R. Ungewitter in Die Nacktheit (first published in 1905), a book which has had a very large circulation in many editions. These writers enthusiastically advocate nakedness, not only on hygienic, but on moral and artistic grounds. Pudor insists more especially that "nakedness, both in gymnastics and in sport, is a method of cure and a method of regeneration;" he advocates co-education in this culture of nakedness. Although he makes large claims for nakedness—believing that all the nations which have disregarded these claims have rapidly become decadent—Pudor is less hopeful than Ungewitter of any speedy victory over the prejudices opposed to the culture of nakedness. He considers that the immediate task is education, and that a practical commencement may best be made with the foot which is specially in need of hygiene and exercise; a large part of the first volume of his book is devoted to the foot.

Maria Lischnewska, one of the ablest advocates of the methodical enlightenment of children in matters of sex (op. cit.), clearly realizes that a sane attitude towards the body lies at the root of a sound education for life. She finds that the chief objection encountered in such education, as applied in the higher classes of schools, is "the horror of the civilized man at his own body." She shows that there can be no doubt that those who are engaged in the difficult task of working towards the abolition of that superstitious horror have taken up a moral task of the first importance.

Walter Gerhard, in a thoughtful and sensible paper on the educational question ("Ein Kapitel zur Erziehungsfrage," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, vol. i, Heft 2), points out that it is the adult who needs education in this matter—as in so many other matters of sexual enlightenment—considerably more than the child. Parents educate their children from the earliest years in prudery, and vainly flatter themselves that they have thereby promoted their modesty and morality. He records his own early life in a tropical land and accustomed to nakedness from the first. "It was not till I came to Germany when nearly twenty that I learnt that the human body is indecent, and that it must not be shown because that 'would arouse bad impulses.' It was not till the human body was entirely withdrawn from my sight and after I was constantly told that there was something improper behind clothes, that I was able to understand this.... Until then I had not known that a naked body, by the mere fact of being naked, could arouse erotic feelings. I had known erotic feelings, but they had not arisen from the sight of the naked body, but gradually blossomed from the union of our souls." And he draws the final moral that, if only for the sake of our children, we must learn to educate ourselves.

Forel (Die Sexuelle Frage, p. 140), speaking in entirely the same sense as Gerhard, remarks that prudery may be either caused or cured in children. It may be caused by undue anxiety in covering their bodies and hiding from them the bodies of others. It may be cured by making them realize that there is nothing in the body that is unnatural and that we need be ashamed of, and by encouraging bathing of the sexes in common. He points out (p. 512) the advantages of allowing children to be acquainted with the adult forms which they will themselves some day assume, and condemns the conduct of those foolish persons who assume that children already possess the adult's erotic feelings about the body. That is so far from being the case that children are frequently unable to distinguish the sex of other children apart from their clothes.

At the Mannheim Congress of the German Society for Combating Venereal Diseases, specially devoted to sexual hygiene, the speakers constantly referred to the necessity of promoting familiarity with the naked body. Thus Eulenburg and Julian Marcuse (Sexualpädagogik, p. 264) emphasize the importance of air-baths, not only for the sake of the physical health of the young, but in the interests of rational sexual training. Höller, a teacher, speaking at the same congress (op. cit., p. 85), after insisting on familiarity with the nude in art and literature, and protesting against the bowdlerising of poems for the young, continues: "By bathing-drawers ordinances no soul was ever yet saved from moral ruin. One who has learnt to enjoy peacefully the naked in art is only stirred by the naked in nature as by a work of art." Enderlin, another teacher, speaking in the same sense (p. 58), points out that nakedness cannot act sexually or immorally on the child, since the sexual impulse has not yet become pronounced, and the earlier he is introduced to the naked in nature and in art, as a matter of course, the less likely are the sexual feelings to be developed precociously. The child thus, indeed, becomes immune to impure influences, so that later, when representations of the nude are brought before him for the object of provoking his wantonness, they are powerless to injure him. It is important, Enderlin adds, for familiarity with the nude in art to be learnt at school, for most of us, as Siebert remarks, have to learn purity through art.

Nakedness in bathing, remarks Bölsche in his Liebesleben in der Natur (vol. iii, pp. 139 et seq.), we already in some measure possess; we need it in physical exercises, at first for the sexes separately; then, when we have grown accustomed to the idea, occasionally for both sexes together. We need to acquire the capacity to see the bodies of individuals of the other sex with such self-control and such natural instinct that they become non-erotic to us and can be gazed at without erotic feeling. Art, he says, shows that this is possible in civilization. Science, he adds, comes to the aid of the same view.

Ungewitter (Die Nacktheit, p. 57) also advocates boys and girls engaging in play and gymnastics together, entirely naked in air-baths. "In this way," he believes, "the gymnasium would become a school of morality, in which young growing things would be able to retain their purity as long as possible through becoming naturally accustomed to each other. At the same time their bodies would be hardened and developed, and the perception of beautiful and natural forms awakened." To those who have any "moral" doubts on the matter, he mentions the custom in remote country districts of boys and girls bathing together quite naked and without any sexual consciousness. Rudolf Sommer, similarly, in an excellent article entitled "Mädchenerziehung oder Menschenbildung?" (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. i, Heft 3) advises that children should be made accustomed to each other's nakedness from an early age in the family life of the house or the garden, in games, and especially in bathing; he remarks that parents having children of only one sex should cultivate for their children's sake intimate relations with a family having children of like age of the opposite sex, so that they may grow up together.

Stanley Hall, who emphasizes the importance of nakedness, remarks that at puberty we have much reason to assume that in a state of nature there is a certain instinctive pride and ostentation that accompanies the new local development, and quotes the observation of Dr. Seerley that the impulse to conceal the sexual organs is especially marked in young men who are underdeveloped, but not evident in those who are developed beyond the average. Stanley Hall (Adolescence, vol. ii, p. 97), also refers to the frequency with which not only "virtuous young men, but even women, rather glory in occasions when they can display the beauty of their forms without reserve, not only to themselves and to loved ones, but even to others with proper pretexts."

Many have doubtless noted this tendency, especially in women, and chiefly in those who are conscious of beautiful physical development. Madame Céline Renooz believes that the tendency corresponds to a really deep-rooted instinct in women, little or not at all manifested in men who have consequently sought to impose artificially on women their own masculine conceptions of modesty. "In the actual life of the young girl to-day there is a moment when, by a secret atavism, she feels the pride of her sex, the intuition of her moral superiority and cannot understand why she must hide its cause. At this moment, wavering between the laws of Nature and social conventions, she scarcely knows if nakedness should, or should not, affright her. A sort of confused atavistic memory recalls to her a period before clothing was known, and reveals to her as a paradisaical ideal the customs of that human epoch" (Céline Renooz, Psychologie Comparée de l'Homme et de la Femme, pp. 85-87). Perhaps this was obscurely felt by the German girl (mentioned in Kalbeck's Life of Brahms), who said: "One enjoys music twice as much décolletée."

"I was feeling in despair and walking despondently along a Melbourne street," writes the Australian author of a yet unpublished autobiography, "when three children came running out of a lane and crossed the road in full daylight. The beauty and texture of their legs in the open air filled me with joy, so that I forgot all my troubles whilst looking at them. It was a bright revelation, an unexpected glimpse of Paradise, and I have never ceased to thank the happy combination of shape, pure blood, and fine skin of these poverty-stricken children, for the wind seemed to quicken their golden beauty, and I retained the rosy vision of their natural young limbs, so much more divine than those always under cover. Another occasion when naked young limbs made me forget all my gloom and despondency was on my first visit to Adelaide. I came on a naked boy leaning on the railing near the Baths, and the beauty of his face, torso, fair young limbs and exquisite feet filled me with joy and renewed hope. The tears came to my eyes, and I said to myself, 'While there is beauty in the world I will continue to struggle,'"

We must, as Bölsche declares (loc. cit.), accustom ourselves to gaze on the naked human body exactly as we gaze at a beautiful flower, not merely with the pity with which the doctor looks at the body, but with joy in its strength and health and beauty. For a flower, as Bölsche truly adds, is not merely "naked body," it is the most sacred region of the body, the sexual organs of the plant.

"For girls to dance naked," said Hinton, "is the only truly pure form of dancing, and in due time it must therefore come about. This is certain: girls will dance naked and men will be pure enough to gaze on them." It has already been so in Greece, he elsewhere remarks, as it is to-day in Japan (as more recently described by Stratz). It is nearly forty years since these prophetic words were written, but Hinton himself would probably have been surprised at the progress which has already been made slowly (for all true progress must be slow) towards this goal. Even on the stage new and more natural traditions are beginning to prevail in Europe. It is not many years since an English actress regarded as a calumny the statement that she appeared on the stage bare-foot, and brought an action for libel, winning substantial damages. Such a result would scarcely be possible to-day. The movement in which Isadora Duncan was a pioneer has led to a partial disuse among dancers of the offensive device of tights, and it is no longer considered indecorous to show many parts of the body which it was formerly usual to cover.

It should, however, be added at the same time that, while dancers, in so far as they are genuine artists, are entitled to determine the conditions most favorable to their art, nothing whatever is gained for the cause of a wholesome culture of nakedness by the "living statues" and "living pictures" which have obtained an international vogue during recent years. These may be legitimate as variety performances, but they have nothing whatever to do with either Nature or art. Dr. Pudor, writing as one of the earliest apostles of the culture of nakedness, has energetically protested against these performances (Sexual-Probleme, Dec., 1908, p. 828). He rightly points out that nakedness, to be wholesome, requires the open air, the meadows, the sunlight, and that nakedness at night, in a music hall, by artificial light, in the presence of spectators who are themselves clothed, has no element of morality about it. Attempts have here and there been quietly made to cultivate a certain amount of mutual nakedness as between the sexes on remote country excursions. It is significant to find a record of such an experiment in Ungewitter's Die Nacktheit. In this case a party of people, men and women, would regularly every Sunday seek remote spots in woods or meadows where they would settle down, picnic, and enjoy games. "They made themselves as comfortable as possible, the men laying aside their coats, waistcoats, boots and socks; the women their blouses, skirts, shoes and stockings. Gradually, as the moral conception of nakedness developed in their minds, more and more clothing fell away, until the men wore nothing but bathing-drawers and the women only their chemises. In this 'costume' games were carried out in common, and a regular camp-life led. The ladies (some of whom were unmarried) would then lie in hammocks and we men on the grass, and the intercourse was delightful. We felt as members of one family, and behaved accordingly. In an entirely natural and unembarrassed way we gave ourselves up entirely to the liberating feelings aroused by this light- and air-bath, and passed these splendid hours in joyous singing and dancing, in wantonly childish fashion, freed from the burden of a false civilization. It was, of course, necessary to seek spots as remote as possible from high-roads, for fear of being disturbed. At the same time we by no means failed in natural modesty and consideration towards one another. Children, who can be entirely naked, may be allowed to take part in such meetings of adults, and will thus be brought up free from morbid prudery" (R. Ungewitter, Die Nacktheit, p. 58).

No doubt it may be said that the ideal in this matter is the possibility of permitting complete nakedness. This may be admitted, and it is undoubtedly true that our rigid police regulations do much to artificially foster a concealment in this matter which is not based on any natural instinct. Dr. Shufeldt narrates in his Studies of the Human Form that once in the course of a photographic expedition in the woods he came upon two boys, naked except for bathing-drawers, engaged in getting water lilies from a pond. He found them a good subject for his camera, but they could not be induced to remove their drawers, by no means out of either modesty or mock-modesty, but simply because they feared they might possibly be caught and arrested. We have to recognize that at the present day the general popular sentiment is not yet sufficiently educated to allow of public disregard for the convention of covering the sexual centres, and all attempts to extend the bounds of nakedness must show a due regard for this requirement. As concerns women, Valentin Lehr, of Freiburg, in Breisgau, has invented a costume (figured in Ungewitter's Die Nacktheit) which is suitable for either public water-baths or air-baths, because it meets the demand of those whose minimum requirement is that the chief sexual centres of the body should be covered in public, while it is otherwise fairly unobjectionable. It consists of two pieces, made of porous material, one covering the breasts with a band over the shoulders, and the other covering the abdomen below the navel and drawn between the legs. This minimal costume, while neither ideal nor æsthetic, adequately covers the sexual regions of the body, while leaving the arms, waist, hips, and legs entirely free.

"Folk are afraid of such things rousing the passions," Edward Carpenter remarks. "No doubt the things may act that way. But why, we may ask, should people be afraid of rousing passions which, after all, are the great driving forces of human life?" It is true, the same writer continues, our conventional moral formulæ are no longer strong enough to control passion adequately, and that we are generating steam in a boiler that is cankered with rust. "The cure is not to cut off the passions, or to be weakly afraid of them, but to find a new, sound, healthy engine of general morality and common sense within which they will work" (Edward Carpenter, Albany Review, Sept., 1907).

So far as I am aware, however, it was James Hinton who chiefly sought to make clear the possibility of a positive morality on the basis of nakedness, beauty, and sexual influence, regarded as dynamic forces which, when suppressed, make for corruption and when wisely used serve to inspire and ennoble life. He worked out his thoughts on this matter in MSS., written from about 1870 to his death two years later, which, never having been prepared for publication, remain in a fragmentary state and have not been published. I quote a few brief characteristic passages: "Is not," he wrote, "the Hindu refusal to see a woman eating strangely like ours to see one naked? The real sensuality of the thought is visibly identical.... Suppose, because they are delicious to eat, pineapples were forbidden to be seen, except in pictures, and about that there was something dubious. Suppose no one might have sight of a pineapple unless he were rich enough to purchase one for his particular eating, the sight and the eating being so indissolubly joined. What lustfulness would surround them, what constant pruriency, what stealing!... Miss —— told us of her Syrian adventures, and how she went into a wood-carver's shop and he would not look at her; and how she took up a tool and worked, till at last he looked, and they both burst out laughing. Will it not be even so with our looking at women altogether? There will come a work—and at last we shall look up and both burst out laughing.... When men see truly what is amiss, and act with reason and forethought in respect to the sexual relations, will they not insist on the enjoyment of women's beauty by youths, and from the earliest age, that the first feeling may be of beauty? Will they not say, 'We must not allow the false purity, we must have the true.' The false has been tried, and it is not good enough; the power purely to enjoy beauty must be gained; attempting to do with less is fatal. Every instructor of youth shall say: 'This beauty of woman, God's chief work of beauty, it is good you see it; it is a pleasure that serves good; all beauty serves it, and above all this, for its office is to make you pure. Come to it as you come to daily bread, or pure air, or the cleansing bath: this is pure to you if you be pure, it will aid you in your effort to be so. But if any of you are impure, and make of it the feeder of impurity, then you should be ashamed and pray; it is not for you our life can be ordered; it is for men and not for beasts.' This must come when men open their eyes, and act coolly and with reason and forethought, and not in mere panic in respect to the sexual passion in its moral relations."

The Conception of Sexual Love—The Attitude of Mediæval Asceticism—St. Bernard and St. Odo of Cluny—The Ascetic Insistence on the Proximity of the Sexual and Excretory Centres—Love as a Sacrament of Nature—The Idea of the Impurity of Sex in Primitive Religions Generally—Theories of the Origin of This Idea—The Anti-Ascetic Element in the Bible and Early Christianity—Clement of Alexandria—St. Augustine's Attitude—The Recognition of the Sacredness of the Body by Tertullian, Rufinus and Athanasius—The Reformation—The Sexual Instinct regarded as Beastly—The Human Sexual Instinct Not Animal-like—Lust and Love—The Definition of Love—Love and Names for Love Unknown in Some Parts of the World—Romantic Love of Late Development in the White Race—The Mystery of Sexual Desire—Whether Love is a Delusion—The Spiritual as Well as the Physical Structure of the World in Part Built up on Sexual Love—The Testimony of Men of Intellect to the Supremacy of Love.

There thus appears to be no adequate ground for agreeing with those who consider that the proximity of the generative and excretory centres is "a stupid bungle of Nature's." An association which is so ancient and primitive in Nature can only seem repulsive to those whose feelings have become morbidly unnatural. It may further be remarked that the anus, which is the more æsthetically unattractive of the excretory centres, is comparatively remote from the sexual centre, and that, as R. Hellmann remarked many years ago in discussing this question (Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit, p. 82): "In the first place, freshly voided urine has nothing specially unpleasant about it, and in the second place, even if it had, we might reflect that a rosy mouth by no means loses its charm merely because it fails to invite a kiss at the moment when its possessor is vomiting."

A clergyman writes suggesting that we may go further and find a positive advantage in this proximity: "I am glad that you do not agree with the man who considered that Nature had bungled by using the genitals for urinary purposes; apart from teleological or theological grounds I could not follow that line of reasoning. I think there is no need for disgust concerning the urinary organs, though I feel that the anus can never be attractive to the normal mind; but the anus is quite separate from the genitals. I would suggest that the proximity serves a good end in making the organs more or less secret except at times of sexual emotion or to those in love. The result is some degree of repulsion at ordinary times and a strong attraction at times of sexual activity. Hence, the ordinary guarding of the parts, from fear of creating disgust, greatly increases their attractiveness at other times when sexual emotion is paramount. Further, the feeling of disgust itself is merely the result of habit and sentiment, however useful it may be, and according to Scripture everything is clean and good. The ascetic feeling of repulsion, if we go back to origin, is due to other than Christian influence. Christianity came out of Judaism which had no sense of the impurity of marriage, for 'unclean' in the Old Testament simply means 'sacred.' The ascetic side of the religion of Christianity is no part of the religion of Christ as it came from the hands of its Founder, and the modern feeling on this matter is a lingering remnant of the heresy of the Manichæans." I may add, however, that, as Northcote points out (Christianity and Sex Problems, p. 14), side by side in the Old Testament with the frank recognition of sexuality, there is a circle of ideas revealing the feeling of impurity in sex and of shame in connection with it. Christianity inherited this mixed feeling. It has really been a widespread and almost universal feeling among the ancient and primitive peoples that there is something impure and sinful in the things of sex, so that those who would lead a religious life must avoid sexual relationships; even in India celibacy has commanded respect (see, e.g., Westermarck, Marriage, pp. 150 et seq.). As to the original foundation of this notion—which it is unnecessary to discuss more fully here—many theories have been put forward; St. Augustine, in his De Civitate Dei, sets forth the ingenious idea that the penis, being liable to spontaneous movements and erections that are not under the control of the will, is a shameful organ and involves the whole sphere of sex in its shame. Westermarck argues that among nearly all peoples there is a feeling against sexual relationship with members of the same family or household, and as sex was thus banished from the sphere of domestic life a notion of its general impurity arose; Northcote points out that from the first it has been necessary to seek concealment for sexual intercourse, because at that moment the couple would be a prey to hostile attacks, and that it was by an easy transition that sex came to be regarded as a thing that ought to be concealed, and, therefore, a sinful thing. (Diderot, in his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, had already referred to this motive for seclusion as "the only natural element in modesty.") Crawley has devoted a large part of his suggestive work, The Mystic Rose, to showing that, to savage man, sex is a perilous, dangerous, and enfeebling element in life, and, therefore, sinful.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that when we turn from Christianity to the other great world-religions, we do not usually meet with so ambiguous an attitude towards sex. The Mahommedans were as emphatic in asserting the sanctity of sex as they were in asserting physical cleanliness; they were prepared to carry the functions of sex into the future life, and were never worried, as Luther and so many other Christians have been, concerning the lack of occupation in Heaven. In India, although India is the home of the most extreme forms of religious asceticism, sexual love has been sanctified and divinized to a greater extent than in any other part of the world. "It seems never to have entered into the heads of the Hindu legislators," said Sir William Jones long since (Works, vol. ii, p. 311), "that anything natural could be offensively obscene, a singularity which pervades all their writings, but is no proof of the depravity of their morals." The sexual act has often had a religious significance in India, and the minutest details of the sexual life and its variations are discussed in Indian erotic treatises in a spirit of gravity, while nowhere else have the anatomical and physiological sexual characters of women been studied with such minute and adoring reverence. "Love in India, both as regards theory and practice," remarks Richard Schmidt (Beiträge zur Indischen Erotik, p. 2) "possesses an importance which it is impossible for us even to conceive."

While "lust" is, of course, known all over the world, and there are everywhere words to designate it, "love" is not universally known, and in many languages there are no words for "love." The failures to find love are often remarkable and unexpected. We may find it where we least expect it. Sexual desire became idealized (as Sergi has pointed out) even by some animals, especially birds, for when a bird pines to death for the loss of its mate this cannot be due to the uncomplicated instinct of sex, but must involve the interweaving of that instinct with the other elements of life to a degree which is rare even among the most civilized men. Some savage races seem to have no fundamental notion of love, and (like the American Nahuas) no primary word for it, while, on the other hand, in Quichua, the language of the ancient Peruvians, there are nearly six hundred combinations of the verb munay, to love. Among some peoples love seems to be confined to the women. Letourneau (L'Evolution Littéraire, p. 529) points out that in various parts of the world women have taken a leading part in creating erotic poetry. It may be mentioned in this connection that suicide from erotic motives among primitive peoples occurs chiefly among women (Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft, 1899, p. 578). Not a few savages possess love-poems, as, for instance, the Suahali (Velten, in his Prosa und Poesie der Suahali, devotes a section to love-poems reproduced in the Suahali language). D. G. Brinton, in an interesting paper on "The Conception of Love in Some American Languages" (Proceedings American Philosophical Society, vol. xxiii, p. 546, 1886) states that the words for love in these languages reveal four main ways of expressing the conception: (1) inarticulate cries of emotion; (2) assertions of sameness or similarity; (3) assertions of conjunction or union; (4) assertions of a wish, desire, a longing. Brinton adds that "these same notions are those which underlie the majority of the words of love in the great Aryan family of languages." The remarkable fact emerges, however, that the peoples of Aryan tongue were slow in developing their conception of sexual love. Brinton remarks that the American Mayas must be placed above the peoples of early Aryan culture, in that they possessed a radical word for the joy of love which was in significance purely psychical, referring strictly to a mental state, and neither to similarity nor desire. Even the Greeks were late in developing any ideal of sexual love. This has been well brought out by E. F. M. Benecke in his Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry, a book which contains some hazardous assertions, but is highly instructive from the present point of view. The Greek lyric poets wrote practically no love poems at all to women before Anacreon, and his were only written in old age. True love for the Greeks was nearly always homosexual. The Ionian lyric poets of early Greece regarded woman as only an instrument of pleasure and the founder of the family. Theognis compares marriage to cattle-breeding; Alcman, when he wishes to be complimentary to the Spartan girls, speaks of them as his "female boy-friends." Æschylus makes even a father assume that his daughters will misbehave if left to themselves. There is no sexual love in Sophocles, and in Euripides it is only the women who fall in love. Benecke concludes (p. 67) that in Greece sexual love, down to a comparatively later period, was looked down on, and held to be unworthy of public discussion and representation. It was in Magna Græcia rather than in Greece itself that men took interest in women, and it was not until the Alexandrian period, and notably in Asclepiades, Benecke maintains, that the love of women was regarded as a matter of life and death. Thereafter the conception of sexual love, in its romantic aspects, appears in European life. With the Celtic story of Tristram, as Gaston Paris remarks, it finally appears in the Christian European world of poetry as the chief point in human life, the great motive force of conduct.

Romantic love failed, however, to penetrate the masses in Europe. In the sixteenth century, or whenever it was that the ballad of "Glasgerion" was written, we see it is assumed that a churl's relation to his mistress is confined to the mere act of sexual intercourse; he fails to kiss her on arriving or departing; it is only the knight, the man of upper class, who would think of offering that tender civility. And at the present day in, for instance, the region between East Friesland and the Alps, Bloch states (Sexualleben unserer Zeit, p. 29), following E. H. Meyer, that the word "love" is unknown among the masses, and only its coarse counterpart recognized.

On the other side of the world, in Japan, sexual love seems to be in as great disrepute as it was in ancient Greece; thus Miss Tsuda, a Japanese head-mistress, and herself a Christian, remarks (as quoted by Mrs. Eraser in World's Work and Play, Dec., 1906): "That word 'love' has been hitherto a word unknown among our girls, in the foreign sense. Duty, submission, kindness—these were the sentiments which a girl was expected to bring to the husband who had been chosen for her—and many happy, harmonious marriages were the result. Now, your dear sentimental foreign women say to our girls: 'It is wicked to marry without love; the obedience to parents in such a case is an outrage against nature and Christianity. If you love a man you must sacrifice everything to marry him.'"

When, however, love is fully developed it becomes an enormously extended, highly complex emotion, and lust, even in the best sense of that word, becomes merely a coördinated element among many other elements. Herbert Spencer, in an interesting passage of his Principles of Psychology (Part IV, Ch. VIII), has analyzed love into as many as nine distinct and important elements: (1) the physical impulse of sex; (2) the feeling for beauty; (3) affection; (4) admiration and respect; (5) love of approbation; (6) self-esteem; (7) proprietary feeling; (8) extended liberty of action from the absence of personal barriers; (9) exaltation of the sympathies. "This passion," he concludes, "fuses into one immense aggregate most of the elementary excitations of which we are capable."

Some writers seem to confuse the liability in matters of love to deception or disappointment with the larger question of a metaphysical illusion in Schopenhauer's sense. To some extent this confusion perhaps exists in the discussion of love by Renouvier and Prat in La Nouvelle Monadologie (pp. 216 et seq.). In considering whether love is or is not a delusion, they answer that it is or is not according as we are, or are not, dominated by selfishness and injustice. "It was not an essential error which presided over the creation of the idol, for the idol is only what in all things the ideal is. But to realize the ideal in love two persons are needed, and therein is the great difficulty. We are never justified," they conclude, "in casting contempt on our love, or even on its object, for if it is true that we have not gained possession of the sovereign beauty of the world it is equally true that we have not attained a degree of perfection that would have entitled us justly to claim so great a prize." And perhaps most of us, it may be added, must admit in the end, if we are honest with ourselves, that the prizes of love we have gained in the world, whatever their flaws, are far greater than we deserved.

It is unnecessary here to magnify the functions of love in the world; it is sufficient to investigate its workings in its own proper sphere. It may, however, be worth while to quote a few expressions of thinkers, belonging to various schools, who have pointed out what seemed to them the far-ranging significance of the sexual emotions for the moral life. "The passions are the heavenly fire which gives life to the moral world," wrote Helvétius long since in De l'Esprit. "The activity of the mind depends on the activity of the passions, and it is at the period of the passions, from the age of twenty-five to thirty-five or forty that men are capable of the greatest efforts of virtue or of genius." "What touches sex," wrote Zola, "touches the centre of social life." Even our regard for the praise and blame of others has a sexual origin, Professor Thomas argues (Psychological Review, Jan., 1904, pp. 61-67), and it is love which is the source of susceptibility generally and of the altruistic side of life. "The appearance of sex," Professor Woods Hutchinson attempts to show ("Love as a Factor in Evolution," Monist, 1898), "the development of maleness and femaleness, was not only the birthplace of affection, the well-spring of all morality, but an enormous economic advantage to the race and an absolute necessity of progress. In it first we find any conscious longing for or active impulse toward a fellow creature." "Were man robbed of the instinct of procreation, and of all that spiritually springs therefrom," exclaimed Maudsley in his Physiology of Mind, "that moment would all poetry, and perhaps also his whole moral sense, be obliterated from his life." "One seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more complete; one is more complete," says Nietzsche (Der Wille zur Macht, p. 389), "we find here art as an organic function: we find it inlaid in the most angelic instinct of 'love:' we find it as the greatest stimulant of life.... It is not merely that it changes the feeling of values: the lover is worth more, is stronger. In animals this condition produces new weapons, pigments, colors, and forms, above all new movements, new rhythms, a new seductive music. It is not otherwise in man.... Even in art the door is opened to him. If we subtract from lyrical work in words and sounds the suggestions of that intestinal fever, what is left over in poetry and music? L'Art pour l'art perhaps, the quacking virtuosity of cold frogs who perish in their marsh. All the rest is created by love."

It would be easy to multiply citations tending to show how many diverse thinkers have come to the conclusion that sexual love (including therewith parental and especially maternal love) is the source of the chief manifestations of life. How far they are justified in that conclusion, it is not our business now to inquire.

Chastity Essential to the Dignity of Love—The Eighteenth Century Revolt Against the Ideal of Chastity—Unnatural Forms of Chastity—The Psychological Basis of Asceticism—Asceticism and Chastity as Savage Virtues—The Significance of Tahiti—Chastity Among Barbarous Peoples—Chastity Among the Early Christians—Struggles of the Saints with the Flesh—The Romance of Christian Chastity—Its Decay in Mediæval Times—Aucassin et Nicolette and the new Romance of Chaste Love—The Unchastity of the Northern Barbarians—The Penitentials—Influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation—The Revolt Against Virginity as a Virtue—The Modern Conception of Chastity as a Virtue—The Influences That Favor the Virtue of Chastity—Chastity as a Discipline—The Value of Chastity for the Artist—Potency and Impotence in Popular Estimation—The Correct Definitions of Asceticism and Chastity.

Thus C. Hill Tout (Journal Anthropological Institute, Jan.-June, 1905, pp. 143-145) gives an interesting account of the self-discipline undergone by those among the Salish Indians of British Columbia, who seek to acquire shamanistic powers. The psychic effects of such training on these men, says Hill Tout, is undoubted. "It enables them to undertake and accomplish feats of abnormal strength, agility, and endurance; and gives them at times, besides a general exaltation of the senses, undoubted clairvoyant and other supernormal mental and bodily powers." At the other end of the world, as shown by the Reports of the Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (vol. v, p. 321), closely analogous methods of obtaining supernatural powers are also customary.

There are fundamental psychological reasons for the wide prevalence of asceticism and for the remarkable manner in which it involves self-mortification, even acute physical suffering. Such pain is an actual psychic stimulant, more especially in slightly neurotic persons. This is well illustrated by a young woman, a patient of Janet's, who suffered from mental depression and was accustomed to find relief by slightly burning her hands and feet. She herself clearly understood the nature of her actions. "I feel," she said, "that I make an effort when I hold my hands on the stove, or when I pour boiling water on my feet; it is a violent act and it awakens me: I feel that it is really done by myself and not by another.... To make a mental effort by itself is too difficult for me; I have to supplement it by physical efforts. I have not succeeded in any other way; that is all: when I brace myself up to burn myself I make my mind freer, lighter and more active for several days. Why do you speak of my desire for mortification? My parents believe that, but it is absurd. It would be a mortification if it brought any suffering, but I enjoy this suffering, it gives me back my mind; it prevents my thoughts from stopping: what would one not do to attain such happiness?" (P. Janet, "The Pathogenesis of Some Impulsions," Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April, 1906.) If we understand this psychological process we may realize how it is that even in the higher religions, however else they may differ, the practical value of asceticism and mortification as the necessary door to the most exalted religious state is almost universally recognized, and with complete cheerfulness. "Asceticism and ecstacy are inseparable," as Probst-Biraben remarks at the outset of an interesting paper on Mahommedan mysticism ("L'Extase dans le Mysticisme Musulman," Revue Philosophique, Nov., 1906). Asceticism is the necessary ante-chamber to spiritual perfection.

In considering the moral quality of chastity among savages, we must carefully separate that chastity which among semi-primitive peoples is exclusively imposed upon women. This has no moral quality whatever, for it is not exercised as a useful discipline, but merely enforced in order to heighten the economic and erotic value of the women. Many authorities believe that the regard for women as property furnishes the true reason for the widespread insistence on virginity in brides. Thus A. B. Ellis, speaking of the West Coast of Africa (Yoruba-Speaking Peoples, pp. 183 et seq.), says that girls of good class are betrothed as mere children, and are carefully guarded from men, while girls of lower class are seldom betrothed, and may lead any life they choose. "In this custom of infant or child betrothals we probably find the key to that curious regard for ante-nuptial chastity found not only among the tribes of the Gold and Slave Coasts, but also among many other uncivilized peoples in different parts of the world." In a very different part of the world, in Northern Siberia, "the Yakuts," Sieroshevski states (Journal Anthropological Institute, Jan.-June, 1901, p. 96), "see nothing immoral in illicit love, providing only that nobody suffers material loss by it. It is true that parents will scold a daughter if her conduct threatens to deprive them of their gain from the bride-price; but if once they have lost hope of marrying her off, or if the bride-price has been spent, they manifest complete indifference to her conduct. Maidens who no longer expect marriage are not restrained at all, if they observe decorum it is only out of respect to custom." Westermarck (History of Human Marriage, pp. 123 et seq.) also shows the connection between the high estimates of virginity and the conception of woman as property, and returning to the question in his later work, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (vol. ii, Ch. XLII), after pointing out that "marriage by purchase has thus raised the standard of female chastity," he refers (p. 437) to the significant fact that the seduction of an unmarried girl "is chiefly, if not exclusively, regarded as an offense against the parents or family of the girl," and there is no indication that it is ever held by savages that any wrong has been done to the woman herself. Westermarck recognizes at the same time that the preference given to virgins has also a biological basis in the instinctive masculine feeling of jealousy in regard to women who have had intercourse with other men, and especially in the erotic charm for men of the emotional state of shyness which accompanies virginity. (This point has been dealt with in the discussion of Modesty in vol. i of these Studies.)

It is scarcely necessary to add that the insistence on the virginity of brides is by no means confined, as A. B. Ellis seems to imply, to uncivilized peoples, nor is it necessary that wife-purchase should always accompany it. The preference still persists, not only by virtue of its natural biological basis, but as a refinement and extension of the idea of woman as property, among those civilized peoples who, like ourselves, inherit a form of marriage to some extent based on wife-purchase. Under such conditions a woman's chastity has an important social function to perform, being, as Mrs. Mona Caird has put it (The Morality of Marriage, 1897, p. 88), the watch-dog of man's property. The fact that no element of ideal morality enters into the question is shown by the usual absence of any demand for ante-nuptial chastity in the husband.

It must not be supposed that when, as is most usually the case, there is no complete and permanent prohibition of extra-nuptial intercourse, mere unrestrained license prevails. That has probably never happened anywhere among uncontaminated savages. The rule probably is that, as among the tribes at Torres Straits (Reports Cambridge Anthropological Expedition, vol. v, p. 275), there is no complete continence before marriage, but neither is there any unbridled license.

The example of Tahiti is instructive as regards the prevalence of chastity among peoples of what we generally consider low grades of civilization. Tahiti, according to all who have visited it, from the earliest explorers down to that distinguished American surgeon, the late Dr. Nicholas Senn, is an island possessing qualities of natural beauty and climatic excellence, which it is impossible to rate too highly. "I seemed to be transported into the garden of Eden," said Bougainville in 1768. But, mainly under the influence of the early English missionaries who held ideas of theoretical morality totally alien to those of the inhabitants of the islands, the Tahitians have become the stock example of a population given over to licentiousness and all its awful results. Thus, in his valuable Polynesian Researches (second edition, 1832, vol. i, Ch. IX) William Ellis says that the Tahitians practiced "the worst pollutions of which it was possible for man to be guilty," though not specifying them. When, however, we carefully examine the narratives of the early visitors to Tahiti, before the population became contaminated by contact with Europeans, it becomes clear that this view needs serious modification. "The great plenty of good and nourishing food," wrote an early explorer, J. R. Forster (Observations Made on a Voyage Round the World, 1778, pp. 231, 409, 422), "together with the fine climate, the beauty and unreserved behavior of their females, invite them powerfully to the enjoyments and pleasures of love. They begin very early to abandon themselves to the most libidinous scenes. Their songs, their dances, and dramatic performances, breathe a spirit of luxury." Yet he is over and over again impelled to set down facts which bear testimony to the virtues of these people. Though rather effeminate in build, they are athletic, he says. Moreover, in their wars they fight with great bravery and valor. They are, for the rest, hospitable. He remarks that they treat their married women with great respect, and that women generally are nearly the equals of men, both in intelligence and in social position; he gives a charming description of the women. "In short, their character," Forster concludes, "is as amiable as that of any nation that ever came unimproved out of the hands of Nature," and he remarks that, as was felt by the South Sea peoples generally, "whenever we came to this happy island we could evidently perceive the opulence and happiness of its inhabitants." It is noteworthy also, that, notwithstanding the high importance which the Tahitians attached to the erotic side of life, they were not deficient in regard for chastity. When Cook, who visited Tahiti many times, was among "this benevolent humane" people, he noted their esteem for chastity, and found that not only were betrothed girls strictly guarded before marriage, but that men also who had refrained from sexual intercourse for some time before marriage were believed to pass at death immediately into the abode of the blessed. "Their behavior, on all occasions, seems to indicate a great openness and generosity of disposition. I never saw them, in any misfortune, labor under the appearance of anxiety, after the critical moment was past. Neither does care ever seem to wrinkle their brow. On the contrary, even the approach of death does not appear to alter their usual vivacity" (Third Voyage of Discovery, 1776-1780). Turnbull visited Tahiti at a later period (A Voyage Round the World in 1800, etc., pp. 374-5), but while finding all sorts of vices among them, he is yet compelled to admit their virtues: "Their manner of addressing strangers, from the king to the meanest subject, is courteous and affable in the extreme.... They certainly live amongst each other in more harmony than is usual amongst Europeans. During the whole time I was amongst them I never saw such a thing as a battle.... I never remember to have seen an Otaheitean out of temper. They jest upon each other with greater freedom than the Europeans, but these jests are never taken in ill part.... With regard to food, it is, I believe, an invariable law in Otaheite that whatever is possessed by one is common to all." Thus we see that even among a people who are commonly referred to as the supreme example of a nation given up to uncontrolled licentiousness, the claims of chastity were admitted, and many other virtues vigorously flourished. The Tahitians were brave, hospitable, self-controlled, courteous, considerate to the needs of others, chivalrous to women, even appreciative of the advantages of sexual restraint, to an extent which has rarely, if ever, been known among those Christian nations which have looked down upon them as abandoned to unspeakable vices.

"Oh, how many times," wrote St. Jerome to Eustochium, the virgin to whom he addressed one of the longest and most interesting of his letters, "when in the desert, in that vast solitude which, burnt up by the heart of the sun, offers but a horrible dwelling to monks, I imagined myself among the delights of Rome! I was alone, for my soul was full of bitterness. My limbs were covered by a wretched sack and my skin was as black as an Ethiopian's. Every day I wept and groaned, and if I was unwillingly overcome by sleep my lean body lay on the bare earth. I say nothing of my food and drink, for in the desert even invalids have no drink but cold water, and cooked food is regarded as a luxury. Well, I, who, out of fear of hell, had condemned myself to this prison, companion of scorpions and wild beasts, often seemed in imagination among bands of girls. My face was pale with fasting and my mind within my frigid body was burning with desire; the fires of lust would still flare up in a body that already seemed to be dead. Then, deprived of all help, I threw myself at the feet of Jesus, washing them with my tears and drying them with my hair, subjugating my rebellious flesh by long fasts. I remember that more than once I passed the night uttering cries and striking my breast until God sent me peace." "Our century," wrote St. Chrysostom in his Discourse to Those Who Keep Virgins in Their Houses, "has seen many men who have bound their bodies with chains, clothed themselves in sacks, retired to the summits of mountains where they have lived in constant vigil and fasting, giving the example of the most austere discipline and forbidding all women to cross the thresholds of their humble dwellings; and yet, in spite of all the severities they have exercised on themselves, it was with difficulty they could repress the fury of their passions." Hilarion, says Jerome, saw visions of naked women when he lay down on his solitary couch and delicious meats when he sat down to his frugal table. Such experiences rendered the early saints very scrupulous. "They used to say," we are told in an interesting history of the Egyptian anchorites, Palladius's Paradise of the Holy Fathers, belonging to the fourth century (A. W. Budge, The Paradise, vol. ii, p. 129), "that Abbâ Isaac went out and found the footprint of a woman on the road, and he thought about it in his mind and destroyed it saying, 'If a brother seeth it he may fall.'" Similarly, according to the rules of St. Cæsarius of Aries for nuns, no male clothing was to be taken into the convent for the purpose of washing or mending. Even in old age, a certain anxiety about chastity still remained. One of the brothers, we are told in The Paradise (p. 132) said to Abbâ Zeno, "Behold thou hast grown old, how is the matter of fornication?" The venerable saint replied, "It knocketh, but it passeth on."

As the centuries went by the same strenuous anxiety to guard chastity still remained, and the old struggle constantly reappeared (see, e.g., Migne's Dictionnaire d'Ascétisme, art. "Démon, Tentation du"). Some saints, it is true, like Luigi di Gonzaga, were so angelically natured that they never felt the sting of sexual desire. These seem to have been the exception. St. Benedict and St. Francis experienced the difficulty of subduing the flesh. St. Magdalena de Pozzi, in order to dispel sexual desires, would roll on thorny bushes till the blood came. Some saints kept a special cask of cold water in their cells to stand in (Lea, Sacerdotal Celibacy, vol. i, p. 124). On the other hand, the Blessed Angela de Fulginio tells us in her Visiones (cap. XIX) that, until forbidden by her confessor, she would place hot coals in her secret parts, hoping by material fire to extinguish the fire of concupiscence. St. Aldhelm, the holy Bishop of Sherborne, in the eighth century, also adopted a homeopathic method of treatment, though of a more literal kind, for William of Malmsbury states that when tempted by the flesh he would have women to sit and lie by him until he grew calm again; the method proved very successful, for the reason, it was thought, that the Devil felt he had been made a fool of.

In time the Catholic practice and theory of asceticism became more formalized and elaborated, and its beneficial effects were held to extend beyond the individual himself. "Asceticism from the Christian point of view," writes Brénier de Montmorand in an interesting study ("Ascétisme et Mysticisme," Revue Philosophique, March, 1904) "is nothing else than all the therapeutic measures making for moral purification. The Christian ascetic is an athlete struggling to transform his corrupt nature and make a road to God through the obstacles due to his passions and the world. He is not working in his own interests alone, but—by virtue of the reversibility of merit which compensates that of solidarity in error—for the good and for the salvation of the whole of society."

Thekla's day is the twenty-third of September. There is a very good Syriac version (by Lipsius and others regarded as more primitive than the Greek version) of the Acts of Paul and Thekla (see, e.g., Wright's Apocryphal Acts). These Acts belong to the latter part of the second century. The story is that Thekla, refusing to yield to the passion of the high priest of Syria, was put, naked but for a girdle (subligaculum) into the arena on the back of a lioness, which licked her feet and fought for her against the other beasts, dying in her defense. The other beasts, however, did her no harm, and she was finally released. A queen loaded her with money, she modified her dress to look like a man, travelled to meet Paul, and lived to old age. Sir W. M. Ramsay has written an interesting study of these Acts (The Church in the Roman Empire, Ch. XVI). He is of opinion that the Acts are based on a first century document, and is able to disentangle many elements of truth from the story. He states that it is the only evidence we possess of the ideas and actions of women during the first century in Asia Minor, where their position was so high and their influence so great. Thekla represents the assertion of woman's rights, and she administered the rite of baptism, though in the existing versions of the Acts these features are toned down or eliminated.

Some of the most typical of these early Christian romances are described as Gnostical in origin, with something of the germs of Manichæan dualism which were held in the rich and complex matrix of Gnosticism, while the spirit of these romances is also largely Montanist, with the combined chastity and ardor, the pronounced feminine tone due to its origin in Asia Minor, which marked Montanism. It cannot be denied, however, that they largely passed into the main stream of Christian tradition, and form an essential and important part of that tradition. (Renan, in his Marc-Aurèle, Chs. IX and XV, insists on the immense debt of Christianity to Gnostic and Montanist contributions). A characteristic example is the story of "The Betrothed of India" in Judas Thomas's Acts (Wright's Apocryphal Acts). Judas Thomas was sold by his master Jesus to an Indian merchant who required a carpenter to go with him to India. On disembarking at the city of Sandaruk they heard the sounds of music and singing, and learnt that it was the wedding-feast of the King's daughter, which all must attend, rich and poor, slaves and freemen, strangers and citizens. Judas Thomas went, with his new master, to the banquet and reclined with a garland of myrtle placed on his head. When a Hebrew flute-player came and stood over him and played, he sang the songs of Christ, and it was seen that he was more beautiful than all that were there and the King sent for him to bless the young couple in the bridal chamber. And when all were gone out and the door of the bridal chamber closed, the bridegroom approached the bride, and saw, as it were, Judas Thomas still talking with her. But it was our Lord who said to him, "I am not Judas, but his brother." And our Lord sat down on the bed beside the young people and began to say to them: "Remember, my children, what my brother spake with you, and know to whom he committed you, and know that if ye preserve yourselves from this filthy intercourse ye become pure temples, and are saved from afflictions manifest and hidden, and from the heavy care of children, the end whereof is bitter sorrow. For their sakes ye will become oppressors and robbers, and ye will be grievously tortured for their injuries. For children are the cause of many pains; either the King falls upon them or a demon lays hold of them, or paralysis befalls them. And if they be healthy they come to ill, either by adultery, or theft, or fornication, or covetousness, or vain-glory. But if ye will be persuaded by me, and keep yourselves purely unto God, ye shall have living children to whom not one of these blemishes and hurts cometh nigh; and ye shall be without care and without grief and without sorrow, and ye shall hope for the time when ye shall see the true wedding-feast." The young couple were persuaded, and refrained from lust, and our Lord vanished. And in the morning, when it was dawn, the King had the table furnished early and brought in before the bridegroom and bride. And he found them sitting the one opposite the other, and the face of the bride was uncovered and the bridegroom was very cheerful. The mother of the bride saith to her: "Why art thou sitting thus, and art not ashamed, but art as if, lo, thou wert married a long time, and for many a day?" And her father, too, said; "Is it thy great love for thy husband that prevents thee from even veiling thyself?" And the bride answered and said: "Truly, my father, I am in great love, and am praying to my Lord that I may continue in this love which I have experienced this night. I am not veiled, because the veil of corruption is taken from me, and I am not ashamed, because the deed of shame has been removed far from me, and I am cheerful and gay, and despise this deed of corruption and the joys of this wedding-feast, because I am invited to the true wedding-feast. I have not had intercourse with a husband, the end whereof is bitter repentance, because I am betrothed to the true Husband." The bridegroom answered also in the same spirit, very naturally to the dismay of the King, who sent for the sorcerer whom he had asked to bless his unlucky daughter. But Judas Thomas had already left the city and at his inn the King's stewards found only the flute-player, sitting and weeping because he had not taken her with him. She was glad, however, when she heard what had happened, and hastened to the young couple, and lived with them ever afterwards. The King also was finally reconciled, and all ended chastely, but happily.

In these same Judas Thomas's Acts, which are not later than the fourth century, we find (eighth act) the story of Mygdonia and Karish. Mygdonia, the wife of Karish, is converted by Thomas and flees from her husband, naked save for the curtain of the chamber door which she has wrapped around her, to her old nurse. With the nurse she goes to Thomas, who pours holy oil over her head, bidding the nurse to anoint her all over with it; then a cloth is put round her loins and he baptizes her; then she is clothed and he gives her the sacrament. The young rapture of chastity grows lyrical at times, and Judas Thomas breaks out: "Purity is the athlete who is not overcome. Purity is the truth that blencheth not. Purity is worthy before God of being to Him a familiar handmaiden. Purity is the messenger of concord which bringeth the tidings of peace."

Another romance of chastity is furnished by the episode of Drusiana in The History of the Apostles traditionally attributed to Abdias, Bishop of Babylon (Bk. v, Ch. IV, et seq.). Drusiana is the wife of Andronicus, and is so pious that she will not have intercourse with him. The youth Callimachus falls madly in love with her, and his amorous attempts involve many exciting adventures, but the chastity of Drusiana is finally triumphant.

A characteristic example of the literature we are here concerned with is St. Ambrose's story of "The Virgin in the Brothel" (narrated in his De Virginibus, Migne's edition of Ambrose's Works, vols. iii-iv, p. 211). A certain virgin, St. Ambrose tells us, who lately lived at Antioch, was condemned either to sacrifice to the gods or to go to the brothel. She chose the latter alternative. But the first man who came in to her was a Christian soldier who called her "sister," and bade her have no fear. He proposed that they should exchange clothes. This was done and she escaped, while the soldier was led away to death. At the place of execution, however, she ran up and exclaimed that it was not death she feared but shame. He, however, maintained that he had been condemned to death in her place. Finally the crown of martyrdom for which they contended was adjudged to both.

We constantly observe in the early documents of this romantic literature of chastity that chastity is insisted on by no means chiefly because of its rewards after death, nor even because the virgin who devotes herself to it secures in Christ an ever-young lover whose golden-haired beauty is sometimes emphasized. Its chief charm is represented as lying in its own joy and freedom and the security it involves from all the troubles, inconveniences and bondages of matrimony. This early Christian movement of romantic chastity was clearly, in large measure, a revolt of women against men and marriage. This is well brought out in the instructive story, supposed to be of third century origin, of the eunuchs Achilleus and Nereus, as narrated in the Acta Sanctorum, May 12th. Achilleus and Nereus were Christian eunuchs of the bedchamber to Domitia, a virgin of noble birth, related to the Emperor Domitian and betrothed to Aurelian, son of a Consul. One day, as their mistress was putting on her jewels and her purple garments embroidered with gold, they began in turn to talk to her about all the joys and advantages of virginity, as compared to marriage with a mere man. The conversation is developed at great length and with much eloquence. Domitia was finally persuaded. She suffered much from Aurelian in consequence, and when he obtained her banishment to an island she went thither with Achilleus and Nereus, who were put to death. Incidentally, the death of Felicula, another heroine of chastity, is described. When elevated on the rack because she would not marry, she constantly refused to deny Jesus, whom she called her lover. "Ego non nego amatorem meum!"

A special department of this literature is concerned with stories of the conversions or the penitence of courtesans. St. Martinianus, for instance (Feb. 13), was tempted by the courtesan Zoe, but converted her. The story of St. Margaret of Cortona (Feb. 22), a penitent courtesan, is late, for she belongs to the thirteenth century. The most delightful document in this literature is probably the latest, the fourteenth century Italian devotional romance called The Life of Saint Mary Magdalen, commonly associated with the name of Frate Domenico Cavalca. (It has been translated into English). It is the delicately and deliciously told romance of the chaste and passionate love of the sweet sinner, Mary Magdalene, for her beloved Master.

As time went on the insistence on the joys of chastity in this life became less marked, and chastity is more and more regarded as a state only to be fully rewarded in a future life. Even, however, in Gregory of Tours's charming story of "The Two Lovers of Auvergne," in which this attitude is clear, the pleasures of chaste love in this life are brought out as clearly as in any of the early romances (Historia Francorum, lib. i, cap. XLII). Two senators of Auvergne each had an only child, and they betrothed them to each other. When the wedding day came and the young couple were placed in bed, the bride turned to the wall and wept bitterly. The bridegroom implored her to tell him what was the matter, and, turning towards him, she said that if she were to weep all her days she could never wash away her grief for she had resolved to give her little body immaculate to Christ, untouched by men, and now instead of immortal roses she had only had on her brow faded roses, which deformed rather than adorned it, and instead of the dowry of Paradise which Christ had promised her she had become the consort of a merely mortal man. She deplored her sad fate at considerable length and with much gentle eloquence. At length the bridegroom, overcome by her sweet words, felt that eternal life had shone before him like a great light, and declared that if she wished to abstain from carnal desires he was of the same mind. She was grateful, and with clasped hands they fell asleep. For many years they thus lived together, chastely sharing the same bed. At length she died and was buried, her lover restoring her immaculate to the hands of Christ. Soon afterwards he died also, and was placed in a separate tomb. Then a miracle happened which made manifest the magnitude of this chaste love, for the two bodies were found mysteriously placed together. To this day, Gregory concludes (writing in the sixth century), the people of the place call them "The Two Lovers."

Although Renan (Marc-Aurèle, Ch. XV) briefly called attention to the existence of this copious early Christian literature setting forth the romance of chastity, it seems as yet to have received little or no study. It is, however, of considerable importance, not merely for its own sake, but on account of its psychological significance in making clear the nature of the motive forces which made chastity easy and charming to the people of the early Christian world, even when it involved complete abstinence from sexual intercourse. The early Church anathematized the eroticism of the Pagan world, and exorcized it in the most effectual way by setting up a new and more exquisite eroticism of its own.

Robert of Arbrissel, who founded, in the eleventh century, the famous and distinguished Order of Fontevrault for women, was a Breton. This Celtic origin is doubtless significant, for it may explain his unfailing ardor and gaiety, and his enthusiastic veneration for womanhood. Even those of his friends who deprecated what they considered his scandalous conduct bear testimony to his unfailing and cheerful temperament, his alertness in action, his readiness for any deed of humanity, and his entire freedom from severity. He attracted immense crowds of people of all conditions, especially women, including prostitutes, and his influence over women was great. Once he went into a brothel to warm his feet, and, incidentally, converted all the women there. "Who are you?" asked one of them, "I have been here twenty-five years and nobody has ever come here to talk about God." Robert's relation with his nuns at Fontevrault was very intimate, and he would often sleep with them. This is set forth precisely in letters written by friends of his, bishops and abbots, one of whom remarks that Robert had "discovered a new but fruitless form of martyrdom." A royal abbess of Fontevrault in the seventeenth century, pretending that the venerated founder of the order could not possibly have been guilty of such scandalous conduct, and that the letters must therefore be spurious, had the originals destroyed, so far as possible. The Bollandists, in an unscholarly and incomplete account of the matter (Acta Sanctorum, Feb. 25), adopted this view. J. von Walter, however, in a recent and thorough study of Robert of Arbrissel (Die Ersten Wanderprediger Frankreichs, Theil I), shows that there is no reason whatever to doubt the authentic and reliable character of the impugned letters.

The Penitentials began to come into use in the seventh century, and became of wide prevalence and authority during the ninth and tenth centuries. They were bodies of law, partly spiritual and partly secular, and were thrown into the form of catalogues of offences with the exact measure of penance prescribed for each offence. They represented the introduction of social order among untamed barbarians, and were codes of criminal law much more than part of a system of sacramental confession and penance. In France and Spain, where order on a Christian basis already existed, they were little needed. They had their origin in Ireland and England, and especially flourished in Germany; Charlemagne supported them (see, e.g., Lea, History of Auricular Confession, vol. ii, p. 96, also Ch. XVII; Hugh Williams, edition of Gildas, Part II, Appendix 3; the chief Penitentials are reproduced in Wasserschleben's Bussordnungen).

In 1216 the Lateran Council, under Innocent III, made confession obligatory. The priestly prerogative of regulating the amount of penance according to circumstances, with greater flexibility than the rigid Penitentials admitted, was first absolutely asserted by Peter of Poitiers. Then Alain de Lille threw aside the Penitentials as obsolete, and declared that the priest himself must inquire into the circumstances of each sin and weigh precisely its guilt (Lea, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 171).

Long before this period, however, the ideals of chastity, so far as they involved any considerable degree of continence, although they had become firmly hardened into the conventional traditions and ideals of the Christian Church, had ceased to have any great charm or force for the people living in Christendom. Among the Northern barbarians, with different traditions of a more vigorous and natural order behind them, the demands of sex were often frankly exhibited. The monk Ordericus Vitalis, in the eleventh century, notes what he calls the "lasciviousness" of the wives of the Norman conquerors of England who, when left alone at home, sent messages that if their husbands failed to return speedily they would take new ones. The celibacy of the clergy was only established with the very greatest difficulty, and when it was established, priests became unchaste. Archbishop Odo of Rouen, in the thirteenth century, recorded in the diary of his diocesan visitations that there was one unchaste priest in every five parishes, and even as regards the Italy of the same period the friar Salimbene in his remarkable autobiography shows how little chastity was regarded in the religious life. Chastity could now only be maintained by force, usually the moral force of ecclesiastical authority, which was itself undermined by unchastity, but sometimes even physical force. It was in the thirteenth century, in the opinion of some, that the girdle of chastity (cingula castitatis) first begins to appear, but the chief authority, Caufeynon (La Ceinture de Chasteté, 1904) believes it only dates from the Renaissance (Schultz, Das Höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesänger, vol. i, p. 595; Dufour, Histoire de la Prostitution, vol. v, p. 272; Krauss, Anthropophyteia, vol. iii, p. 247). In the sixteenth century convents were liable to become almost brothels, as we learn on the unimpeachable authority of Burchard, a Pope's secretary, in his Diarium, edited by Thuasne who brings together additional authorities for this statement in a footnote (vol. ii, p. 79); that they remained so in the eighteenth century we see clearly in the pages of Casanova's Mémoires, and in many other documents of the period.

A little later this doctrine was repeated in varying tones by many writers more or less tinged by the culture brought into fashion by the Renaissance. "As long as Danae was free," remarks Ferrand in his sixteenth century treatise, De la Maladie d'Amour, "she was chaste." And Sir Kenelm Digby, the latest representative of the Renaissance spirit, insists in his Private Memoirs that the liberty which Lycurgus, "the wisest human law-maker that ever was," gave to women to communicate their bodies to men to whom they were drawn by noble affection, and the hope of generous offspring, was the true cause why "real chastity flourished in Sparta more than in any other part of the world."

"How arbitrary, artificial, contrary to Nature, is the life now imposed upon women in this matter of chastity!" wrote James Hinton forty years ago. "Think of that line: 'A woman who deliberates is lost.' We make danger, making all womanhood hang upon a point like this, and surrounding it with unnatural and preternatural dangers. There is a wanton unreason embodied in the life of woman now; the present 'virtue' is a morbid unhealthy plant. Nature and God never poised the life of a woman upon such a needle's point. The whole modern idea of chastity has in it sensual exaggeration, surely, in part, remaining to us from other times, with what was good in it in great part gone."

"The whole grace of virginity," wrote another philosopher, Guyau, "is ignorance. Virginity, like certain fruits, can only be preserved by a process of desiccation."

Mérimée pointed out the same desiccating influence of virginity. In a letter dated 1859 he wrote: "I think that nowadays people attach far too much importance to chastity. Not that I deny that chastity is a virtue, but there are degrees in virtues just as there are in vices. It seems to be absurd that a woman should be banished from society for having had a lover, while a woman who is miserly, double-faced and spiteful goes everywhere. The morality of this age is assuredly not that which is taught in the Gospel. In my opinion it is better to love too much than not enough. Nowadays dry hearts are stuck up on a pinnacle" (Revue des Deux Mondes, April, 1896).

Dr. H. Paul has developed an allied point. She writes: "There are girls who, even as children, have prostituted themselves by masturbation and lascivious thoughts. The purity of their souls has long been lost and nothing remains unknown to them, but—they have preserved their hymens! That is for the sake of the future husband. Let no one dare to doubt their innocence with that unimpeachable evidence! And if another girl, who has passed her childhood in complete purity, now, with awakened senses and warm impetuous womanliness, gives herself to a man in love or even only in passion, they all stand up and scream that she is 'dishonored!' And, not least, the prostituted girl with the hymen. It is she indeed who screams loudest and throws the biggest stones. Yet the 'dishonored' woman, who is sound and wholesome, need not fear to tell what she has done to the man who desires her in marriage, speaking as one human being to another. She has no need to blush, she has exercised her human rights, and no reasonable man will on that account esteem her the less" (Dr. H. Paul, "Die Ueberschätzung der Jungfernschaft," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. ii, p. 14, 1907).

In a similar spirit writes F. Erhard (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. i, p. 408): "Virginity in one sense has its worth, but in the ordinary sense it is greatly overestimated. Apart from the fact that a girl who possesses it may yet be thoroughly perverted, this over-estimation of virginity leads to the girl who is without it being despised, and has further resulted in the development of a special industry for the preparation, by means of a prudishly cloistral education, of girls who will bring to their husbands the peculiar dainty of a bride who knows nothing about anything. Naturally, this can only be achieved at the expense of any rational education. What the undeveloped little goose may turn into, no man can foresee."

Freud (Sexual-Probleme, March, 1908) also points out the evil results of the education for marriage which is given to girls on the basis of this ideal of virginity. "Education undertakes the task of repressing the girl's sensuality until the time of betrothal. It not only forbids sexual relations and sets a high premium on innocence, but it also withdraws the ripening womanly individuality from temptation, maintaining a state of ignorance concerning the practical side of the part she is intended to play in life, and enduring no stirring of love which cannot lead to marriage. The result is that when she is suddenly permitted to fall in love by the authority of her elders, the girl cannot bring her psychic disposition to bear, and goes into marriage uncertain of her own feelings. As a consequence of this artificial retardation of the function of love she brings nothing but deception to the husband who has set all his desires upon her, and manifests frigidity in her physical relations with him."

Sénancour (De l'Amour, vol. i, p. 285) even believes that, when it is possible to leave out of consideration the question of offspring, not only will the law of chastity become equal for the two sexes, but there will be a tendency for the situation of the sexes to be, to some extent, changed. "Continence becomes a counsel rather than a precept, and it is in women that the voluptuous inclination will be regarded with most indulgence. Man is made for work; he only meets pleasure in passing; he must be content that women should occupy themselves with it more than he. It is men whom it exhausts, and men must always, in part, restrain their desires."

"Physical purity," remarks Hans Menjago ("Die Ueberschätzung der Physischen Reinheit," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, vol. ii, Part VIII) "was originally valued as a sign of greater strength of will and firmness of character, and it marked a rise above primitive conditions. This purity was difficult to preserve in those unsure days; it was rare and unusual. From this rarity rose the superstition of supernatural power residing in the virgin. But this has no meaning as soon as such purity becomes general and a specially conspicuous degree of firmness of character is no longer needed to maintain it.... Physical purity can only possess value when it is the result of individual strength of character, and not when it is the result of compulsory rules of morality."

Konrad Höller, who has given special attention to the sexual question in schools, remarks in relation to physical exercise: "The greatest advantage of physical exercises, however, is not the development of the active and passive strength of the body and its skill, but the establishment and fortification of the authority of the will over the body and its needs, so much given up to indolence. He who has learnt to endure and overcome, for the sake of a definite aim, hunger and thirst and fatigue, will be the better able to withstand sexual impulses and the temptation to gratify them, when better insight and æsthetic feeling have made clear to him, as one used to maintain authority over his body, that to yield would be injurious or disgraceful" (K. Höller, "Die Aufgabe der Volksschule," Sexualpädagogik, p. 70). Professor Schäfenacker (id., p. 102), who also emphasizes the importance of self-control and self-restraint, thinks a youth must bear in mind his future mission, as citizen and father of a family.

A subtle and penetrative thinker of to-day, Jules de Gaultier, writing on morals without reference to this specific question, has discussed what new internal inhibitory motives we can appeal to in replacing the old external inhibition of authority and belief which is now decayed. He answers that the state of feeling on which old faiths were based still persists. "May not," he asks, "the desire for a thing that we love and wish for beneficently replace the belief that a thing is by divine will, or in the nature of things? Will not the presence of a bridle on the frenzy of instinct reveal itself as a useful attitude adopted by instinct itself for its own conservation, as a symptom of the force and health of instinct? Is not empire over oneself, the power of regulating one's acts, a mark of superiority and a motive for self-esteem? Will not this joy of pride have the same authority in preserving the instincts as was once possessed by religious fear and the pretended imperatives of reason?" (Jules de Gaultier, La Dépendance de la Morale et l'Indépendance des Mœurs, p. 153.)

H. G. Wells (in A Modern Utopia), pointing out the importance of chastity, though rejecting celibacy, invokes, like Jules de Gaultier, the motive of pride. "Civilization has developed far more rapidly than man has modified. Under the unnatural perfection of security, liberty, and abundance our civilization has attained, the normal untrained human being is disposed to excess in almost every direction; he tends to eat too much and too elaborately, to drink too much, to become lazy faster than his work can be reduced, to waste his interest upon displays, and to make love too much and too elaborately. He gets out of training, and concentrates upon egoistic or erotic broodings. Our founders organized motives from all sorts of sources, but I think the chief force to give men self-control is pride. Pride may not be the noblest thing in the soul, but it is the best king there, for all that. They looked to it to keep a man clean and sound and sane. In this matter, as in all matters of natural desire, they held no appetite must be glutted, no appetite must have artificial whets, and also and equally that no appetite should be starved. A man must come from the table satisfied, but not replete. And, in the matter of love, a straight and clean desire for a clean and straight fellow-creature was our founders' ideal. They enjoined marriage between equals as the duty to the race, and they framed directions of the precisest sort to prevent that uxorious inseparableness, that connubiality, that sometimes reduces a couple of people to something jointly less than either."

With regard to chastity as an element of erotic satisfaction, Edward Carpenter writes (Love's Coming of Age, p. 11): "There is a kind of illusion about physical desire similar to that which a child suffers from when, seeing a beautiful flower, it instantly snatches the same, and destroys in a few moments the form and fragrance which attracted it. He only gets the full glory who holds himself back a little, and truly possesses, who is willing, if need be, not to possess. He is indeed a master of life who, accepting the grosser desires as they come to his body, and not refusing them, knows how to transform them at will into the most rare and fragrant flowers of human emotion."

It may be added that we may find a curiously inconsistent proof of the excessive importance attached to sexual function by a society which systematically tries to depreciate sex, in the disgrace which is attributed to the lack of "virile" potency. Although civilized life offers immense scope for the activities of sexually impotent persons, the impotent man is made to feel that, while he need not be greatly concerned if he suffers from nervous disturbances of digestion, if he should suffer just as innocently from nervous disturbances of the sexual impulse, it is almost a crime. A striking example of this was shown, a few years ago, when it was plausibly suggested that Carlyle's relations with his wife might best be explained by supposing that he suffered from some trouble of sexual potency. At once admirers rushed forward to "defend" Carlyle from this "disgraceful" charge; they were more shocked than if it had been alleged that he was a syphilitic. Yet impotence is, at the most, an infirmity, whether due to some congenital anatomical defect or to a disturbance of nervous balance in the delicate sexual mechanism, such as is apt to occur in men of abnormally sensitive temperament. It is no more disgraceful to suffer from it than from dyspepsia, with which, indeed, it may be associated. Many men of genius and high moral character have been sexually deformed. This was the case with Cowper (though this significant fact is suppressed by his biographers); Ruskin was divorced for a reason of this kind; and J. S. Mill, it is said, was sexually of little more than infantile development.

It will be seen that the definition of chastity remains somewhat lacking in precision. That is inevitable. We cannot grasp purity tightly, for, like snow, it will merely melt in our hands. "Purity itself forbids too minute a system of rules for the observance of purity," well says Sidgwick (Methods of Ethics, Bk. iii, Ch. IX). Elsewhere (op. cit., Bk. iii, Ch. XI) he attempts to answer the question: What sexual relations are essentially impure? and concludes that no answer is possible. "There appears to be no distinct principle, having any claim to self-evidence, upon which the question can be answered so as to command general assent." Even what is called "Free Love," he adds, "in so far as it is earnestly advocated as a means to a completer harmony of sentiment between men and women, cannot be condemned as impure, for it seems paradoxical to distinguish purity from impurity merely by less rapidity of transition."

Moll, from the standpoint of medical psychology, reaches the same conclusion as Sidgwick from that of ethics. In a report on the "Value of Chastity for Men," published as an appendix to the third edition (1899) of his Konträre Sexualempfindung, the distinguished Berlin physician discusses the matter with much vigorous common sense, insisting that "chaste and unchaste are relative ideas." We must not, he states, as is so often done, identify "chaste" with "sexually abstinent." He adds that we are not justified in describing all extra-marital sexual intercourse as unchaste, for, if we do so, we shall be compelled to regard nearly all men, and some very estimable women, as unchaste. He rightly insists that in this matter we must apply the same rule to women as to men, and he points out that even when it involves what may be technically adultery sexual intercourse is not necessarily unchaste. He takes the case of a girl who, at eighteen, when still mentally immature, is married to a man with whom she finds it impossible to live and a separation consequently occurs, although a divorce may be impossible to obtain. If she now falls passionately in love with a man her love may be entirely chaste, though it involves what is technically adultery.

The Influence of Tradition—The Theological Conception of Lust—Tendency of These Influences to Degrade Sexual Morality—Their Result in Creating the Problem of Sexual Abstinence—The Protests Against Sexual Abstinence—Sexual Abstinence and Genius—Sexual Abstinence in Women—The Advocates of Sexual Abstinence—Intermediate Attitude—Unsatisfactory Nature of the Whole Discussion—Criticism of the Conception of Sexual Abstinence—Sexual Abstinence as Compared to Abstinence from Food—No Complete Analogy—The Morality of Sexual Abstinence Entirely Negative—Is It the Physician's Duty to Advise Extra-Conjugal Sexual Intercourse?—Opinions of Those Who Affirm or Deny This Duty—The Conclusion Against Such Advice—The Physician Bound by the Social and Moral Ideas of His Age—The Physician as Reformer—Sexual Abstinence and Sexual Hygiene—Alcohol—The Influence of Physical and Mental Exercise—The Inadequacy of Sexual Hygiene in This Field—The Unreal Nature of the Conception of Sexual Abstinence—The Necessity of Replacing It by a More Positive Ideal.

Gregory the Great ordered that the seducer of a virgin shall marry her, or, in case of refusal, be severely punished corporally and shut up in a monastery to perform penance. According to other ecclesiastical rules, the seducer of a virgin, though held to no responsibility by the civil forum, was required to marry her, or to find a husband and furnish a dowry for her. Such rules had their good side, and were especially equitable when seduction had been accomplished by deceit. But they largely tended in practice to subordinate all questions of sexual morality to a money question. The reparation to the woman, also, largely became necessary because the ecclesiastical conception of lust caused her value to be depreciated by contact with lust, and the reparation might be said to constitute a part of penance. Aquinas held that lust, in however slight a degree, is a mortal sin, and most of the more influential theologians took a view nearly or quite as rigid. Some, however, held that a certain degree of delectation is possible in these matters without mortal sin, or asserted, for instance, that to feel the touch of a soft and warm hand is not mortal sin so long as no sexual feeling is thereby aroused. Others, however, held that such distinctions are impossible, and that all pleasures of this kind are sinful. Tomás Sanchez endeavored at much length to establish rules for the complicated problems of delectation that thus arose, but he was constrained to admit that no rules are really possible, and that such matters must be left to the judgment of a prudent man. At that point casuistry dissolves and the modern point of view emerges (see, e.g., Lea, History of Auricular Confession, vol. ii, pp. 57, 115, 246, etc.).

If we confine ourselves to modern times and to fairly precise medical statements, we find in Schurig's Spermatologia (1720, pp. 274 et seq.), not only a discussion of the advantages of moderate sexual intercourse in a number of disorders, as witnessed by famous authorities, but also a list of results—including anorexia, insanity, impotence, epilepsy, even death—which were believed to have been due to sexual abstinence. This extreme view of the possible evils of sexual abstinence seems to have been part of the Renaissance traditions of medicine stiffened by a certain opposition between religion and science. It was still rigorously stated by Lallemand early in the nineteenth century. Subsequently, the medical statements of the evil results of sexual abstinence became more temperate and measured, though still often pronounced. Thus Gyurkovechky believes that these results may be as serious as those of sexual excess. Krafft-Ebing showed that sexual abstinence could produce a state of general nervous excitement (Jahrbuch für Psychiatrie, Bd. viii, Heft 1 and 2). Schrenck-Notzing regards sexual abstinence as a cause of extreme sexual hyperæsthesia and of various perversions (in a chapter on sexual abstinence in his Kriminalpsychologische und Psychopathologische Studien, 1902, pp. 174-178). He records in illustration the case of a man of thirty-six who had masturbated in moderation as a boy, but abandoned the practice entirely, on moral grounds, twenty years ago, and has never had sexual intercourse, feeling proud to enter marriage a chaste man, but now for years has suffered greatly from extreme sexual hyperæsthesia and concentration of thought on sexual subjects, notwithstanding a strong will and the resolve not to masturbate or indulge in illicit intercourse. In another case a vigorous and healthy man, not inverted, and with strong sexual desires, who remained abstinent up to marriage, suffers from psychic impotence, and his wife remains a virgin notwithstanding all her affection and caresses. Ord considered that sexual abstinence might produce many minor evils. "Most of us," he wrote (British Medical Journal, Aug. 2, 1884) "have, no doubt, been consulted by men, chaste in act, who are tormented by sexual excitement. They tell one stories of long-continued local excitement, followed by intense muscular weariness, or by severe aching pain in the back and legs. In some I have had complaints of swelling and stiffness in the legs, and of pains in the joints, particularly in the knees;" he gives the case of a man who suffered after prolonged chastity from inflammatory conditions of knees and was only cured by marriage. Pearce Gould, it may be added, finds that "excessive ungratified sexual desire" is one of the causes of acute orchitis. Remondino ("Some Observations on Continence as a Factor in Health and Disease," Pacific Medical Journal, Jan., 1900) records the case of a gentleman of nearly seventy who, during the prolonged illness of his wife, suffered from frequent and extreme priapism, causing insomnia. He was very certain that his troubles were not due to his continence, but all treatment failed and there were no spontaneous emissions. At last Remondino advised him to, as he expresses it, "imitate Solomon." He did so, and all the symptoms at once disappeared. This case is of special interest, because the symptoms were not accompanied by any conscious sexual desire. It is no longer generally believed that sexual abstinence tends to produce insanity, and the occasional cases in which prolonged and intense sexual desire in young women is followed by insanity will usually be found to occur on a basis of hereditary degeneration. It is held by many authorities, however, that minor mental troubles, of a more or less vague character, as well as neurasthenia and hysteria, are by no means infrequently due to sexual abstinence. Thus Freud, who has carefully studied angstneurosis, the obsession of anxiety, finds that it is a result of sexual abstinence, and may indeed be considered as a vicarious form of such abstinence (Freud, Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 1906, pp. 76 et seq.).

The whole subject of sexual abstinence has been discussed at length by Nyström, of Stockholm, in Das Geschlechtsleben und seine Gesetze, Ch. III. He concludes that it is desirable that continence should be preserved as long as possible in order to strengthen the physical health and to develop the intelligence and character. The doctrine of permanent sexual abstinence, however, he regards as entirely false, except in the case of a small number of religious or philosophic persons. "Complete abstinence during a long period of years cannot be borne without producing serious results both on the body and the mind.... Certainly, a young man should repress his sexual impulses as long as possible and avoid everything that may artificially act as a sexual stimulant. If, however, he has done so, and still suffers from unsatisfied normal sexual desires, and if he sees no possibility of marriage within a reasonable time, no one should dare to say that he is committing a sin if, with mutual understanding, he enters into sexual relations with a woman friend, or forms temporary sexual relationships, provided, that is, that he takes the honorable precaution of begetting no children, unless his partner is entirely willing to become a mother, and he is prepared to accept all the responsibilities of fatherhood." In an article of later date ("Die Einwirkung der Sexuellen Abstinenz auf die Gesundheit," Sexual-Probleme, July, 1908) Nyström vigorously sums up his views. He includes among the results of sexual abstinence orchitis, frequent involuntary seminal emissions, impotence, neurasthenia, depression, and a great variety of nervous disturbances of vaguer character, involving diminished power of work, limited enjoyment of life, sleeplessness, nervousness, and pre-occupation with sexual desires and imaginations. More especially there is heightened sexual irritability with erections, or even seminal emissions on the slightest occasion, as on gazing at an attractive woman or in social intercourse with her, or in the presence of works of art representing naked figures. Nyström has had the opportunity of investigating and recording ninety cases of persons who have presented these and similar symptoms as the result, he believes, of sexual abstinence. He has published some of these cases (Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, Oct., 1908), but it may be added that Rohleder ("Die Abstinentia Sexualis," ib., Nov., 1908) has criticized these cases, and doubts whether any of them are conclusive. Rohleder believes that the bad results of sexual abstinence are never permanent, and also that no anatomically pathological states (such as orchitis) can be thereby produced. But he considers, nevertheless, that even incomplete and temporary sexual abstinence may produce fairly serious results, and especially neurasthenic disturbances of various kinds, such as nervous irritability, anxiety, depression, disinclination for work; also diurnal emissions, premature ejaculations, and even a state approaching satyriasis; and in women hysteria, hystero-epilepsy, and nymphomaniacal manifestations; all these symptoms may, however, he believes, be cured when the abstinence ceases.

Many advocates of sexual abstinence have attached importance to the fact that men of great genius have apparently been completely continent throughout life. This is certainly true (see ante, p. 173). But this fact can scarcely be invoked as an argument in favor of the advantages of sexual abstinence among the ordinary population. J. F. Scott selects Jesus, Newton, Beethoven, and Kant as "men of vigor and mental acumen who have lived chastely as bachelors." It cannot, however, be said that Dr. Scott has been happy in the four figures whom he has been able to select from the whole history of human genius as examples of life-long sexual abstinence. We know little with absolute certainty of Jesus, and even if we reject the diagnosis which Professor Binet-Sanglé (in his Folie de Jesus) has built up from a minute study of the Gospels, there are many reasons why we should refrain from emphasizing the example of his sexual abstinence; Newton, apart from his stupendous genius in a special field, was an incomplete and unsatisfactory human being who ultimately reached a condition very like insanity; Beethoven was a thoroughly morbid and diseased man, who led an intensely unhappy existence; Kant, from first to last, was a feeble valetudinarian. It would probably be difficult to find a healthy normal man who would voluntarily accept the life led by any of these four, even as the price of their fame. J. A. Godfrey (Science of Sex, pp. 139-147) discusses at length the question whether sexual abstinence is favorable to ordinary intellectual vigor, deciding that it is not, and that we cannot argue from the occasional sexual abstinence of men of genius, who are often abnormally constituted, and physically below the average, to the normally developed man. Sexual abstinence, it may be added, is by no means always a favorable sign, even in men who stand intellectually above the average. "I have not obtained the impression," remarks Freud (Sexual-Probleme, March, 1908), "that sexual abstinence is helpful to energetic and independent men of action or original thinkers, to courageous liberators or reformers. The sexual conduct of a man is often symbolic of his whole method of reaction in the world. The man who energetically grasps the object of his sexual desire may be trusted to show a similarly relentless energy in the pursuit of other aims."

Cabanis, in his famous and pioneering work, Rapports du Physique et du Moral, said in 1802, that women not only bear sexual excess more easily than men, but sexual privations with more difficulty, and a cautious and experienced observer of to-day, Löwenfeld (Sexualleben und Nervenleiden, 1899, p. 53), while not considering that normal women bear sexual abstinence less easily than men, adds that this is not the case with women of neuropathic disposition, who suffer much more from this cause, and either masturbate when sexual intercourse is impossible or fall into hystero-neurasthenic states. Busch stated (Das Geschlechtsleben des Weibes, 1839, vol. i, pp. 69, 71) that not only is the working of the sexual functions in the organism stronger in women than in men, but that the bad results of sexual abstinence are more marked in women. Sir Benjamin Brodie said long ago that the evils of continence to women are perhaps greater than those of incontinence, and to-day Hammer (Die Gesundheitlichen Gefahren der Geschlechtlichen Enthaltsamkeit, 1904) states that, so far as reasons of health are concerned, sexual abstinence is no more to be recommended to women than to men. Nyström is of the same opinion, though he thinks that women bear sexual abstinence better than men, and has discussed this special question at length in a section of his Geschlechtsleben und seine Gesetze. He agrees with the experienced Erb that a large number of completely chaste women of high character, and possessing distinguished qualities of mind and heart, are more or less disordered through their sexual abstinence; this is specially often the case with women married to impotent men, though it is frequently not until they approach the age of thirty, Nyström remarks, that women definitely realize their sexual needs.

A great many women who are healthy, chaste, and modest, feel at times such powerful sexual desire that they can scarcely resist the temptation to go into the street and solicit the first man they meet. Not a few such women, often of good breeding, do actually offer themselves to men with whom they may have perhaps only the slightest acquaintance. Routh records such cases (British Gynæcological Journal, Feb., 1887), and most men have met with them at some time. When a woman of high moral character and strong passions is subjected for a very long period to the perpetual strain of such sexual craving, especially if combined with love for a definite individual, a chain of evil results, physical and moral, may be set up, and numerous distinguished physicians have recorded such cases, which terminated at once in complete recovery as soon as the passion was gratified. Lauvergne long since described a case. A fairly typical case of this kind was reported in detail by Brachet (De l'Hypochondrie, p. 69) and embodied by Griesinger in his classic work on "Mental Pathology." It concerned a healthy married lady, twenty-six years old, having three children. A visiting acquaintance completely gained her affections, but she strenuously resisted the seducing influence, and concealed the violent passion that he had aroused in her. Various serious symptoms, physical and mental, slowly began to appear, and she developed what seemed to be signs of consumption. Six months' stay in the south of France produced no improvement, either in the bodily or mental symptoms. On returning home she became still worse. Then she again met the object of her passion, succumbed, abandoned her husband and children, and fled with him. Six months later she was scarcely recognizable; beauty, freshness and plumpness had taken the place of emaciation; while the symptoms of consumption and all other troubles had entirely disappeared. A somewhat similar case is recorded by Camill Lederer, of Vienna (Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und Sexuelle Hygiene, 1906, Heft 3). A widow, a few months after her husband's death, began to cough, with symptoms of bronchial catarrh, but no definite signs of lung disease. Treatment and change of climate proved entirely unavailing to effect a cure. Two years later, as no signs of disease had appeared in the lungs, though the symptoms continued, she married again. Within a very few weeks all symptoms had disappeared, and she was entirely fresh and well.

Numerous distinguished gynæcologists have recorded their belief that sexual excitement is a remedy for various disorders of the sexual system in women, and that abstinence is a cause of such disorders. Matthews Duncan said that sexual excitement is the only remedy for amenorrhœa; "the only emmenagogue medicine that I know of," he wrote (Medical Times, Feb. 2, 1884), "is not to be found in the Pharmacopœia: it is erotic excitement. Of the value of erotic excitement there is no doubt." Anstie, in his work on Neuralgia, refers to the beneficial effect of sexual intercourse on dysmenorrhœa, remarking that the necessity of the full natural exercise of the sexual function is shown by the great improvement in such cases after marriage, and especially after childbirth. (It may be remarked that not all authorities find dysmenorrhœa benefited by marriage, and some consider that the disease is often thereby aggravated; see, e.g., Wythe Cook, American Journal Obstetrics, Dec., 1893.) The distinguished gynæcologist, Tilt, at a somewhat earlier date (On Uterine and Ovarian Inflammation, 1862, p. 309), insisted on the evil results of sexual abstinence in producing ovarian irritation, and perhaps subacute ovaritis, remarking that this was specially pronounced in young widows, and in prostitutes placed in penitentiaries. Intense desire, he pointed out, determines organic movements resembling those required for the gratification of the desire. These burning desires, which can only be quenched by their legitimate satisfaction, are still further heightened by the erotic influence of thoughts, books, pictures, music, which are often even more sexually stimulating than social intercourse with men, but the excitement thus produced is not relieved by that natural collapse which should follow a state of vital turgescence. After referring to the biological facts which show the effect of psychic influences on the formative powers of the ovario-uterine organs in animals, Tilt continues: "I may fairly infer that similar incitements on the mind of females may have a stimulating effect on the organs of ovulation. I have frequently known menstruation to be irregular, profuse, or abnormal in type during courtship in women in whom nothing similar had previously occurred, and that this protracted the treatment of chronic ovaritis and of uterine inflammation." Bonnifield, of Cincinnati (Medical Standard, Dec., 1896), considers that unsatisfied sexual desire is an important cause of catarrhal endometritis. It is well known that uterine fibroids bear a definite relation to organic sexual activity, and that sexual abstinence, more especially the long-continued deprivation of pregnancy, is a very important cause of the disease. This is well shown by an analysis by A. E. Giles (Lancet, March 2, 1907) of one hundred and fifty cases. As many as fifty-six of these cases, more than a third, were unmarried women, though nearly all were over thirty years of age. Of the ninety-four married women, thirty-four had never been pregnant; of those who had been pregnant, thirty-six had not been so for at least ten years. Thus eighty-four per cent, had either not been pregnant at all, or had had no pregnancy for at least ten years. It is, therefore, evident that deprivation of sexual function, whether or not involving abstinence from sexual intercourse, is an important cause of uterine fibroid tumors. Balls-Headley, of Victoria (Evolution of the Diseases of Women, 1894, and "Etiology of Diseases of Female Genital Organs," Allbutt and Playfair, System of Gynæcology,) believes that unsatisfied sexual desire is a factor in very many disorders of the sexual organs in women. "My views," he writes in a private letter, "are founded on a really special gynæcological practice of twenty years, during which I have myself taken about seven thousand most careful records. The normal woman is sexually well-formed and her sexual feelings require satisfaction in the direction of the production of the next generation, but under the restrictive and now especially abnormal conditions of civilization some women undergo hereditary atrophy, and the uterus and sexual feelings are feeble; in others of good average local development the feeling is in restraint; in others the feelings, as well as the organs, are strong, and if normal use be withheld evils ensue. Bearing in mind these varieties of congenital development in relation to the respective condition of virginity, or sterile or parous married life, the mode of occurrence and of progress of disease grows on the physician's mind, and there is no more occasion for bewilderment than to the mathematician studying conic sections, when his knowledge has grown from the basis of the science. The problem is suggested: Has a crowd of unassociated diseases fallen as through a sieve on woman, or have these affections almost necessarily ensued from the circumstances of her unnatural environment?" It may be added that Kisch (Sexual Life of Woman), while protesting against any exaggerated estimate of the effects of sexual abstinence, considers that in women it may result, not only in numerous local disorders, but also in nervous disturbance, hysteria, and even insanity, while in neurasthenic women "regulated sexual intercourse has an actively beneficial effect which is often striking."

It is important to remark that the evil results of sexual abstinence in women, in the opinion of many of those who insist upon their importance, are by no means merely due to unsatisfied sexual desire. They may be pronounced even when the woman herself has not the slightest consciousness of sexual needs. This was clearly pointed out forty years ago by the sagacious Anstie (op. cit.) In women, especially, he remarks, "a certain restless hyperactivity of mind, and perhaps of body also, seems to be the expression of Nature's unconscious resentment of the neglect of sexual functions." Such women, he adds, have kept themselves free from masturbation "at the expense of a perpetual and almost fierce activity of mind and muscle." Anstie had found that some of the worst cases of the form of nervosity and neurasthenia which he termed "spinal irritation," often accompanied by irritable stomach and anæmia, get well on marriage. "There can be no question," he continues, "that a very large proportion of these cases in single women (who form by far the greater number of subjects of spinal irritation) are due to this conscious or unconscious irritation kept up by an unsatisfied sexual want. It is certain that very many young persons (women more especially) are tormented by the irritability of the sexual organs without having the least consciousness of sexual desire, and present the sad spectacle of a vie manquée without ever knowing the true source of the misery which incapacitates them for all the active duties of life. It is a singular fact that in occasional instances one may even see two sisters, inheriting the same kind of nervous organization, both tormented with the symptoms of spinal irritation and both probably suffering from repressed sexual functions, but of whom one shall be pure-minded and entirely unconscious of the real source of her troubles, while the other is a victim to conscious and fruitless sexual irritation." In this matter Anstie may be regarded as a forerunner of Freud, who has developed with great subtlety and analytic power the doctrine of the transformation of repressed sexual instinct in women into morbid forms. He considers that the nervosity of to-day is largely due to the injurious action on the sexual life of that repression of natural instincts on which our civilization is built up. (Perhaps the clearest brief statement of Freud's views on the matter is to be found in a very suggestive article, "Die 'Kulturelle' Sexualmoral und die Moderne Nervosität," in Sexual-Probleme, March, 1908, reprinted in the second series of Freud's Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 1909). We possess the aptitude, he says, of sublimating and transforming our sexual activities into other activities of a psychically related character, but non-sexual. This process cannot, however, be carried out to an unlimited extent any more than can the conversion of heat into mechanical work in our machines. A certain amount of direct sexual satisfaction is for most organizations indispensable, and the renunciation of this individually varying amount is punished by manifestations which we are compelled to regard as morbid. The process of sublimation, under the influence of civilization, leads both to sexual perversions and to psycho-neuroses. These two conditions are closely related, as Freud views the process of their development; they stand to each other as positive and negative, sexual perversions being the positive pole and psycho-neuroses the negative. It often happens, he remarks, that a brother may be sexually perverse, while his sister, with a weaker sexual temperament, is a neurotic whose symptoms are a transformation of her brother's perversion; while in many families the men are immoral, the women pure and refined but highly nervous. In the case of women who have no defect of sexual impulse there is yet the same pressure of civilized morality pushing them into neurotic states. It is a terribly serious injustice, Freud remarks, that the civilized standard of sexual life is the same for all persons, because though some, by their organization, may easily accept it, for others it involves the most difficult psychic sacrifices. The unmarried girl, who has become nervously weak, cannot be advised to seek relief in marriage, for she must be strong in order to "bear" marriage, while we urge a man on no account to marry a girl who is not strong. The married woman who has experienced the deceptions of marriage has usually no way of relief left but by abandoning her virtue. "The more strenuously she has been educated, and the more completely she has been subjected to the demands of civilization, the more she fears this way of escape, and in the conflict between her desires and her sense of duty, she also seeks refuge—in neurosis. Nothing protects her virtue so surely as disease." Taking a still wider view of the influence of the narrow "civilized" conception of sexual morality on women, Freud finds that it is not limited to the production of neurotic conditions; it affects the whole intellectual aptitude of women. Their education denies them any occupation with sexual problems, although such problems are so full of interest to them, for it inculcates the ancient prejudice that any curiosity in such matters is unwomanly and a proof of wicked inclinations. They are thus terrified from thinking, and knowledge is deprived of worth. The prohibition to think extends, automatically and inevitably, far beyond the sexual sphere. "I do not believe," Freud concludes, "that there is any opposition between intellectual work and sexual activity such as was supposed by Möbius. I am of opinion that the unquestionable fact of the intellectual inferiority of so many women is due to the inhibition of thought imposed upon them for the purpose of sexual repression."

It is only of recent years that this problem has been realized and faced, though solitary thinkers, like Hinton, have been keenly conscious of its existence; for "sorrowing virtue," as Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox puts it, "is more ashamed of its woes than unhappy sin, because the world has tears for the latter and only ridicule for the former." "It is an almost cynical trait of our age," Hellpach wrote a few years ago, "that it is constantly discussing the theme of prostitution, of police control, of the age of consent, of the 'white slavery,' and passes over the moral struggle of woman's soul without an attempt to answer her burning questions."

Ribbing, the Swedish professor, in his Hygiène Sexuelle, advocates sexual abstinence outside marriage, and asserts its harmlessness. Gilles de la Tourette, Féré, and Augagneur in France agree. In Germany Fürbringer (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 228) asserts that continence is possible and necessary, though admitting that it may, however, mean serious mischief in exceptional cases. Eulenburg (Sexuale Neuropathie, p. 14) doubts whether anyone, who otherwise lived a reasonable life, ever became ill, or more precisely neurasthenic, through sexual abstinence. Hegar, replying to the arguments of Bebel in his well-known book on women, denies that sexual abstinence can ever produce satyriasis or nymphomania. Näcke, who has frequently discussed the problem of sexual abstinence (e.g., Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie, 1903, Heft 1, and Sexual-Probleme, June, 1908), maintains that sexual abstinence can, at most, produce rare and slight unfavorable results, and that it is no more likely to produce insanity, even in predisposed individuals, than are the opposite extremes of sexual excess and masturbation. He adds that, so far as his own observations are concerned, the patients in asylums suffer scarcely at all from their compulsory sexual abstinence.

It is in England, however, that the virtues of sexual abstinence have been most loudly and emphatically proclaimed, sometimes indeed with considerable lack of cautious qualification. Acton, in his Reproductive Organs, sets forth the traditional English view, as well as Beale in his Morality and the Moral Question. A more distinguished representative of the same view was Paget, who, in his lecture on "Sexual Hypochondriasis," coupled sexual intercourse with "theft or lying." Sir William Gowers (Syphilis and the Nervous System, 1892, p. 126) also proclaims the advantages of "unbroken chastity," more especially as a method of avoiding syphilis. He is not hopeful, however, even as regards his own remedy, for he adds: "We can trace small ground for hope that the disease will thus be materially reduced." He would still, however, preach chastity to the individual, and he does so with all the ascetic ardor of a mediæval monk. "With all the force that any knowledge I possess, and any authority I have, can give, I assert that no man ever yet was in the slightest degree or way the worse for continence or better for incontinence. From the latter all are worse morally; a clear majority are worse physically; and in no small number the result is, and ever will be, utter physical shipwreck on one of the many rocks, sharp, jagged-edged, which beset the way, or on one of the many beds of festering slime which no care can possibly avoid." In America the same view widely prevails, and Dr. J. F. Scott, in his Sexual-Instinct (second edition, 1908, Ch. III), argues very vigorously and at great length in favor of sexual abstinence. He will not even admit that there are two sides to the question, though if that were the case, the length and the energy of his arguments would be unnecessary.

Among medical authorities who have discussed the question of sexual abstinence at length it is not, indeed, usually possible to find such unqualified opinions in its favor as those I have quoted. There can be no doubt, however, that a large proportion of physicians, not excluding prominent and distinguished authorities, when casually confronted with the question whether sexual abstinence is harmless, will at once adopt the obvious path of least resistance and reply: Yes. In only a few cases will they even make any qualification of this affirmative answer. This tendency is very well illustrated by an inquiry made by Dr. Ludwig Jacobsohn, of St. Petersburgh ("Die Sexuelle Enthaltsamkeit im Lichte der Medizin," St. Petersburger Medicinische Wochenschrift, March 17, 1907). He wrote to over two hundred distinguished Russian and German professors of physiology, neurology, psychiatry, etc., asking them if they regarded sexual abstinence as harmless. The majority returned no answer; eleven Russian and twenty-eight Germans replied, but four of them merely said that "they had no personal experience," etc.; there thus remained thirty-five. Of these E. Pflüger, of Bonn, was skeptical of the advantage of any propaganda of abstinence: "if all the authorities in the world declared the harmlessness of abstinence that would have no influence on youth. Forces are here in play that break through all obstacles." The harmlessness of abstinence was affirmed by Kräpelin, Cramer, Gärtner, Tuczek, Schottelius, Gaffky, Finkler, Selenew, Lassar, Seifert, Gruber; the last, however, added that he knew very few abstinent young men, and himself only considered abstinence good before full development, and intercourse not dangerous in moderation even before then. Brieger knew cases of abstinence without harmful results, but himself thought that no general opinion could be given. Jürgensen said that abstinence in itself is not harmful, but that in some cases intercourse exerts a more beneficial influence. Hoffmann said that abstinence is harmless, adding that though it certainly leads to masturbation, that is better than gonorrhœa, to say nothing of syphilis, and is easily kept within bounds. Strümpell replied that sexual abstinence is harmless, and indirectly useful as preserving from the risk of venereal disease, but that sexual intercourse, being normal, is always more desirable. Hensen said that abstinence is not to be unconditionally approved. Rumpf replied that abstinence was not harmful for most before the age of thirty, but after that age there was a tendency to mental obsessions, and marriage should take place at twenty-five. Leyden also considered abstinence harmless until towards thirty, when it leads to psychic anomalies, especially states of anxiety, and a certain affectation. Hein replied that abstinence is harmless for most, but in some leads to hysterical manifestations and indirectly to bad results from masturbation, while for the normal man abstinence cannot be directly beneficial, since intercourse is natural. Grützner thought that abstinence is almost never harmful. Nescheda said it is harmless in itself, but harmful in so far as it leads to unnatural modes of gratification. Neisser believes that more prolonged abstinence than is now usual would be beneficial, but admitted the sexual excitations of our civilization; he added that of course he saw no harm for healthy men in intercourse. Hoche replied that abstinence is quite harmless in normal persons, but not always so in abnormal persons. Weber thought it had a useful influence in increasing will-power. Tarnowsky said it is good in early manhood, but likely to be unfavorable after twenty-five. Orlow replied that, especially in youth, it is harmless, and a man should be as chaste as his wife. Popow said that abstinence is good at all ages and preserves the energy. Blumenau said that in adult age abstinence is neither normal nor beneficial, and generally leads to masturbation, though not generally to nervous disorders; but that even masturbation is better than syphilis. Tschiriew saw no harm in abstinence up to thirty, and thought sexual weakness more likely to follow excess than abstinence. Tschish regarded abstinence as beneficial rather than harmful up to twenty-five or twenty-eight, but thought it difficult to decide after that age when nervous alterations seem to be caused. Darkschewitcz regarded abstinence as harmless up to twenty-five. Fränkel said it was harmless for most, but that for a considerable proportion of people intercourse is a necessity. Erb's opinion is regarded by Jacobsohn as standing alone; he placed the age below which abstinence is harmless at twenty; after that age he regarded it as injurious to health, seriously impeding work and capacity, while in neurotic persons it leads to still more serious results. Jacobsohn concludes that the general opinion of those answering the inquiry may thus be expressed: "Youth should be abstinent. Abstinence can in no way injure them; on the contrary, it is beneficial. If our young people will remain abstinent and avoid extra-conjugal intercourse they will maintain a high ideal of love and preserve themselves from venereal diseases."

The harmlessness of sexual abstinence was likewise affirmed in America in a resolution passed by the American Medical Association in 1906. The proposition thus formally accepted was thus worded: "Continence is not incompatible with health." It ought to be generally realized that abstract propositions of this kind are worthless, because they mean nothing. Every sane person, when confronted by the demand to boldly affirm or deny the proposition, "Continence is not incompatible with health," is bound to affirm it. He might firmly believe that continence is incompatible with the health of most people, and that prolonged continence is incompatible with anyone's health, and yet, if he is to be honest in the use of language, it would be impossible for him to deny the vague and abstract proposition that "Continence is not incompatible with health." Such propositions are therefore not only without value, but actually misleading.

It is obvious that the more extreme and unqualified opinions in favor of sexual abstinence are based not on medical, but on what the writers regard as moral considerations. Moreover, as the same writers are usually equally emphatic in regard to the advantages of sexual intercourse in marriage, it is clear that they have committed themselves to a contradiction. The same act, as Näcke rightly points out, cannot become good or bad according as it is performed in or out of marriage. There is no magic efficacy in a few words pronounced by a priest or a government official.

Remondino (loc. cit.) remarks that the authorities who have committed themselves to declarations in favor of the unconditional advantages of sexual abstinence tend to fall into three errors: (1) they generalize unduly, instead of considering each case individually, on its own merits; (2) they fail to realize that human nature is influenced by highly mixed and complex motives and cannot be assumed to be amenable only to motives of abstract morality; (3) they ignore the great army of masturbators and sexual perverts who make no complaint of sexual suffering, but by maintaining a rigid sexual abstinence, so far as normal relationships are concerned, gradually drift into currents whence there is no return.

"Where there is such a marked opposition of opinion truth is not exclusively on one side," remarks Löwenfeld (Sexualleben und Nervenleiden, second edition, p. 40). Sexual abstinence is certainly often injurious to neuropathic persons. (This is now believed by a large number of authorities, and was perhaps first decisively stated by Krafft-Ebing, "Ueber Neurosen durch Abstinenz," Jahrbuch für Psychiatrie, 1889, p. 1). Löwenfeld finds no special proclivity to neurasthenia among the Catholic clergy, and when it does occur, there is no reason to suppose a sexual causation. "In healthy and not hereditarily neuropathic men complete abstinence is possible without injury to the nervous system." Injurious effects, he continues, when they appear, seldom occur until between twenty-four and thirty-six years of age, and even then are not usually serious enough to lead to a visit to a doctor, consisting mainly in frequency of nocturnal emissions, pain in testes or rectum, hyperæsthesia in the presence of women or of sexual ideas. If, however, conditions arise which specially stimulate the sexual emotions, neurasthenia may be produced. Löwenfeld agrees with Freud and Gattel that the neurosis of anxiety tends to occur in the abstinent, careful examination showing that the abstinence is a factor in its production in both sexes. It is common among young women married to much older men, often appearing during the first years of marriage. Under special circumstances, therefore, abstinence can be injurious, but on the whole the difficulties due to such abstinence are not severe, and they only exceptionally call forth actual disturbance in the nervous or psychic spheres. Moll takes a similar temperate and discriminating view. He regards sexual abstinence before marriage as the ideal, but points out that we must avoid any doctrinal extremes in preaching sexual abstinence, for such preaching will merely lead to hypocrisy. Intercourse with prostitutes, and the tendency to change a woman like a garment, induce loss of sensitiveness to the spiritual and personal element in woman, while the dangers of sexual abstinence must no more be exaggerated than the dangers of sexual intercourse (Moll, Libido Sexualis, 1898, vol. i, p. 848; id., Konträre Sexualempfindung, 1899, p. 588). Bloch also (in a chapter on the question of sexual abstinence in his Sexualleben unserer Zeit, 1908) takes a similar standpoint. He advocates abstention during early life and temporary abstention in adult life, such abstention being valuable, not only for the conservation and transformation of energy, but also to emphasize the fact that life contains other matters to strive for beyond the ends of sex. Redlich (Medizinische Klinik, 1908, No. 7) also, in a careful study of the medical aspects of the question, takes an intermediate standpoint in relation to the relative advantages and disadvantages of sexual abstinence. "We may say that sexual abstinence is not a condition which must, under all circumstances and at any price, be avoided, though it is true that for the majority of healthy adult persons regular sexual intercourse is advantageous, and sometimes is even to be recommended."

It may be added that from the standpoint of Christian religious morality this same attitude, between the extremes of either party, recognizing the advantages of sexual abstinence, but not insisting that they shall be purchased at any price, has also found representation. Thus, in England, an Anglican clergyman, the Rev. H. Northcote (Christianity and Sex Problems, pp. 58, 60) deals temperately and sympathetically with the difficulties of sexual abstinence, and is by no means convinced that such abstinence is always an unmixed advantage; while in Germany a Catholic priest, Karl Jentsch (Sexualethik, Sexualjustiz, Sexualpolizei, 1900) sets himself to oppose the rigorous and unqualified assertions of Ribbing in favor of sexual abstinence. Jentsch thus expresses what he conceives ought to be the attitude of fathers, of public opinion, of the State and the Church towards the young man in this matter: "Endeavor to be abstinent until marriage. Many succeed in this. If you can succeed, it is good. But, if you cannot succeed, it is unnecessary to cast reproaches on yourself and to regard yourself as a scoundrel or a lost sinner. Provided that you do not abandon yourself to mere enjoyment or wantonness, but are content with what is necessary to restore your peace of mind, self-possession, and cheerful capacity for work, and also that you observe the precautions which physicians or experienced friends impress upon you."

Various distinguished physicians, especially in Germany, have proclaimed the duty of the doctor to recommend sexual intercourse to his patient whenever he considers it desirable. Gyurkovechky, for instance, has fully discussed this question, and answered it in the affirmative. Nyström (Sexual-Probleme, July, 1908, p. 413) states that it is the physician's duty, in some cases of sexual weakness, when all other methods of treatment have failed, to recommend sexual intercourse as the best remedy. Dr. Max Marcuse stands out as a conspicuous advocate of the unconditional duty of the physician to advocate sexual intercourse in some cases, both to men and to women, and has on many occasions argued in this sense (e.g., Darf der Arzt zum Ausserehelichen Geschlechtsverkehr raten? 1904). Marcuse is strongly of opinion that a physician who, allowing himself to be influenced by moral, sociological, or other considerations, neglects to recommend sexual intercourse when he considers it desirable for the patient's health, is unworthy of his profession, and should either give up medicine or send his patients to other doctors. This attitude, though not usually so emphatically stated, seems to be widely accepted. Lederer goes even further when he states (Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und Sexuelle Hygiene, 1906, Heft 3) that it is the physician's duty in the case of a woman who is suffering from her husband's impotence, to advise her to have intercourse with another man, adding that "whether she does so with her husband's consent is no affair of the physician's, for he is not the guardian of morality, but the guardian of health." The physicians who publicly take this attitude are, however, a small minority. In England, so far as I am aware, no physician of eminence has openly proclaimed the duty of the doctor to advise sexual intercourse outside marriage, although, it is scarcely necessary to add, in England, as elsewhere, it happens that doctors, including women doctors, from time to time privately point out to their unmarried and even married patients, that sexual intercourse would probably be beneficial.

The duty of the physician to recommend sexual intercourse has been denied as emphatically as it has been affirmed. Thus Eulenburg (Sexuale Neuropathie, p. 43), would by no means advise extra-conjugal relations to his patient; "such advice is quite outside the physician's competence." It is, of course, denied by those who regard sexual abstinence as always harmless, if not beneficial. But it is also denied by many who consider that, under some circumstances, sexual intercourse would do good.

Moll has especially, and on many occasions, discussed the duty of the physician in relation to the question of advising sexual intercourse outside marriage (e.g., in his comprehensive work, Aerztliche Ethik, 1902; also Zeitschrift für Aerztliche Fortbildung, 1905, Nos. 12-15; Mutterschutz, 1905, Heft 3; Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, vol. ii, Heft 8). At the outset Moll had been disposed to assert the right of the physician to recommend sexual intercourse under some circumstances; "so long as marriage is unduly delayed and sexual intercourse outside marriage exists," he wrote (Die Conträre Sexualempfindung, second edition, p. 287), "so long, I think, we may use such intercourse therapeutically, provided that the rights of no third person (husband or wife) are injured." In all his later writings, however, Moll ranges himself clearly and decisively on the opposite side. He considers that the physician has no right to overlook the possible results of his advice in inflicting venereal disease, or, in the case of a woman, pregnancy, on his patient, and he believes that these serious results are far more likely to happen than is always admitted by those who defend the legitimacy of such advice. Nor will Moll admit that the physician is entitled to overlook the moral aspects of the question. A physician may know that a poor man could obtain many things good for his health by stealing, but he cannot advise him to steal. Moll takes the case of a Catholic priest who is suffering from neurasthenia due to sexual abstinence. Even although the physician feels certain that the priest may be able to avoid all the risks of disease as well as of publicity, he is not entitled to urge him to sexual intercourse. He has to remember that in thus causing a priest to break his vows of chastity he may induce a mental conflict and a bitter remorse which may lead to the worst results, even on his patient's physical health. Similar results, Moll remarks, may follow such advice when given to a married man or woman, to say nothing of possible divorce proceedings and accompanying evils.

Rohleder (Vorlesungen über Geschlechtstrieb und Gesamtes Geschlechtsleben der Menschen) adopts a somewhat qualified attitude in this matter. As a general rule he is decidedly against recommending sexual intercourse outside marriage to those who are suffering from partial or temporary abstinence (the only form of abstinence he recognizes), partly on the ground that the evils of abstinence are not serious or permanent, and partly because the patient is fairly certain to exercise his own judgment in the matter. But in some classes of cases he recommends such intercourse, and notably to bisexual persons, on the ground that he is thus preserving his patient from the criminal risks of homosexual practices.

Moll also is of opinion that this impartial presentation of the case for and against sexual intercourse corresponds to the physician's duty in the matter. It is, indeed, a duty which can scarcely be escaped by the physician in many cases. Moll points out that it can by no means be assimilated, as some have supposed, with the recommendation of sexual intercourse. It is, on the contrary, he remarks, much more analogous to the physician's duty in reference to operations. He puts before the patient the nature of the operation, its advantages and its risks, but he leaves it to the patient's judgment to accept or reject the operation. Lewitt also (Geschlechtliche Enthaltsamkeit und Gesundheitsstörungen, 1905), after discussing the various opinions on this question, comes to the conclusion that the physician, if he thinks that intercourse outside marriage might be beneficial, should explain the difficulties and leave the patient himself to decide.

The extent to which sexual abstinence and the struggles it involves may hamper and absorb the individual throughout life is well illustrated in the following case. A lady, vigorous, robust, and generally healthy, of great intelligence and high character, has reached middle life without marrying, or ever having sexual relationships. She was an only child, and when between three and four years of age, a playmate some six years older, initiated her into the habit of playing with her sexual parts. She was, however, at this age quite devoid of sexual feelings, and the habit dropped naturally, without any bad effects, as soon as she left the neighborhood of this girl a year or so later. Her health was good and even brilliant, and she developed vigorously at puberty. At the age of sixteen, however, a mental shock caused menstruation to diminish in amount during some years, and simultaneously with this diminution persistent sexual excitement appeared spontaneously, for the first time. She regarded such feelings as abnormal and unhealthy, and exerted all her powers of self-control in resisting them. But will power had no effect in diminishing the feelings. There was constant and imperious excitement, with the sense of vibration, tension, pressure, dilatation and tickling, accompanied, it may be, by some ovarian congestion, for she felt that on the left side there was a network of sexual nerves, and retroversion of the uterus was detected some years later. Her life was strenuous with many duties, but no occupation could be pursued without this undercurrent of sexual hyperæsthesia involving perpetual self-control. This continued more or less acutely for many years, when menstruation suddenly stopped altogether, much before the usual period of the climacteric. At the same time the sexual excitement ceased, and she became calm, peaceful, and happy. Diminished menstruation was associated with sexual excitement, but abundant menstruation and its complete absence were both accompanied by the relief of excitement. This lasted for two years. Then, for the treatment of a trifling degree of anæmia, she was subjected to a long, and, in her case, injudicious course of hypodermic injections of strychnia. From that time, five years ago, up to the present, there has been constant sexual excitement, and she has always to be on guard lest she should be overtaken by a sexual spasm. Her torture is increased by the fact that her traditions make it impossible for her (except under very exceptional circumstances) to allude to the cause of her sufferings. "A woman is handicapped," she writes. "She may never speak to anyone on such a subject. She must live her tragedy alone, smiling as much as she can under the strain of her terrible burden." To add to her trouble, two years ago, she felt impelled to resort to masturbation, and has done so about once a month since; this not only brings no real relief, and leaves irritability, wakefulness, and dark marks under the eyes, but is a cause of remorse to her, for she regards masturbation as entirely abnormal and unnatural. She has tried to gain benefit, not merely by the usual methods of physical hygiene, but by suggestion, Christian Science, etc., but all in vain. "I may say," she writes, "that it is the most passionate desire of my heart to be freed from this bondage, that I may relax the terrible years-long tension of resistance, and be happy in my own way. If I had this affliction once a month, once a week, even twice a week, to stand against it would be child's play. I should scorn to resort to unnatural means, however moderately. But self-control itself has its revenges, and I sometimes feel as if it is no longer to be borne."

I. The Orgy:—The Religious Origin of the Orgy—The Feast of Fools—Recognition of the Orgy by the Greeks and Romans—The Orgy Among Savages—The Drama—The Object Subserved by the Orgy.

II. The Origin and Development of Prostitution:—The Definition of Prostitution—Prostitution Among Savages—The Conditions Under Which Professional Prostitution Arises—Sacred Prostitution—The Rite of Mylitta—The Practice of Prostitution to Obtain a Marriage Portion—The Rise of Secular Prostitution in Greece—Prostitution in the East—India, China, Japan, etc.—Prostitution in Rome—The Influence of Christianity on Prostitution—The Effort to Combat Prostitution—The Mediæval Brothel—The Appearance of the Courtesan—Tullia D'Aragona—Veronica Franco—Ninon de Lenclos—Later Attempts to Eradicate Prostitution—The Regulation of Prostitution—Its Futility Becoming Recognized.

III. The Causes of Prostitution:—Prostitution as a Part of the Marriage System—The Complex Causation of Prostitution—The Motives Assigned by Prostitutes—(1) Economic Factor of Prostitution—Poverty Seldom the Chief Motive for Prostitution—But Economic Pressure Exerts a Real Influence—The Large Proportion of Prostitutes Recruited from Domestic Service—Significance of This Fact—(2) The Biological Factor of Prostitution—The So-called Born-Prostitute—Alleged Identity with the Born-Criminal—The Sexual Instinct in Prostitutes—The Physical and Psychic Characters of Prostitutes—(3) Moral Necessity as a Factor in the Existence of Prostitution—The Moral Advocates of Prostitution—The Moral Attitude of Christianity Towards Prostitution—The Attitude of Protestantism—Recent Advocates of the Moral Necessity of Prostitution—(4) Civilizational Value as a Factor of Prostitution—The Influence of Urban Life—The Craving for Excitement—Why Servant-girls so Often Turn to Prostitution—The Small Part Played by Seduction—Prostitutes Come Largely from the Country—The Appeal of Civilization Attracts Women to Prostitution—The Corresponding Attraction Felt by Men—The Prostitute as Artist and Leader of Fashion—The Charm of Vulgarity.

IV. The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution:—The Decay of the Brothel—The Tendency to the Humanization of Prostitution—The Monetary Aspects of Prostitution—The Geisha—The Hetaira—The Moral Revolt Against Prostitution—Squalid Vice Based on Luxurious Virtue—The Ordinary Attitude Towards Prostitutes—Its Cruelty Absurd—The Need of Reforming Prostitution—The Need of Reforming Marriage—These These Two Needs Closely Correlated—The Dynamic Relationships Involved.

It is essential that the act of prostitution should be habitually performed with "various persons." A woman who gains her living by being mistress to a man, to whom she is faithful, is not a prostitute, although she often becomes one afterwards, and may have been one before. The exact point at which a woman begins to be a prostitute is a question of considerable importance in countries in which prostitutes are subject to registration. Thus in Berlin, not long ago, a girl who was mistress to a rich cavalry officer and supported by him, during the illness of the officer accidentally met a man whom she had formerly known, and once or twice invited him to see her, receiving from him presents in money. This somehow came to the knowledge of the police, and she was arrested and sentenced to one day's imprisonment as an unregistered prostitute. On appeal, however, the sentence was annulled. Liszt, in his Strafrecht, lays it down that a girl who obtains whole or part of her income from "fixed relationships" is not practicing unchastity for gain in the sense of the German law (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Jahrgang 1, Heft 9, p. 345).

The theory that religious prostitution developed, as a general rule, out of the belief that the generative activity of human beings possessed a mysterious and sacred influence in promoting the fertility of Nature generally seems to have been first set forth by Mannhardt in his Antike Wald- und Feldkulte (pp. 283 et seq.). It is supported by Dr. F. S. Krauss ("Beischlafausübung als Kulthandlung," Anthropophyteia, vol. iii, p. 20), who refers to the significant fact that in Baruch's time, at a period long anterior to Herodotus, sacred prostitution took place under the trees. Dr. J. G. Frazer has more especially developed this conception of the origin of sacred prostitution in his Adonis, Attis, Osiris. He thus summarizes his lengthy discussion: "We may conclude that a great Mother Goddess, the personification of all the reproductive energies of nature, was worshipped under different names, but with a substantial similarity of myth and ritual by many peoples of western Asia; that associated with her was a lover, or rather series of lovers, divine yet mortal, with whom she mated year by year, their commerce being deemed essential to the propagation of animals and plants, each in their several kind; and further, that the fabulous union of the divine pair was simulated, and, as it were, multiplied on earth by the real, though temporary, union of the human sexes at the sanctuary of the goddess for the sake of thereby ensuring the fruitfulness of the ground and the increase of man and beast. In course of time, as the institution of individual marriage grew in favor, and the old communism fell more and more into discredit, the revival of the ancient practice, even for a single occasion in a woman's life, became ever more repugnant to the moral sense of the people, and accordingly they resorted to various expedients for evading in practice the obligation which they still acknowledged in theory.... But while the majority of women thus contrived to observe the form of religion without sacrificing their virtue, it was still thought necessary to the general welfare that a certain number of them should discharge the old obligation in the old way. These became prostitutes, either for life or for a term of years, at one of the temples: dedicated to the service of religion, they were invested with a sacred character, and their vocation, far from being deemed infamous, was probably long regarded by the laity as an exercise of more than common virtue, and rewarded with a tribute of mixed wonder, reverence, and pity, not unlike that which in some parts of the world is still paid to women who seek to honor their Creator in a different way by renouncing the natural functions of their sex and the tenderest relations of humanity" (J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 1907, pp. 23 et seq.).

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that this theory represents the central and primitive idea which led to the development of sacred prostitution. It seems equally clear, however, that as time went on, and especially as temple cults developed and priestly influence increased, this fundamental and primitive idea tended to become modified, and even transformed. The primitive conception became specialized in the belief that religious benefits, and especially the gift of fruitfulness, were gained by the worshipper, who thus sought the goddess's favor by an act of unchastity which might be presumed to be agreeable to an unchaste deity. The rite of Mylitta, as described by Herodotus, was a late development of this kind in an ancient civilization, and the benefit sought was evidently for the worshipper herself. This has been pointed out by Dr. Westermarck, who remarks that the words spoken to the woman by her partner as he gives her the coin—"May the goddess be auspicious to thee!"—themselves indicate that the object of the act was to insure her fertility, and he refers also to the fact that strangers frequently had a semi-supernatural character, and their benefits a specially efficacious character (Westermarck, Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii, p. 446). It may be added that the rite of Mylitta thus became analogous with another Mediterranean rite, in which the act of simulating intercourse with the representative of a god, or his image, ensured a woman's fertility. This is the rite practiced by the Egyptians of Mendes, in which a woman went through the ceremony of simulated intercourse with the sacred goat, regarded as the representative of a deity of Pan-like character (Herodotus, Bk. ii, Ch. XLVI; and see Dulaure, Des Divinités Génératrices, Ch. II; cf. vol. v of these Studies, "Erotic Symbolism," Sect. IV). This rite was maintained by Roman women, in connection with the statues of Priapus, to a very much later date, and St. Augustine mentions how Roman matrons placed the young bride on the erect member of Priapus (De Civitate Dei, Bk. iii, Ch. IX). The idea evidently running through this whole group of phenomena is that the deity, or the representative or even mere image of the deity, is able, through a real or simulated act of intercourse, to confer on the worshipper a portion of its own exalted generative activity.

A fairly typical example of the conditions existing among savages is to be found in the South Sea Island of Rotuma, where "prostitution for money or gifts was quite unknown." Adultery after marriage was also unknown. But there was great freedom in the formation of sexual relationships before marriage (J. Stanley Gardiner, Journal Anthropological Institute, February, 1898, p. 409). Much the same is said of the Bantu Ba mbola of Africa (op. cit., July-December, 1905, p. 410).

Among the early Cymri of Wales, representing a more advanced social stage, prostitution appears to have been not absolutely unknown, but public prostitution was punished by loss of valuable privileges (R. B. Holt, "Marriage Laws and Customs of the Cymri," Journal Anthropological Institute, August-November, 1898, pp. 161-163).

Prostitution was practically unknown in Burmah, and regarded as shameful before the coming of the English and the example of the modern Hindus. The missionaries have unintentionally, but inevitably, favored the growth of prostitution by condemning free unions (Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, November, 1903, p. 720). The English brought prostitution to India. "That was not specially the fault of the English," said a Brahmin to Jules Bois, "it is the crime of your civilization. We have never had prostitutes. I mean by that horrible word the brutalized servants of the gross desire of the passerby. We had, and we have, castes of singers and dancers who are married to trees—yes, to trees—by touching ceremonies which date from Vedic times; our priests bless them and receive much money from them. They do not refuse themselves to those who love them and please them. Kings have made them rich. They represent all the arts; they are the visible beauty of the universe" (Jules Bois, Visions de l'Inde, p. 55).

Religious prostitutes, it may be added, "the servants of the god," are connected with temples in Southern India and the Deccan. They are devoted to their sacred calling from their earliest years, and it is their chief business to dance before the image of the god, to whom they are married (though in Upper India professional dancing girls are married to inanimate objects), but they are also trained in arousing and assuaging the desires of devotees who come on pilgrimage to the shrine. For the betrothal rites by which, in India, sacred prostitutes are consecrated, see, e.g., A. Van Gennep, Rites de Passage, p. 142.

In many parts of Western Asia, where barbarism had reached a high stage of development, prostitution was not unknown, though usually disapproved. The Hebrews knew it, and the historical Biblical references to prostitutes imply little reprobation. Jephtha was the son of a prostitute, brought up with the legitimate children, and the story of Tamar is instructive. But the legal codes were extremely severe on Jewish maidens who became prostitutes (the offense was quite tolerable in strange women), while Hebrew moralists exercised their invectives against prostitution; it is sufficient to refer to a well-known passage in the Book of Proverbs (see art. "Harlot," by Cheyne, in the Encyclopædia Biblica). Mahomed also severely condemned prostitution, though somewhat more tolerant to it in slave women; according to Haleby, however, prostitution was practically unknown in Islam during the first centuries after the Prophet's time.

The Persian adherents of the somewhat ascetic Zendavesta also knew prostitution, and regarded it with repulsion: "It is the Gahi [the courtesan, as an incarnation of the female demon, Gahi], O Spitama Zarathustra! who mixes in her the seed of the faithful and the unfaithful, of the worshipper of Mazda and the worshipper of the Dævas, of the wicked and the righteous. Her look dries up one-third of the mighty floods that run from the mountains, O Zarathustra; her look withers one-third of the beautiful, golden-hued, growing plants, O Zarathustra; her look withers one-third of the strength of Spenta Armaiti [the earth]; and her touch withers in the faithful one-third of his good thoughts, of his good words, of his good deeds, one-third of his strength, of his victorious power, of his holiness. Verily I say unto thee, O Spitama Zarathustra! such creatures ought to be killed even more than gliding snakes, than howling wolves, than the she-wolf that falls upon the fold, or than the she-frog that falls upon the waters with her thousandfold brood" (Zend-Avesta, the Vendidad, translated by James Darmesteter, Farfad XVIII).

In practice, however, prostitution is well established in the modern East. Thus in the Tartar-Turcoman region houses of prostitution lying outside the paths frequented by Christians have been described by a writer who appears to be well informed ("Orientalische Prostitution," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, 1907, Bd. ii, Heft 1). These houses are not regarded as immoral or forbidden, but as places in which the visitor will find a woman who gives him for a few hours the illusion of being in his own home, with the pleasure of enjoying her songs, dances, and recitations, and finally her body. Payment is made at the door, and no subsequent question of money arises; the visitor is henceforth among friends, almost as if in his own family. He treats the prostitute almost as if she were his wife, and no indecorum or coarseness of speech occurs. "There is no obscenity in the Oriental brothel." At the same time there is no artificial pretence of innocence.

In Eastern Asia, among the peoples of Mongolian stock, especially in China, we find prostitution firmly established and organized on a practical business basis. Prostitution is here accepted and viewed with no serious disfavor, but the prostitute herself is, nevertheless, treated with contempt. Young children are frequently sold to be trained to a life of prostitution, educated accordingly, and kept shut up from the world. Young widows (remarriage being disapproved) frequently also slide into a life of prostitution. Chinese prostitutes often end through opium and the ravages of syphilis (see, e.g., Coltman's The Chinese, 1900, Ch. VII). In ancient China, it is said prostitutes were a superior class and occupied a position somewhat similar to that of the hetairæ in Greece. Even in modern China, however, where they are very numerous, and the flower boats, in which in towns by the sea they usually live, very luxurious, it is chiefly for entertainment, according to some writers, that they are resorted to. Tschang Ki Tong, military attaché in Paris (as quoted by Ploss and Bartels), describes the flower boat as less analogous to a European brothel than to a café chantant; the young Chinaman comes here for music, for tea, for agreeable conversation with the flower-maidens, who are by no means necessarily called upon to minister to the lust of their visitors.

In Japan, the prostitute's lot is not so degraded as in China. The greater refinement of Japanese civilization allows the prostitute to retain a higher degree of self-respect. She is sometimes regarded with pity, but less often with contempt. She may associate openly with men, ultimately be married, even to men of good social class, and rank as a respectable woman. "In riding from Tokio to Yokohama, the past winter," Coltman observes (op. cit., p. 113), "I saw a party of four young men and three quite pretty and gaily-painted prostitutes, in the same car, who were having a glorious time. They had two or three bottles of various liquors, oranges, and fancy cakes, and they ate, drank and sang, besides playing jokes on each other and frolicking like so many kittens. You may travel the whole length of the Chinese Empire and never witness such a scene." Yet the history of Japanese prostitutes (which has been written in an interesting and well-informed book, The Nightless City, by an English student of sociology who remains anonymous) shows that prostitution in Japan has not only been severely regulated, but very widely looked down upon, and that Japanese prostitutes have often had to suffer greatly; they were at one time practically slaves and often treated with much hardship. They are free now, and any condition approaching slavery is strictly prohibited and guarded against. It would seem, however, that the palmiest days of Japanese prostitution lay some centuries back. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century Japanese prostitutes were highly accomplished in singing, dancing, music, etc. Towards this period, however, they seem to have declined in social consideration and to have ceased to be well educated. Yet even to-day, says Matignon ("La Prostitution au Japon," Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, October, 1906), less infamy attaches to prostitution in Japan than in Europe, while at the same time there is less immorality in Japan than in Europe. Though prostitution is organized like the postal or telegraph service, there is also much clandestine prostitution. The prostitution quarters are clean, beautiful and well-kept, but the Japanese prostitutes have lost much of their native good taste in costume by trying to imitate European fashions. It was when prostitution began to decline two centuries ago, that the geishas first appeared and were organized in such a way that they should not, if possible, compete as prostitutes with the recognized and licensed inhabitants of the Yoshiwara, as the quarter is called to which prostitutes are confined. The geishas, of course, are not prostitutes, though their virtue may not always be impregnable, and in social position they correspond to actresses in Europe.

In Korea, at all events before Korea fell into the hands of the Japanese, it would seem that there was no distinction between the class of dancing girls and prostitutes. "Among the courtesans," Angus Hamilton states, "the mental abilities are trained and developed with a view to making them brilliant and entertaining companions. These 'leaves of sunlight' are called gisaing, and correspond to the geishas of Japan. Officially, they are attached to a department of government, and are controlled by a bureau of their own, in common with the Court musicians. They are supported from the national treasury, and they are in evidence at official dinners and all palace entertainments. They read and recite; they dance and sing; they become accomplished artists and musicians. They dress with exceptional taste; they move with exceeding grace; they are delicate in appearance, very frail and very human, very tender, sympathetic, and imaginative." But though they are certainly the prettiest women in Korea, move in the highest society, and might become concubines of the Emperor, they are not allowed to marry men of good class (Angus Hamilton, Korea, p. 52).

Before the term "courtesan" came into repute, prostitutes were even in Italy commonly called "sinners," peccatrice. The change, Graf remarks in a very interesting study of the Renaissance prostitute ("Una Cortigiana fra Mille," Attraverso il Cinquecento, pp. 217-351), "reveals a profound alteration in ideas and in life;" a term that suggested infamy gave place to one that suggested approval, and even honor, for the courts of the Renaissance period represented the finest culture of the time. The best of these courtesans seem to have been not altogether unworthy of the honor they received. We can detect this in their letters. There is a chapter on the letters of Renaissance prostitutes, especially those of Camilla de Pisa which are marked by genuine passion, in Lothar Schmidt's Frauenbriefe der Renaissance. The famous Imperia, called by a Pope in the early years of the sixteenth century "nobilissimum Romæ scortum," knew Latin and could write Italian verse. Other courtesans knew Italian and Latin poetry by heart, while they were accomplished in music, dancing, and speech. We are reminded of ancient Greece, and Graf, discussing how far the Renaissance courtesans resembled the hetairæ, finds a very considerable likeness, especially in culture and influence, though with some differences due to the antagonism between religion and prostitution at the later period.

The most distinguished figure in every respect among the courtesans of that time was certainly Tullia D'Aragona. She was probably the daughter of Cardinal D'Aragona (an illegitimate scion of the Spanish royal family) by a Ferrarese courtesan who became his mistress. Tullia has gained a high reputation by her verse. Her best sonnet is addressed to a youth of twenty, whom she passionately loved, but who did not return her love. Her Guerrino Meschino, a translation from the Spanish, is a very pure and chaste work. She was a woman of refined instincts and aspirations, and once at least she abandoned her life of prostitution. She was held in high esteem and respect. When, in 1546, Cosimo, Duke of Florence, ordered all prostitutes to wear a yellow veil or handkerchief as a public badge of their profession, Tullia appealed to the Duchess, a Spanish lady of high character, and received permission to dispense with this badge on account of her "rara scienzia di poesia et filosofia." She dedicated her Rime to the Duchess. Tullia D'Aragona was very beautiful, with yellow hair, and remarkably large and bright eyes, which dominated those who came near her. She was of proud bearing and inspired unusual respect (G. Biagi, "Un' Etera Romana," Nuova Antologia, vol. iv, 1886, pp. 655-711; S. Bongi, Rivista critica della Letteratura Italiana, 1886, IV, p. 186).

Tullia D'Aragona was clearly not a courtesan at heart. Perhaps the most typical example of the Renaissance courtesan at her best is furnished by Veronica Franco, born in 1546 at Venice, of middle class family and in early life married to a doctor. Of her also it has been said that, while by profession a prostitute, she was by inclination a poet. But she appears to have been well content with her profession, and never ashamed of it. Her life and character have been studied by Arturo Graf, and more slightly in a little book by Tassini. She was highly cultured, and knew several languages; she also sang well and played on many instruments. In one of her letters she advises a youth who was madly in love with her that if he wishes to obtain her favors he must leave off importuning her and devote himself tranquilly to study. "You know well," she adds, "that all those who claim to be able to gain my love, and who are extremely dear to me, are strenuous in studious discipline.... If my fortune allowed it I would spend all my time quietly in the academies of virtuous men." The Diotimas and Aspasias of antiquity, as Graf comments, would not have demanded so much of their lovers. In her poems it is possible to trace some of her love histories, and she often shows herself torn by jealousy at the thought that perhaps another woman may approach her beloved. Once she fell in love with an ecclesiastic, possibly a bishop, with whom she had no relationships, and after a long absence, which healed her love, she and he became sincere friends. Once she was visited by Henry III of France, who took away her portrait, while on her part she promised to dedicate a book to him; she so far fulfilled this as to address some sonnets to him and a letter; "neither did the King feel ashamed of his intimacy with the courtesan," remarks Graf, "nor did she suspect that he would feel ashamed of it." When Montaigne passed through Venice she sent him a little book of hers, as we learn from his Journal, though they do not appear to have met. Tintoret was one of her many distinguished friends, and she was a strenuous advocate of the high qualities of modern, as compared with ancient, art. Her friendships were affectionate, and she even seems to have had various grand ladies among her friends. She was, however, so far from being ashamed of her profession of courtesan that in one of her poems she affirms she has been taught by Apollo other arts besides those he is usually regarded as teaching:

In a certain catalogo of the prices of Venetian courtesans Veronica is assigned only 2 scudi for her favors, while the courtesan to whom the catalogue is dedicated is set down at 25 scudi. Graf thinks there may be some mistake or malice here, and an Italian gentleman of the time states that she required not less than 50 scudi from those to whom she was willing to accord what Montaigne called the "negotiation entière."

In regard to this matter it may be mentioned that, as stated by Bandello, it was the custom for a Venetian prostitute to have six or seven gentlemen at a time as her lovers. Each was entitled to come to sup and sleep with her on one night of the week, leaving her days free. They paid her so much per month, but she always definitely reserved the right to receive a stranger passing through Venice, if she wished, changing the time of her appointment with her lover for the night. The high and special prices which we find recorded are, of course, those demanded from the casual distinguished stranger who came to Venice as, once in the sixteenth century, Montaigne came.

In 1580 (when not more than thirty-four) Veronica confessed to the Holy Office that she had had six children. In the same year she formed the design of founding a home, which should not be a monastery, where prostitutes who wished to abandon their mode of life could find a refuge with their children, if they had any. This seems to have led to the establishment of a Casa del Soccorso. In 1591 she died of fever, reconciled with God and blessed by many unfortunates. She had a good heart and a sound intellect, and was the last of the great Renaissance courtesans who revived Greek hetairism (Graf, Attraverso il Cinquecento, pp. 217-351). Even in sixteenth century Venice, however, it will be seen, Veronica Franco seems to have been not altogether at peace in the career of a courtesan. She was clearly not adapted for ordinary marriage, yet under the most favorable conditions that the modern world has ever offered it may still be doubted whether a prostitute's career can offer complete satisfaction to a woman of large heart and brain.

Ninon de Lenclos, who is frequently called "the last of the great courtesans," may seem an exception to the general rule as to the inability of a woman of good heart, high character, and fine intelligence to find satisfaction in a prostitute's life. But it is a total misconception alike of Ninon de Lenclos's temperament and her career to regard her as in any true sense a prostitute at all. A knowledge of even the barest outlines of her life ought to prevent such a mistake. Born early in the seventeenth century, she was of good family on both sides; her mother was a woman of severe life, but her father, a gentleman of Touraine, inspired her with his own Epicurean philosophy as well as his love of music. She was extremely well educated. At the age of sixteen or seventeen she had her first lover, the noble and valiant Gaspard de Coligny; he was followed for half a century by a long succession of other lovers, sometimes more than one at a time; three years was the longest period during which she was faithful to one lover. Her attractions lasted so long that, it is said, three generations of Sévignés were among her lovers. Tallemant des Réaux enables us to study in detail her liaisons.

It is not, however, the abundance of lovers which makes a woman a prostitute, but the nature of her relationships with them. Sainte-Beuve, in an otherwise admirable study of Ninon de Lenclos (Causeries du Lundi, vol. iv), seems to reckon her among the courtesans. But no woman is a prostitute unless she uses men as a source of pecuniary gain. Not only is there no evidence that this was the case with Ninon, but all the evidence excludes such a relationship. "It required much skill," said Voltaire, "and a great deal of love on her part, to induce her to accept presents." Tallemant, indeed, says that she sometimes took money from her lovers, but this statement probably involves nothing beyond what is contained in Voltaire's remark, and, in any case, Tallemant's gossip, though usually well-informed, was not always reliable. All are agreed as to her extreme disinterestedness.

When we hear precisely of Ninon de Lenclos in connection with money, it is not as receiving a gift, but only as repaying a debt to an old lover, or restoring a large sum left with her for safe keeping when the owner was exiled. Such incidents are far from suggesting the professional prostitute of any age; they are rather the relationships which might exist between men friends. Ninon de Lenclos's character was in many respects far from perfect, but she combined many masculine virtues, and especially probity, with a temperament which, on the whole, was certainly feminine; she hated hypocrisy, and she was never influenced by pecuniary considerations. She was, moreover, never reckless, but always retained a certain self-restraint and temperance, even in eating and drinking, and, we are told, she never drank wine. She was, as Sainte-Beuve has remarked, the first to realize that there must be the same virtues for men and for women, and that it is absurd to reduce all feminine virtues to one. "Our sex has been burdened with all the frivolities," she wrote, "and men have reserved to themselves the essential qualities: I have made myself a man." She sometimes dressed as a man when riding (see, e.g., Correspondence Authentique of Ninon de Lenclos, with a good introduction by Emile Colombey). Consciously or not, she represented a new feminine idea at a period when—as we may see in many forgotten novels written by the women of that time—ideas were beginning to emerge in the feminine sphere. She was the first, and doubtless, from one point of view, the most extreme representative of a small and distinguished group of French women among whom Georges Sand is the finest personality.

Thus it is idle to attempt to adorn the history of prostitution with the name of Ninon de Lenclos. A debauched old prostitute would never, like Ninon towards the end of her long life, have been able to retain or to conquer the affection and the esteem of many of the best men and women of her time; even to the austere Saint-Simon it seemed that there reigned in her little court a decorum which the greatest princesses cannot achieve. She was not a prostitute, but a woman of unique personality with a little streak of genius in it. That she was inimitable we need not perhaps greatly regret. In her old age, in 1699, her old friend and former lover, Saint-Evremond, wrote to her, with only a little exaggeration, that there were few princesses and few saints who would not leave their courts and their cloisters to change places with her. "If I had known beforehand what my life would be I would have hanged myself," was her oft-quoted answer. It is, indeed, a solitary phrase that slips in, perhaps as the expression of a momentary mood; one may make too much of it. More truly characteristic is the fine saying in which her Epicurean philosophy seems to stretch out towards Nietzsche: "La joie de l'esprit en marque la force."

In 1860 a Mayor of Portsmouth felt it his duty to attempt to suppress prostitution. "In the early part of his mayoralty," according to a witness before the Select Committee on the Contagious Diseases Acts (p. 393), "there was an order passed that every beerhouse-keeper and licensed victualer in the borough known to harbor these women would be dealt with, and probably lose his license. On a given day about three hundred or four hundred of these forlorn outcasts were bundled wholesale into the streets, and they formed up in a large body, many of them with only a shift and a petticoat on, and with a lot of drunken men and boys with a fife and fiddle they paraded the streets for several days. They marched in a body to the workhouse, but for many reasons they were refused admittance.... These women wandered about for two or three days shelterless, and it was felt that the remedy was very much worse than the disease, and the women were allowed to go back to their former places."

Similar experiments have been made even more recently in America. "In Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1891, the houses of prostitutes were closed, the inmates turned out upon the streets, and were refused lodging and even food by the citizens of that place. A wave of popular remonstrance, all over the country, at the outrage on humanity, created a reaction which resulted in a last condition by no means better than the first." In the same year also a similar incident occurred in New York with the same unfortunate results (Isidore Dyer, "The Municipal Control of Prostitution in the United States," report presented to the Brussels International Conference in 1899).

It is in Germany that the attempt to regulate prostitution still remains most persistent, with results that in Germany itself are regarded as unfortunate. Thus the German law inflicts a penalty on householders who permit illegitimate sexual intercourse in their houses. This is meant to strike the unlicensed prostitute, but it really encourages prostitution, for a decent youth and girl who decide to form a relationship which later may develop into marriage, and which is not illegal (for extra-marital sexual intercourse per se is not in Germany, as it is by the antiquated laws of several American States, a punishable offense), are subjected to so much trouble and annoyance by the suspicious police that it is much easier for the girl to become a prostitute and put herself under the protection of the police. The law was largely directed against those who live on the profits of prostitution. But in practice it works out differently. The prostitute simply has to pay extravagantly high rents, so that her landlord really lives on the fruits of her trade, while she has to carry on her business with increased activity and on a larger scale in order to cover her heavy expenses (P. Hausmeister, "Zur Analyse der Prostitution," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, vol. ii, 1907, p. 294).

In Italy, opinion on this matter is much divided. The regulation of prostitution has been successively adopted, abandoned, and readopted. In Switzerland, the land of governmental experiments, various plans are tried in different cantons. In some there is no attempt to interfere with prostitution, except under special circumstances; in others all prostitution, and even fornication generally, is punishable; in Geneva only native prostitutes are permitted to practice; in Zurich, since 1897, prostitution is prohibited, but care is taken to put no difficulties in the path of free sexual relationships which are not for gain. With these different regulations, morals in Switzerland generally are said to be much on the same level as elsewhere (Moreau-Christophe, Du Problème de la Misère, vol. iii, p. 259). The same conclusion holds good of London. A disinterested observer, Félix Remo (La Vie Galante en Angleterre, 1888, p. 237), concluded that, notwithstanding its free trade in prostitution, its alcoholic excesses, its vices of all kinds, "London is one of the most moral capitals in Europe." The movement towards freedom in this matter has been evidenced in recent years by the abandonment of the system of regulation by Denmark in 1906.

The ways in which various factors of environment and suggestion unite to lead a girl into the paths of prostitution are indicated in the following statement in which a correspondent has set forth his own conclusions on this matter as a man of the world: "I have had a somewhat varied experience among loose women, and can say, without hesitation, that not more than 1 per cent, of the women I have known could be regarded as educated. This indicates that almost invariably they are of humble origin, and the terrible cases of overcrowding that are daily brought to light suggest that at very early ages the sense of modesty becomes extinct, and long before puberty a familiarity with things sexual takes place. As soon as they are old enough these girls are seduced by their sweethearts; the familiarity with which they regard sexual matters removes the restraint which surrounds a girl whose early life has been spent in decent surroundings. Later they go to work in factories and shops; if pretty and attractive, they consort with managers and foremen. Then the love of finery, which forms so large a part of the feminine character, tempts the girl to become the 'kept' woman of some man of means. A remarkable thing in this connection is the fact that they rarely enjoy excitement with their protectors, preferring rather the coarser embraces of some man nearer their own station in life, very often a soldier. I have not known many women who were seduced and deserted, though this is a fiction much affected by prostitutes. Barmaids supply a considerable number to the ranks of prostitution, largely on account of their addiction to drink; drunkenness invariably leads to laxness of moral restraint in women. Another potent factor in the production of prostitutes lies in the flare of finery flaunted by some friend who has adopted the life. A girl, working hard to live, sees some friend, perhaps making a call in the street where the hard-working girl lives, clothed in finery, while she herself can hardly get enough to eat. She has a conversation with her finely-clad friend who tells her how easily she can earn money, explaining what a vital asset the sexual organs are, and soon another one is added to the ranks."

There is some interest in considering the reasons assigned for prostitutes entering their career. In some countries this has been estimated by those who come closely into official or other contact with prostitutes. In other countries, it is the rule for girls, before they are registered as prostitutes, to state the reasons for which they desire to enter the career.

Parent-Duchâtelet, whose work on prostitutes in Paris is still an authority, presented the first estimate of this kind. He found that of over five thousand prostitutes, 1441 were influenced by poverty, 1425 by seduction of lovers who had abandoned them, 1255 by the loss of parents from death or other cause. By such an estimate, nearly the whole number are accounted for by wretchedness, that is by economic causes, alone (Parent-Duchâtelet, De la Prostitution, 1857, vol. i, p. 107).

In Brussels during a period of twenty years (1865-1884) 3505 women were inscribed as prostitutes. The causes they assigned for desiring to take to this career present a different picture from that shown by Parent-Duchâtelet, but perhaps a more reliable one, although there are some marked and curious discrepancies. Out of the 3505, 1523 explained that extreme poverty was the cause of their degradation; 1118 frankly confessed that their sexual passions were the cause; 420 attributed their fall to evil company; 316 said they were disgusted and weary of their work, because the toil was so arduous and the pay so small; 101 had been abandoned by their lovers; 10 had quarrelled with their parents; 7 were abandoned by their husbands; 4 did not agree with their guardians; 3 had family quarrels; 2 were compelled to prostitute themselves by their husbands, and 1 by her parents (Lancet, June 28, 1890, p. 1442).

In London, Merrick found that of 16,022 prostitutes who passed through his hands during the years he was chaplain at Millbank prison, 5061 voluntarily left home or situation for "a life of pleasure;" 3363 assigned poverty as the cause; 3154 were "seduced" and drifted on to the street; 1636 were betrayed by promises of marriage and abandoned by lover and relations. On the whole, Merrick states, 4790, or nearly one-third of the whole number, may be said to owe the adoption of their career directly to men, 11,232 to other causes. He adds that of those pleading poverty a large number were indolent and incapable (G. P. Merrick, Work Among the Fallen, p. 38).

Logan, an English city missionary with an extensive acquaintance with prostitutes, divided them into the following groups: (1) One-fourth of the girls are servants, especially in public houses, beer shops, etc., and thus led into the life; (2) one-fourth come from factories, etc.; (3) nearly one-fourth are recruited by procuresses who visit country towns, markets, etc.; (4) a final group includes, on the one hand, those who are induced to become prostitutes by destitution, or indolence, or a bad temper, which unfits them for ordinary avocations, and, on the other hand, those who have been seduced by a false promise of marriage (W. Logan, The Great Social Evil, 1871, p. 53).

In America Sanger has reported the results of inquiries made of two thousand New York prostitutes as to the causes which induced them to take up their avocation:

(Sanger, History of Prostitution, p. 488.)

In America, again, more recently, Professor Woods Hutchinson put himself into communication with some thirty representative men in various great metropolitan centres, and thus summarizes the answers as regards the etiology of prostitution:

(Woods Hutchinson, "The Economics of Prostitution," American Gynæcologic and Obstetric Journal, September, 1895; Id., The Gospel According to Darwin, p. 194.)

In Italy, in 1881, among 10,422 inscribed prostitutes from the age of seventeen upwards, the causes of prostitution were classified as follows:

(Ferriani, Minorenni Delinquenti, p. 193.) The reasons assigned by Russian prostitutes for taking up their career are (according to Federow) as follows:

(Summarized in Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Nov. 15, 1901.)

The following case, though noted down over twenty years ago, is fairly typical of a certain class, among the lower ranks of prostitution, in which the economic factor counts for much, but in which we ought not too hastily to assume that it is the sole factor.

Widow, aged thirty, with two children. Works in an umbrella manufactory in the East End of London, earning eighteen shillings a week by hard work, and increasing her income by occasionally going out on the streets in the evenings. She haunts a quiet side street which is one of the approaches to a large city railway terminus. She is a comfortable, almost matronly-looking woman, quietly dressed in a way that is only noticeable from the skirts being rather short. If spoken to she may remark that she is "waiting for a lady friend," talks in an affected way about the weather, and parenthetically introduces her offers. She will either lead a man into one of the silent neighboring lanes filled with warehouses, or will take him home with her. She is willing to accept any sum the man may be willing or able to give; occasionally it is a sovereign, sometimes it is only a sixpence; on an average she earns a few shillings in an evening. She had only been in London for ten months; before that she lived in Newcastle. She did not go on the streets there; "circumstances alter cases," she sagely remarks. Though not speaking well of the police, she says they do not interfere with her as they do with some of the girls. She never gives them money, but hints that it is sometimes necessary to gratify their desires in order to keep on good terms with them.

One circumstance alone should have sufficed to indicate that the inability of many women to secure "a living wage," is far from being the most fundamental cause of prostitution: a large proportion of prostitutes come from the ranks of domestic service. Of all the great groups of female workers, domestic servants are the freest from economic anxieties; they do not pay for food or for lodging; they often live as well as their mistresses, and in a large proportion of cases they have fewer money anxieties than their mistresses. Moreover, they supply an almost universal demand, so that there is never any need for even very moderately competent servants to be in want of work. They constitute, it is true, a very large body which could not fail to supply a certain contingent of recruits to prostitution. But when we see that domestic service is the chief reservoir from which prostitutes are drawn, it should be clear that the craving for food and shelter is by no means the chief cause of prostitution.

It may be added that, although the significance of this predominance of servants among prostitutes is seldom realized by those who fancy that to remove poverty is to abolish prostitution, it has not been ignored by the more thoughtful students of social questions. Thus Sherwell, while pointing out truly that, to a large extent, "morals fluctuate with trade," adds that, against the importance of the economic factor, it is a suggestive and in every way impressive fact that the majority of the girls who frequent the West End of London (88 per cent., according to the Salvation Army's Registers) are drawn from domestic service where the economic struggle is not severely felt (Arthur Sherwell, Life in West London, Ch. V, "Prostitution").

It is at the same time worthy of note that by the conditions of their lives servants, more than any other class, resemble prostitutes (Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo have pointed this out in La Mala Vida en Madrid, p. 240). Like prostitutes, they are a class of women apart; they are not entitled to the considerations and the little courtesies usually paid to other women; in some countries they are even registered, like prostitutes; it is scarcely surprising that when they suffer from so many of the disadvantages of the prostitute, they should sometimes desire to possess also some of her advantages. Lily Braun (Frauenfrage, pp. 389 et seq.) has set forth in detail these unfavorable conditions of domestic labor as they bear on the tendency of servant-girls to become prostitutes. R. de Ryckère, in his important work, La Servante Criminelle (1907, pp. 460 et seq.; cf., the same author's article, "La Criminalité Ancillaire," Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, July and December, 1906), has studied the psychology of the servant-girl. He finds that she is specially marked by lack of foresight, vanity, lack of invention, tendency to imitation, and mobility of mind. These are characters which ally her to the prostitute. De Ryckère estimates the proportion of former servants among prostitutes generally as fifty per cent., and adds that what is called the "white slavery" here finds its most complacent and docile victims. He remarks, however, that the servant prostitute is, on the whole, not so much immoral as non-moral.

In Paris Parent-Duchâtelet found that, in proportion to their number, servants furnished the largest contingent to prostitution, and his editors also found that they head the list (Parent-Duchâtelet, edition 1857, vol. i, p. 83). Among clandestine prostitutes at Paris, Commenge has more recently found that former servants constitute forty per cent. In Bordeaux Jeannel (De le Prostitution Publique, p. 102) also found that in 1860 forty per cent, of prostitutes had been servants, seamstresses coming next with thirty-seven per cent.

In Germany and Austria it has long been recognized that domestic service furnishes the chief number of recruits to prostitution. Lippert, in Germany, and Gross-Hoffinger, in Austria, pointed out this predominance of maid-servants and its significance before the middle of the nineteenth century, and more recently Blaschko has stated ("Hygiene der Syphilis" in Weyl's Handbuch der Hygiene, Bd. ii, p. 40) that among Berlin prostitutes in 1898 maid-servants stand at the head with fifty-one per cent. Baumgarten has stated that in Vienna the proportion of servants is fifty-eight per cent.

In England, according to the Report of a Select Committee of the Lords on the laws for the protection of children, sixty per cent, of prostitutes have been servants. F. Remo, in his Vie Galante en Angleterre, states the proportion as eighty per cent. It would appear to be even higher as regards the West End of London. Taking London as a whole the extensive statistics of Merrick (Work Among the Fallen), chaplain of the Millbank Prison, showed that out of 14,790 prostitutes, 5823, or about forty per cent., had previously been servants, laundresses coming next, and then dressmakers; classifying his data somewhat more summarily and roughly, Merrick found that the proportion of servants was fifty-three per cent.

In America, among two thousand prostitutes, Sanger states that forty-three per cent, had been servants, dressmakers coming next, but at a long interval, with six per cent. (Sanger, History of Prostitution, p. 524). Among Philadelphia prostitutes, Goodchild states that "domestics are probably in largest proportion," although some recruits may be found from almost any occupation.

It is the same in other countries. In Italy, according to Tammeo (La Prostituzione, p. 100), servants come first among prostitutes with a proportion of twenty-eight per cent., followed by the group of dressmakers, tailoresses and milliners, seventeen per cent. In Sardinia, A Mantegazza states, most prostitutes are servants from the country. In Russia, according to Fiaux, the proportion is forty-five per cent. In Madrid, according to Eslava (as quoted by Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo (La Mala Vida, en Madrid, p. 239)), servants come at the head of registered prostitutes with twenty-seven per cent.—almost the same proportion as in Italy—and are followed by dressmakers. In Sweden, according to Welander (Monatshefte für Praktische Dermatologie, 1899, p. 477) among 2541 inscribed prostitutes, 1586 (or sixty-two per cent.) were domestic servants; at a long interval followed 210 seamstresses, then 168 factory workers, etc.

Lombroso has more especially advocated the doctrine that prostitution is the vicarious equivalent of criminality. In this he was developing the results reached, in the important study of the Jukes family, by Dugdale, who found that "there where the brothers commit crime, the sisters adopt prostitution;" the fines and imprisonments of the women of the family were not for violations of the right of property, but mainly for offences against public decency. "The psychological as well as anatomical identity of the criminal and the born prostitute," Lombroso and Ferrero concluded, "could not be more complete: both are identical with the moral insane, and therefore, according to the axiom, equal to each other. There is the same lack of moral sense, the same hardness of heart, the same precocious taste for evil, the same indifference to social infamy, the same volatility, love of idleness, and lack of foresight, the same taste for facile pleasures, for the orgy and for alcohol, the same, or almost the same, vanity. Prostitution is only the feminine side of criminality. And so true is it that prostitution and criminality are two analogous, or, so to say, parallel, phenomena, that at their extremes they meet. The prostitute is, therefore, psychologically a criminal: if she commits no offenses it is because her physical weakness, her small intelligence, the facility of acquiring what she wants by more easy methods, dispenses her from the necessity of crime, and on these very grounds prostitution represents the specific form of feminine criminality." The authors add that "prostitution is, in a certain sense, socially useful as an outlet for masculine sexuality and a preventive of crime" (Lombroso and Ferrero, La Donna Delinquente, 1893, p. 571).

Those who have opposed this view have taken various grounds, and by no means always understood the position they are attacking. Thus W. Fischer (in Die Prostitution) vigorously argues that prostitution is not an inoffensive equivalent of criminality, but a factor of criminality. Féré, again (in Dégénérescence et Criminalité), asserts that criminality and prostitution are not equivalent, but identical. "Prostitutes and criminals," he holds, "have as a common character their unproductiveness, and consequently they are both anti-social. Prostitution thus constitutes a form of criminality." The essential character of criminals is not, however, their unproductiveness, for that they share with a considerable proportion of the wealthiest of the upper classes; it must be added, also, that the prostitute, unlike the criminal, is exercising an activity for which there is a demand, for which she is willingly paid, and for which she has to work (it has sometimes been noted that the prostitute looks down on the thief, who "does not work"); she is carrying on a profession, and is neither more nor less productive than those who carry on many more reputable professions. Aschaffenburg, also believing himself in opposition to Lombroso, argues, somewhat differently from Féré, that prostitution is not indeed, as Féré said, a form of criminality, but that it is too frequently united with criminality to be regarded as an equivalent. Mönkemöller has more recently supported the same view. Here, however, as usual, there is a wide difference of opinion as to the proportion of prostitutes of whom this is true. It is recognized by all investigators to be true of a certain number, but while Baumgarten, from an examination of eight thousand prostitutes, only found a minute proportion who were criminals, Ströhmberg found that among 462 prostitutes there were as many as 175 thieves. From another side, Morasso (as quoted in Archivio di Psichiatria, 1896, fasc. I), on the strength of his own investigations, is more clearly in opposition to Lombroso, since he protests altogether against any purely degenerative view of prostitutes which would in any way assimilate them with criminals.

One of my correspondents, who has had much experience of prostitutes, not only in Britain, but also in Germany, France, Belgium and Holland, has found that the normal manifestations of sexual feeling are much more common in British than in continental prostitutes. "I should say," he writes, "that in normal coitus foreign women are generally unconscious of sexual excitement. I don't think I have ever known a foreign woman who had any semblance of orgasm. British women, on the other hand, if a man is moderately kind, and shows that he has some feelings beyond mere sensual gratification, often abandon themselves to the wildest delights of sexual excitement. Of course in this life, as in others, there is keen competition, and a woman, to vie with her competitors, must please her gentlemen friends; but a man of the world can always distinguish between real and simulated passion." (It is possible, however, that he may be most successful in arousing the feelings of his own fellow-country women.) On the other hand, this writer finds that the foreign women are more anxious to provide for the enjoyment of their temporary consorts and to ascertain what pleases them. "The foreigner seems to make it the business of her life to discover some abnormal mode of sexual gratification for her consort." For their own pleasure also foreign prostitutes frequently ask for cunnilinctus, in preference to normal coitus, while anal coitus is also common. The difference evidently is that the British women, when they seek gratification, find it in normal coitus, while the foreign women prefer more abnormal methods. There is, however, one class of British prostitutes which this correspondent finds to be an exception to the general rule: the class of those who are recruited from the lower walks of the stage. "Such women are generally more licentious—that is to say, more acquainted with the bizarre in sexualism—than girls who come from shops or bars; they show a knowledge of fellatio, and even anal coitus, and during menstruation frequently suggest inter-mammary coitus."

Baumgarten, in Vienna, from a knowledge of over 8000 prostitutes, concluded that only a very minute proportion are either criminal or psychopathic in temperament or organization (Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie, vol. xi, 1902). It is not clear, however, that Baumgarten carried out any detailed and precise investigations. Mr. Lane, a London police magistrate, has stated as the result of his own observation, that prostitution is "at once a symptom and outcome of the same deteriorated physique and decadent moral fibre which determine the manufacture of male tramps, petty thieves, and professional beggars, of whom the prostitute is in general the female analogue" (Ethnological Journal, April, 1905, p. 41). This estimate is doubtless correct as regards a considerable proportion of the women, often enfeebled by drink, who pass through the police courts, but it could scarcely be applied without qualification to prostitutes generally.

Morasso (Archivio di Psichiatria, 1896, fasc. I) has protested against a purely degenerative view of prostitutes on the strength of his own observations. There is, he states, a category of prostitutes, unknown to scientific inquirers, which he calls that of the prostitute di alto bordo. Among these the signs of degeneration, physical or moral, are not to be found in greater number than among women who do not belong to prostitution. They reveal all sorts of characters, some of them showing great refinement, and are chiefly marked off by the possession of an unusual degree of sexual appetite. Even among the more degraded group of the bassa prostituzione, he asserts, we find a predominance of sexual, as well as professional, characters, rather than the signs of degeneration. It is sufficient to quote one more testimony, as set down many years ago by a woman of high intelligence and character, Mrs. Craik, the novelist: "The women who fall are by no means the worst of their station," she wrote. "I have heard it affirmed by more than one lady—by one in particular whose experience was as large as her benevolence—that many of them are of the very best, refined, intelligent, truthful, and affectionate. 'I don't know how it is,' she would say, 'whether their very superiority makes them dissatisfied with their own rank—such brutes or clowns as laboring men often are!—so that they fall easier victims to the rank above them; or whether, though this theory will shock many people, other virtues can exist and flourish entirely distinct from, and after the loss of, that which we are accustomed to believe the indispensable prime virtue of our sex—chastity. I cannot explain it; I can only say that it is so, that some of my most promising village girls have been the first to come to harm; and some of the best and most faithful servants I ever had, have been girls who have fallen into shame, and who, had I not gone to the rescue and put them in the way to do well, would infallibly have become "lost women"'" (A Woman's Thoughts About Women, 1858, p. 291). Various writers have insisted on the good moral qualities of prostitutes. Thus in France, Despine first enumerates their vices as (1) greediness and love of drink, (2) lying, (3) anger, (4) want of order and untidiness, (5) mobility of character, (6) need of movement, (7) tendency to homosexuality; and then proceeds to detail their good qualities: their maternal and filial affection, their charity to each other; and their refusal to denounce each other; while they are frequently religious, sometimes modest, and generally very honest (Despine, Psychologie Naturelle, vol. iii, pp. 207 et seq.; as regards Sicilian prostitutes, cf. Callari, Archivio di Psichiatria, fasc. IV, 1903). The charity towards each other, often manifested in distress, is largely neutralized by a tendency to professional suspicion and jealousy of each other.

Lombroso believes that the basis of prostitution must be found in moral idiocy. If by moral idiocy we are to understand a condition at all closely allied with insanity, this assertion is dubious. There seems no clear relationship between prostitution and insanity, and Tammeo has shown (La Prostituzione, p. 76) that the frequency of prostitutes in the various Italian provinces is in inverse ratio to the frequency of insane persons; as insanity increases, prostitution decreases. But if we mean a minor degree of moral imbecility—that is to say, a bluntness of perception for the ordinary moral considerations of civilization which, while it is largely due to the hardening influence of an unfavorable early environment, may also rest on a congenital predisposition—there can be no doubt that moral imbecility of slight degree is very frequently found among prostitutes. It would be plausible, doubtless, to say that every woman who gives her virginity in exchange for an inadequate return is an imbecile. If she gives herself for love, she has, at the worst, made a foolish mistake, such as the young and inexperienced may at any time make. But if she deliberately proposes to sell herself, and does so for nothing or next to nothing, the case is altered. The experiences of Commenge in Paris are instructive on this point. "For many young girls," he writes, "modesty has no existence, they experience no emotion in showing themselves completely undressed, they abandon themselves to any chance individual whom they will never see again. They attach no importance to their virginity; they are deflowered under the strangest conditions, without the least thought or care about the act they are accomplishing. No sentiment, no calculation, pushes them into a man's arms. They let themselves go without reflexion and without motive, in an almost animal manner, from indifference and without pleasure." He was acquainted with forty-five girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen who were deflowered by chance strangers whom they never met again; they lost their virginity, in Dumas's phrase, as they lost their milk-teeth, and could give no plausible account of the loss. A girl of fifteen, mentioned by Commenge, living with her parents who supplied all her wants, lost her virginity by casually meeting a man who offered her two francs if she would go with him; she did so without demur and soon begun to accost men on her own account. A girl of fourteen, also living comfortably with her parents, sacrificed her virginity at a fair in return for a glass of beer, and henceforth begun to associate with prostitutes. Another girl of the same age, at a local fête, wishing to go round on the hobby horse, spontaneously offered herself to the man directing the machinery for the pleasure of a ride. Yet another girl, of fifteen, at another fête, offered her virginity in return for the same momentary joy (Commenge, Prostitution Clandestine, 1897, pp. 101 et seq.). In the United States, Dr. W. Travis Gibb, examining physician to the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, bears similar testimony to the fact that in a fairly large proportion of "rape" cases the child is the willing victim. "It is horribly pathetic," he says (Medical Record, April 20, 1907), "to learn how far a nickel or a quarter will go towards purchasing the virtue of these children."

In estimating the tendency of prostitutes to display congenital physical anomalies, the crudest and most obvious test, though not a precise or satisfactory one, is the general impression produced by the face. In France, when nearly 1000 prostitutes were divided into five groups from the point of view of their looks, only from seven to fourteen per cent, were found to belong to the first group, or that of those who could be said to possess youth and beauty (Jeannel, De la Prostitution Publique, 1860, p. 168). Woods Hutchinson, again, judging from an extensive acquaintance with London, Paris, Vienna, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, asserts that a handsome or even attractive-looking prostitute, is rare, and that the general average of beauty is lower than in any other class of women. "Whatever other evils," he remarks, "the fatal power of beauty may be responsible for, it has nothing to do with prostitution" (Woods Hutchinson, "The Economics of Prostitution," American Gynæcological and Obstetric Journal, September, 1895). It must, of course, be borne in mind that these estimates are liable to be vitiated through being based chiefly on the inspection of women who most obviously belong to the class of prostitutes and have already been coarsened by their profession.

If we may conclude—and the fact is probably undisputed—that beautiful, agreeable, and harmoniously formed faces are rare rather than common among prostitutes, we may certainly say that minute examination will reveal a large number of physical abnormalities. One of the earliest important physical investigations of prostitutes was that of Dr. Pauline Tarnowsky in Russia (first published in the Vratch in 1887, and afterwards as Etudes anthropométriques sur les Prostituées et les Voleuses). She examined fifty St. Petersburg prostitutes who had been inmates of a brothel for not less than two years, and also fifty peasant women of, so far as possible, the same age and mental development. She found that (1) the prostitute showed shorter anterior-posterior and transverse diameters of skull; (2) a proportion equal to eighty-four per cent. showed various signs of physical degeneration (irregular skull, asymmetry of face, anomalies of hard palate, teeth, ears, etc.). This tendency to anomaly among the prostitutes was to some extent explained when it was found that about four-fifths of them had parents who were habitual drunkards, and nearly one-fifth were the last survivors of large families; such families have been often produced by degenerate parents.

The frequency of hereditary degeneration has been noted by Bonhoeffer among German prostitutes. He investigated 190 Breslau prostitutes in prison, and therefore of a more abnormal class than ordinary prostitutes, and found that 102 were hereditarily degenerate, and mostly with one or both parents who were drunkards; 53 also showed feeble-mindedness (Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Strafwissenschaft, Bd. xxiii, p. 106).

The most detailed examinations of ordinary non-criminal prostitutes, both anthropometrically and as regards the prevalence of anomalies, have been made in Italy, though not on a sufficiently large number of subjects to yield absolutely decisive results. Thus Fornasari made a detailed examination of sixty prostitutes belonging chiefly to Emilia and Venice, and also of twenty-seven others belonging to Bologna, the latter group being compared with a third group of twenty normal women belonging to Bologna (Archivio di Psichiatria, 1892, fasc. VI). The prostitutes were found to be of lower type than the normal individuals, having smaller heads and larger faces. As the author himself points out, his subjects were not sufficiently numerous to justify far-reaching generalizations, but it may be worth while to summarize some of his results. At equal heights the prostitutes showed greater weight; at equal ages they were of shorter stature than other women, not only of well-to-do, but of the poor class: height of face, bi-zygomatic diameter (though not the distance between zygomas), the distance from chin to external auditory meatus, and the size of the jaw were all greater in the prostitutes; the hands were longer and broader, compared to the palm, than in ordinary women; the foot also was longer in prostitutes, and the thigh, as compared to the calf, was larger. It is noteworthy that in most particulars, and especially in regard to head measurements, the variations were much greater among the prostitutes than among the other women examined; this is to some extent, though not entirely, to be accounted for by the slightly greater number of the former.

Ardu (in the same number of the Archivio) gave the result of observations (undertaken at Lombroso's suggestion) as to the frequency of abnormalities among prostitutes. The subjects were seventy-four in number and belonged to Professor Giovannini's Clinica Sifilopatica at Turin. The abnormalities investigated were virile distribution of hair on pubes, chest, and limbs, hypertrichosis on forehead, left-handedness, atrophy of nipple, and tattooing (which was only found once). Combining Ardu's observations with another series of observations on fifty-five prostitutes examined by Lombroso, it is found that virile disposition of hair is found in fifteen per cent. as against six per cent. in normal women; some degree of hypertrichosis in eighteen per cent.; left-handedness in eleven per cent. (but in normal women as high as twelve per cent. according to Gallia); and atrophy of nipple in twelve per cent.

Giuffrida-Ruggeri, again (Atti della, Società Romana di Antropologia, 1897, p. 216), on examining eighty-two prostitutes found anomalies in the following order of decreasing frequency: tendency of eyebrows to meet, lack of cranial symmetry, depression at root of nose, defective development of calves, hypertrichosis and other anomalies of hair, adherent or absent lobule, prominent zigoma, prominent forehead or frontal bones, bad implantation of teeth, Darwinian tubercle of ear, thin vertical lips. These signs are separately of little or no importance, though together not without significance as an indication of general anomaly.

More recently Ascarilla, in an elaborate study (Archivio di Psichiatria, 1906, fasc. VI, p. 812) of the finger prints of prostitutes, comes to the conclusion that even in this respect prostitutes tend to form a class showing morphological inferiority to normal women. The patterns tend to show unusual simplicity and uniformity, and the significance of this is indicated by the fact that a similar uniformity is shown by the finger prints of the insane and deaf-mutes (De Sanctis and Toscano, Atti Società Romana Antropologia, vol. viii, 1901, fasc. II).

In Chicago Dr. Harriet Alexander, in conjunction with Dr. E. S. Talbot and Dr. J. G. Kiernan, examined thirty prostitutes in the Bridewell, or House of Correction; only the "obtuse" class of professional prostitutes reach this institution, and it is not therefore surprising that they were found to exhibit very marked stigmata of degeneracy. In race nearly half of those examined were Celtic Irish. In sixteen the zygomatic processes were unequal and very prominent. Other facial asymmetries were common. In three cases the heads were of Mongoloid type; sixteen were epignathic, and eleven prognathic; five showed arrest of development of face. Brachycephaly predominated (seventeen cases); the rest were mesaticephalic; there were no dolichocephals. Abnormalities in shape of the skull were numerous, and twenty-nine had defective ears. Four were demonstrably insane, and one was an epileptic (H. C. B. Alexander, "Physical Abnormalities in Prostitutes," Chicago Academy of Medicine, April, 1893; E. S. Talbot, Degeneracy, p. 320; Id., Irregularities of the Teeth, fourth edition, p. 141).

It may be of interest to gather together a few more modern examples of statements brought forward for the moral justification of prostitution.

Thus in France Meusnier de Querlon, in his story of Psaphion, written in the middle of the eighteenth century, puts into the mouth of a Greek courtesan many interesting reflections concerning the life and position of the prostitute. She defends her profession with much skill, and argues that while men imagine that prostitutes are merely the despised victims of their pleasures, these would-be tyrants are really dupes who are ministering to the needs of the women they trample beneath their feet, and themselves equally deserve the contempt they bestow. "We return disgust for disgust, as they must surely perceive. We often abandon to them merely a statue, and while inflamed by their own desires they consume themselves on insensible charms, our tranquil coldness leisurely enjoys their sensibility. Then it is we resume all our rights. A little hot blood has brought these proud creatures to our feet, and rendered us mistresses of their fate. On which side, I ask, is the advantage?" But all men, she adds, are not so unjust towards the prostitute, and she proceeds to pronounce a eulogy, not without a slight touch of irony in it, of the utility, facility, and convenience of the brothel.

A large number of the modern writers on prostitution insist on its socially beneficial character. Thus Charles Richard concludes his book on the subject with the words: "The conduct of society with regard to prostitution must proceed from the principle of gratitude without false shame for its utility, and compassion for the poor creatures at whose expense this is attained" (La Prostitution devant le Philosophe, 1882, p. 171). "To make marriage permanent is to make it difficult," an American medical writer observes; "to make it difficult is to defer it; to defer it is to maintain in the community an increasing number of sexually perfect individuals, with normal, or, in cases where repression is prolonged, excessive sexual appetites. The social evil is the natural outcome of the physical nature of man, his inherited impulses, and the artificial conditions under which he is compelled to live" ("The Social Evil," Medicine, August and September, 1906). Woods Hutchinson, while speaking with strong disapproval of prostitution and regarding prostitutes as "the worst specimens of the sex," yet regards prostitution as a social agency of the highest value. "From a medico-economic point of view I venture to claim it as one of the grand selective and eliminative agencies of nature, and of highest value to the community. It may be roughly characterized as a safety valve for the institution of marriage" (The Gospel According to Darwin, p. 193; cf. the same author's article on "The Economics of Prostitution," summarized in Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, November 21, 1895). Adolf Gerson, in a somewhat similar spirit, argues ("Die Ursache der Prostitution," Sexual-Probleme, September, 1908) that "prostitution is one of the means used by Nature to limit the procreative activity of men, and especially to postpone the period of sexual maturity." Molinari considers that the social benefits of prostitution have been manifested in various ways from the first; by sterilizing, for instance, the more excessive manifestations of the sexual impulse prostitution suppressed the necessity for the infanticide of superfluous children, and led to the prohibition of that primitive method of limiting the population (G. de Molinari, La Viriculture, p. 45). In quite another way than that mentioned by Molinari, prostitution has even in very recent times led to the abandonment of infanticide. In the Chinese province of Ping-Yang, Matignon states, it was usual not many years ago for poor parents to kill forty per cent. of the girl children, or even all of them, at birth, for they were too expensive to rear and brought nothing in, since men who wished to marry could easily obtain a wife in the neighboring province of Wenchu, where women were very easy to obtain. Now, however, the line of steamships along the coast makes it very easy for girls to reach the brothels of Shang-Hai, where they can earn money for their families; the custom of killing them has therefore died out (Matignon, Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, 1896, p. 72). "Under present conditions," writes Dr. F. Erhard ("Auch ein Wort zur Ehereform," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Jahrgang I, Heft 9), "prostitution (in the broadest sense, including free relationships) is necessary in order that young men may, in some degree, learn to know women, for conventional conversation cannot suffice for this; an exact knowledge of feminine thought and action is, however, necessary for a proper choice, since it is seldom possible to rely on the certainty of instinct. It is good also that men should wear off their horns before marriage, for the polygamous tendency will break through somewhere. Prostitution will only spoil those men in whom there is not much to spoil, and if the desire for marriage is thus lost, the man's unbegotten children may have cause to thank him." Neisser, Näcke, and many others, have pleaded for prostitution, and even for brothels, as "necessary evils."

It is scarcely necessary to add that many, among even the strongest upholders of the moral advantages of prostitution, believe that some improvement in method is still desirable. Thus Bérault looks forward to a time when regulated brothels will become less contemptible. Various improvements may, he thinks, in the near future, "deprive them of the barbarous attributes which mark them out for the opprobrium of the skeptical or ignorant multitude, while their recognizable advantages will put an end to the contempt aroused by their cynical aspect" (La Maison de Tolérance, Thèse de Paris, 1904).

Charles Booth seems to be of the same opinion, and quotes (Life and Labor of the People, Third Series, vol. vii, p. 364) from a Rescue Committee Report: "The popular idea is, that these women are eager to leave a life of sin. The plain and simple truth is that, for the most part, they have no desire at all to be rescued. So many of these women do not, and will not, regard prostitution as a sin. 'I am taken out to dinner and to some place of amusement every night; why should I give it up?'" Merrick, who found that five per cent. of 14,000 prostitutes who passed through Millbank Prison, were accustomed to combine religious observance with the practice of their profession, also remarks in regard to their feelings about morality: "I am convinced that there are many poor men and women who do not in the least understand what is implied in the term 'immorality.' Out of courtesy to you, they may assent to what you say, but they do not comprehend your meaning when you talk of virtue or purity; you are simply talking over their heads" (Merrick, op. cit., p. 28). The same attitude may be found among prostitutes everywhere. In Italy Ferriani mentions a girl of fifteen who, when accused of indecency with a man in a public garden, denied with tears and much indignation. He finally induced her to confess, and then asked her: "Why did you try to make me believe you were a good girl?" She hesitated, smiled, and said: "Because they say girls ought not to do what I do, but ought to work. But I am what I am, and it is no concern of theirs." This attitude is often more than an instinctive feeling; in intelligent prostitutes it frequently becomes a reasoned conviction. "I can bear everything, if so it must be," wrote the author of the Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (p. 291), "even serious and honorable contempt, but I cannot bear scorn. Contempt—yes, if it is justified. If a poor and pretty girl with sick and bitter heart stands alone in life, cast off, with temptations and seductions offering on every side, and, in spite of that, out of inner conviction she chooses the grey and monotonous path of renunciation and middle-class morality, I recognize in that girl a personality, who has a certain justification in looking down with contemptuous pity on weaker girls. But those geese who, under the eyes of their shepherds and life-long owners, have always been pastured in smooth green fields, have certainly no right to laugh scornfully at others who have not been so fortunate." Nor must it be supposed that there is necessarily any sophistry in the prostitute's justification of herself. Some of our best thinkers and observers have reached a conclusion that is not dissimilar. "The actual conditions of society are opposed to any high moral feeling in women," Marro observes (La Pubertà, p. 462), "for between those who sell themselves to prostitution and those who sell themselves to marriage, the only difference is in price and duration of the contract."

It is sometimes stated that the prevalence of prostitution among girls who were formerly servants is due to the immense numbers of servants who are seduced by their masters or the young men of the family, and are thus forced on to the streets. Undoubtedly in a certain proportion of cases, perhaps sometimes a fairly considerable proportion, this is a decisive factor in the matter, but it scarcely seems to be the chief factor. The existence of relationships between servants and masters, it must be remembered, by no means necessarily implies seduction. In a large number of cases the servant in a household is, in sexual matters, the teacher rather than the pupil. (In "The Sexual Impulse in Women," in the third volume of these Studies, I have discussed the part played by servants as sexual initiators of the young boys in the households in which they are placed.) The more precise statistics of the causes of prostitution seldom assign seduction as the main determining factor in more than about twenty per cent. of cases, though this is obviously one of the most easily avowable motives (see ante, p. 256). Seduction by any kind of employer constitutes only a proportion (usually less than half) even of these cases. The special case of seduction of servants by masters can thus play no very considerable part as a factor of prostitution.

The statistics of the parentage of illegitimate children have some bearing on this question. In a series of 180 unmarried mothers assisted by the Berlin Bund für Mutterschutz, particulars are given of the occupations both of the mothers, and, as far as possible, of the fathers. The former were one-third servant-girls, and the great majority of the remainder assistants in trades or girls carrying on work at home. At the head of the fathers (among 120 cases) came artisans (33), followed by tradespeople (22); only a small proportion (20 to 25) could be described as "gentlemen," and even this proportion loses some of its significance when it is pointed out that some of the girls were also of the middle-class; in nineteen cases the fathers were married men (Mutterschutz, January, 1907, p. 45).

Most authorities in most countries are of opinion that girls who eventually (usually between the ages of fifteen and twenty) become prostitutes have lost their virginity at an early age, and in the great majority of cases through men of their own class. "The girl of the people falls by the people," stated Reuss in France (La Prostitution, p. 41). "It is her like, workers like herself, who have the first fruits of her beauty and virginity. The man of the world who covers her with gold and jewels only has their leavings." Martineau, again (De la Prostitution Clandestine, 1885), showed that prostitutes are usually deflowered by men of their own class. And Jeannel, in Bordeaux, found reason for believing that it is not chiefly their masters who lead servants astray; they often go into service because they have been seduced in the country, while lazy, greedy, and unintelligent girls are sent from the country into the town to service. In Edinburgh, W. Tait (Magdalenism, 1842) found that soldiers more than any other class in the community are the seducers of women, the Highlanders being especially notorious in this respect. Soldiers have this reputation everywhere, and in Germany especially it is constantly found that the presence of the soldiery in a country district, as at the annual manœuvres, is the cause of unchastity and illegitimate births; it is so also in Austria, where, long ago, Gross-Hoffinger stated that soldiers were responsible for at least a third of all illegitimate births, a share out of all proportion to their numbers. In Italy, Marro, investigating the occasion of the loss of virginity in twenty-two prostitutes, found that ten gave themselves more or less spontaneously to lovers or masters, ten yielded in the expectation of marriage, and two were outraged (La Pubertà, p. 461). The loss of virginity, Marro adds, though it may not be the direct cause of prostitution, often leads on to it. "When a door has once been broken in," a prostitute said to him, "it is difficult to keep it closed." In Sardinia, as A. Mantegazza and Ciuffo found, prostitutes are very largely servants from the country who have already been deflowered by men of their own class.

In all great cities a large proportion, if not the majority, of the inhabitants have usually been born outside the city (in London only about fifty per cent. of heads of households are definitely reported as born in London); and it is not therefore surprising that prostitutes also should often be outsiders. Still it remains a significant fact that so typically urban a phenomenon as prostitution should be so largely recruited from the country. This is everywhere the case. Merrick enumerates the regions from which came some 14,000 prostitutes who passed through Millbank Prison. Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, Essex and Devon are the counties that stand at the head, and Merrick estimates that the contingent of London from the four counties which make up London was 7000, or one-half of the whole; military towns like Colchester and naval ports like Plymouth supply many prostitutes to London; Ireland furnished many more than Scotland, and Germany far more than any other European country, France being scarcely represented at all (Merrick, Work Among the Fallen, 1890, pp. 14-18). It is, of course, possible that the proportions among those who pass through a prison do not accurately represent the proportions among prostitutes generally. The registers of the London Salvation Army Rescue Home show that sixty per cent. of the girls and women come from the provinces (A. Sherwell, Life in West London, Ch. V). This is exactly the same proportion as Tait found among prostitutes generally, half a century earlier, in Edinburgh. Sanger found that of 2000 prostitutes in New York as many as 1238 were born abroad (706 in Ireland), while of the remaining 762 only half were born in the State of New York, and clearly (though the exact figures are not given) a still smaller proportion in New York City. Prostitutes come from the North—where the climate is uncongenial, and manufacturing and sedentary occupations prevail—much more than from the South; thus Maine, a cold bleak maritime State, sent twenty-four of these prostitutes to New York, while equidistant Virginia, which at the same rate should have sent seventy-two, only sent nine; there was a similar difference between Rhode Island and Maryland (Sanger, History of Prostitution, p. 452). It is instructive to see here the influence of a dreary climate and monotonous labor in stimulating the appetite for a "life of pleasure." In France, as shown by a map in Parent-Duchâtelet's work (vol. i, pp. 37-64, 1857), if the country is divided into five zones, on the whole running east and west, there is a steady and progressive decrease in the number of prostitutes each zone sends to Paris, as we descend southwards. Little more than a third seem to belong to Paris, and, as in America, it is the serious and hard-working North, with its relatively cold climate, which furnishes the largest contingent; even in old France, Dufour remarks (op. cit., vol. iv, Ch. XV), prostitution, as the fabliaux and romans show, was less infamous in the langue d'oil than in the langue d'oc, so that they were doubtless rare in the South. At a later period Reuss states (La Prostitution, p. 12) that "nearly all the prostitutes of Paris come from the provinces." Jeannel found that of one thousand Bordeaux prostitutes only forty-six belonged to the city itself, and Potton (Appendix to Parent-Duchâtelet, vol. ii, p. 446) states that of nearly four thousand Lyons prostitutes only 376 belonged to Lyons. In Vienna, in 1873, Schrank remarks that of over 1500 prostitutes only 615 were born in Vienna. The general rule, it will be seen, though the variations are wide, is that little more than a third of a city's prostitutes are children of the city.

It is interesting to note that this tendency of the prostitute to reach cities from afar, this migratory tendency—which they nowadays share with waiters—is no merely modern phenomenon. "There are few cities in Lombardy, or France, or Gaul," wrote St. Boniface nearly twelve centuries ago, "in which there is not an adulteress or prostitute of the English nation," and the Saint attributes this to the custom of going on pilgrimage to foreign shrines. At the present time there is no marked English element among Continental prostitutes. Thus in Paris, according to Reuss (La Prostitution, p. 12), the foreign prostitutes in decreasing order are Belgian, German (Alsace-Lorraine), Swiss (especially Geneva), Italian, Spanish, and only then English. Connoisseurs in this matter say, indeed, that the English prostitute, as compared with her Continental (and especially French) sister, fails to show to advantage, being usually grasping as regards money and deficient in charm.

In England, a well-informed writer remarks that "the value of marriage as a moral agent is evidenced by the fact that all the better-class prostitutes in London are almost entirely supported by married men," while in Germany, as stated in the interesting series of reminiscences by a former prostitute, Hedwig Hard's Beichte einer Gefallenen, (p. 208), the majority of the men who visit prostitutes are married. The estimate is probably excessive. Neisser states that only twenty-five per cent. of cases of gonorrhœa occur in married men. This indication is probably misleading in the opposite direction, as the married would be less reckless than the young and unmarried. As regards the motives which lead married men to prostitutes, Hedwig Hard narrates from her own experiences an incident which is instructive and no doubt typical. In the town in which she lived quietly as a prostitute a man of the best social class was introduced by a friend, and visited her habitually. She had often seen and admired his wife, who was one of the beauties of the place, and had two charming children; husband and wife seemed devoted to each other, and every one envied their happiness. He was a man of intellect and culture who encouraged Hedwig's love of books; she became greatly attached to him, and one day ventured to ask him how he could leave his lovely and charming wife to come to one who was not worthy to tie her shoe-lace. "Yes, my child," he answered, "but all her beauty and culture brings nothing to my heart. She is cold, cold as ice, proper, and, above all, phlegmatic. Pampered and spoilt, she lives only for herself; we are two good comrades, and nothing more. If, for instance, I come back from the club in the evening and go to her bed, perhaps a little excited, she becomes nervous and she thinks it improper to wake her. If I kiss her she defends herself, and tells me that I smell horribly of cigars and wine. And if perhaps I attempt more, she jumps out of bed, bristles up as though I were assaulting her, and threatens to throw herself out of the window if I touch her. So, for the sake of peace, I leave her alone and come to you." There can be no doubt whatever that this is the experience of many married men who would be well content to find the sweetheart as well as the friend in their wives. But the wives, from a variety of causes, have proved incapable of becoming the sexual mates of their husbands. And the husbands, without being carried away by any impulse of strong passion or any desire for infidelity, seek abroad what they cannot find at home.

This is not the only reason why married men visit prostitutes. Even men who are happily married to women in all chief respects fitted to them, are apt to find, after some years of married life, a mysterious craving for variety. They are not tired of their wives, they have not the least wish or intention to abandon them, they will not, if they can help it, give them the slightest pain. But from time to time they are led by an almost irresistible and involuntary impulse to seek a temporary intimacy with women to whom nothing would persuade them to join themselves permanently. Pepys, whose Diary, in addition to its other claims upon us, is a psychological document of unique importance, furnishes a very characteristic example of this kind of impulse. He had married a young and charming wife, to whom he is greatly attached, and he lives happily with her, save for a few occasional domestic quarrels soon healed by kisses; his love is witnessed by his jealousy, a jealousy which, as he admits, is quite unreasonable, for she is a faithful and devoted wife. Yet a few years after marriage, and in the midst of a life of strenuous official activity, Pepys cannot resist the temptation to seek the temporary favors of other women, seldom prostitutes, but nearly always women of low social class—shop women, workmen's wives, superior servant-girls. Often he is content to invite them to a quiet ale-house, and to take a few trivial liberties. Sometimes they absolutely refuse to allow more than this; when that happens he frequently thanks Almighty God (as he makes his entry in his Diary at night) that he has been saved from temptation and from loss of time and money; in any case, he is apt to vow that it shall never occur again. It always does occur again. Pepys is quite sincere with himself; he makes no attempt at justification or excuse; he knows that he has yielded to a temptation; it is an impulse that comes over him at intervals, an impulse that he seems unable long to resist. Throughout it all he remains an estimable and diligent official, and in most respects a tolerably virtuous man, with a genuine dislike of loose people and loose talk. The attitude of Pepys is brought out with incomparable simplicity and sincerity because he is setting down these things for his own eyes only, but his case is substantially that of a vast number of other men, perhaps indeed of the typical homme moyen sensuel (see Pepys, Diary, ed. Wheatley; e.g., vol. iv, passim).

There is a third class of married men, less considerable in number but not unimportant, who are impelled to visit prostitutes: the class of sexually perverted men. There are a great many reasons why such men may desire to be married, and in some cases they marry women with whom they find it possible to obtain the particular form of sexual gratification they crave. But in a large proportion of cases this is not possible. The conventionally bred woman often cannot bring herself to humor even some quite innocent fetishistic whim of her husband's, for it is too alien to her feelings and too incomprehensible to her ideas, even though she may be genuinely in love with him; in many cases the husband would not venture to ask, and scarcely even wish, that his wife should lend herself to play the fantastic or possibly degrading part his desires demand. In such a case he turns naturally to the prostitute, the only woman whose business it is to fulfil his peculiar needs. Marriage has brought no relief to these men, and they constitute a noteworthy proportion of a prostitute's clients in every great city. The most ordinary prostitute of any experience can supply cases from among her own visitors to illustrate a treatise of psychopathic sexuality. It may suffice here to quote a passage from the confessions of a young London (Strand) prostitute as written down from her lips by a friend to whom I am indebted for the document; I have merely turned a few colloquial terms into more technical forms. After describing how, when she was still a child of thirteen in the country, a rich old gentleman would frequently come and exhibit himself before her and other girls, and was eventually arrested and imprisoned, she spoke of the perversities she had met with since she had become a prostitute. She knew a young man, about twenty-five, generally dressed in a sporting style, who always came with a pair of live pigeons, which he brought in a basket. She and the girl with whom she lived had to undress and take the pigeons and wring their necks; he would stand in front of them, and as the necks were wrung orgasm occurred. Once a man met her in the street and asked her if he might come with her and lick her boots. She agreed, and he took her to a hotel, paid half a guinea for a room, and, when she sat down, got under the table and licked her boots, which were covered with mud; he did nothing more. Then there were some things, she said, that were too dirty to repeat; well, one man came home with her and her friend and made them urinate into his mouth. She also had stories of flagellation, generally of men who whipped the girls, more rarely of men who liked to be whipped by them. One man, who brought a new birch every time, liked to whip her friend until he drew blood. She knew another man who would do nothing but smack her nates violently. Now all these things, which come into the ordinary day's work of the prostitute, are rooted in deep and almost irresistible impulses (as will be clear to any reader of the discussion of Erotic Symbolism in the previous volume of these Studies). They must find some outlet. But it is only the prostitute who can be relied upon, through her interests and training, to overcome the natural repulsion to such actions, and gratify desires which, without gratification, might take on other and more dangerous forms.

"However surprising it may seem to some," a modern writer remarks, "prostitutes must be put on the same level as artists. Both use their gifts and talents for the joy and pleasure of others, and, as a rule, for payment. What is the essential difference between a singer who gives pleasure to hearers by her throat and a prostitute who gives pleasure to those who seek her by another part of her body? All art works on the senses." He refers to the significant fact that actors, and especially actresses, were formerly regarded much as prostitutes are now (R. Hellmann, Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit, pp. 245-252).

Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo (La Mala Vida en Madrid, p. 242) trace the same influence still lower in the social scale. They are describing the more squalid kind of café chantant, in which, in Spain and elsewhere, the most vicious and degenerate feminine creatures become waitresses (and occasionally singers and dancers), playing the part of amiable and distinguished hetairæ to the public of carmen and shop-boys who frequent these resorts. "Dressed with what seems to the youth irreproachable taste, with hair elaborately prepared, and clean face adorned with flowers or trinkets, affable and at times haughty, superior in charm and in finery to the other women he is able to know, the waitresses become the most elevated example of the femme galante whom he is able to contemplate and talk to, the courtesan of his sphere."

In illustration of this aspect of the appeal of prostitution, I may quote a passage in which the novelist, Hermant, in his Confession d'un Enfant d'Hier (Lettre VII), has set down the reasons which may lead the super-refined child of a cultured age, yet by no means radically or completely vicious, to find satisfaction in commerce with prostitutes: "As long as my heart was not touched the object of my satisfaction was completely indifferent to me. I was, moreover, a great lover of absolute liberty, which is only possible in the circle of these anonymous creatures and in their reserved dwelling. There everything became permissible. With other women, however low we may seek them, certain convenances must be observed, a kind of protocol. To these one can say everything: one is protected by incognito and assured that nothing will be divulged. I profited by this freedom, which suited my age, but with a perverse fancy which was not characteristic of my years. I scarcely know where I found what I said to them, for it was the opposite of my tastes, which were simple, and, if I may venture to say so, classic. It is true that, in matters of love, unrestrained naturalism always tends to perversion, a fact that can only seem paradoxical at first sight. Primitive peoples have many traits in common with degenerates. It was, however, only in words that I was unbridled; and that was the only occasion on which I can recollect seriously lying. But that necessity, which I then experienced, of expelling a lower depth of ignoble instincts, seems to me characteristic and humiliating. I may add that even in the midst of these dissipations I retained a certain reserve. The contacts to which I exposed myself failed to soil me; nothing was left when I had crossed the threshold. I have always retained, from that forcible and indifferent commerce, the habit of attributing no consequence to the action of the flesh. The amorous function, which religion and morality have surrounded with mystery or seasoned with sin, seems to me a function like any other, a little vile, but agreeable, and one to which the usual epilogue is too long.... This kind of companionship only lasted for a short time." This analysis of the attitude of a certain common type of civilized modern man seems to be just, but it may perhaps occur to some readers that a commerce which led to "the action of the flesh" being regarded as of no consequence can scarcely be said to have left no taint.

In a somewhat similar manner, Henri de Régnier, in his novel, Les Rencontres de Monsieur Bréot (p. 50), represents Bercaillé as deliberately preferring to take his pleasures with servant-girls rather than with ladies, for pleasure was, to his mind, a kind of service, which could well be accommodated with the services they are accustomed to give; and then they are robust and agreeable, they possess the naïveté which is always charming in the common people, and they are not apt to be repelled by those little accidents which might offend the fastidious sensibilities of delicately bred ladies.

Bloch, who has especially emphasized this side of the appeal of prostitution (Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit, pp. 359-362), refers to the delicate and sensitive young Danish writer, J. P. Jakobsen, who seems to have acutely felt the contrast between the higher and more habitual impulses, and the occasional outburst of what he felt to be lower instincts; in his Niels Lyhne he describes the kind of double life in which a man is true for a fortnight to the god he worships, and is then overcome by other powers which madly bear him in their grip towards what he feels to be humiliating, perverse, and filthy. "At such moments," Bloch remarks, "the man is another being. The 'two souls' in the breast become a reality. Is that the famous scholar, the lofty idealist, the fine-souled æsthetician, the artist who has given us so many splendid and pure works in poetry and painting? We no longer recognize him, for at such moments another being has come to the surface, another nature is moving within him, and with the power of an elementary force is impelling him towards things at which his 'upper consciousness,' the civilized man within him, would shudder." Bloch believes that we are here concerned with a kind of normal masculine masochism, which prostitution serves to gratify.

This tendency in an advanced civilization towards the humanization of prostitution is the reverse process, we may note, to that which takes place at an earlier stage of civilization when the ancient conception of the religious dignity of prostitution begins to fall into disrepute. When men cease to reverence women who are prostitutes in the service of a goddess they set up in their place prostitutes who are merely abject slaves, flattering themselves that they are thereby working in the cause of "progress" and "morality." On the shores of the Mediterranean this process took place more than two thousand years ago, and is associated with the name of Solon. To-day we may see the same process going on in India. In some parts of India (as at Jejuri, near Poonah) first born girls are dedicated to Khandoba or other gods; they are married to the god and termed muralis. They serve in the temple, sweep it, and wash the holy vessels, also they dance, sing and prostitute themselves. They are forbidden to marry, and they live in the homes of their parents, brothers, or sisters; being consecrated to religious service, they are untouched by degradation. Nowadays, however, Indian "reformers," in the name of "civilization and science," seek to persuade the muralis that they are "plunged in a career of degradation." No doubt in time the would-be moralists will drive the muralis out of their temples and their homes, deprive them of all self-respect, and convert them into wretched outcasts, all in the cause of "science and civilization" (see, e.g., an article by Mrs. Kashibai Deodhar, The New Reformer, October, 1907). So it is that early reformers create for the reformers of a later day the task of humanizing prostitution afresh.

There can be no doubt that this more humane conception of prostitution is to-day beginning to be realized in the actual civilized life of Europe. Thus in writing of prostitution in Paris, Dr. Robert Michels ("Erotische Streifzüge," Mutterschutz, 1906, Heft 9, p. 368) remarks: "While in Germany the prostitute is generally considered as an 'outcast' creature, and treated accordingly, an instrument of masculine lust to be used and thrown away, and whom one would under no circumstances recognize in public, in France the prostitute plays in many respects the part which once give significance and fame to the hetairæ of Athens." And after describing the consideration and respect which the Parisian prostitute is often able to require of her friends, and the non-sexual relation of comradeship which she can enter into with other men, the writer continues: "A girl who certainly yields herself for money, but by no means for the first comer's money, and who, in addition to her 'business friends,' feels the need of, so to say, non-sexual companions with whom she can associate in a free comrade-like way, and by whom she is treated and valued as a free human being, is not wholly lost for the moral worth of humanity." All prostitution is bad, Michels concludes, but we should have reason to congratulate ourselves if love-relationships of this Parisian species represented the lowest known form of extra-conjugal sexuality. (As bearing on the relative consideration accorded to prostitutes I may mention that a Paris prostitute remarked to a friend of mine that Englishmen would ask her questions which no Frenchman would venture to ask.)

It is not, however, only in Paris, although here more markedly and prominently, that this humanizing change in prostitution is beginning to make itself felt. It is manifested, for instance, in the greater openness of a man's sexual life. "While he formerly slinked into a brothel in a remote street," Dr. Willy Hellpach remarks (Nervosität und Kultur, p. 169), "he now walks abroad with his 'liaison,' visiting the theatres and cafés, without indeed any anxiety to meet his acquaintances, but with no embarrassment on that point. The thing is becoming more commonplace, more—natural." It is also, Hellpach proceeds to point out, thus becoming more moral also, and much unwholesome prudery and pruriency is being done away with.

In England, where change is slow, this tendency to the humanization of prostitution may be less pronounced. But it certainly exists. In the middle of the last century Lecky wrote (History of European Morals, vol. ii, p. 285) that habitual prostitution "is in no other European country so hopelessly vicious or so irrevocable." That statement, which was also made by Parent-Duchâtelet and other foreign observers, is fully confirmed by the evidence on record. But it is a statement which would hardly be made to-day, except perhaps, in reference to special confined areas of our cities. It is the same in America, and we may doubtless find this tendency reflected in the report on The Social Evil (1902), drawn up by a committee in New York, who gave it (p. 176) as one of their chief recommendations that prostitution should no longer be regarded as a crime, in which light, one gathers, it had formerly been regarded in New York. That may seem but a small step in the path of humanization, but it is in the right direction.

It is by no means only in lands of European civilization that we may trace with developing culture the refinement and humanization of the slighter bonds of relationship with women. In Japan exactly the same demands led, several centuries ago, to the appearance of the geisha. In the course of an interesting and precise study of the geisha Mr. R. T. Farrer remarks (Nineteenth Century, April, 1904): "The geisha is in no sense necessarily a courtesan. She is a woman educated to attract; perfected from her childhood in all the intricacies of Japanese literature; practiced in wit and repartee; inured to the rapid give-and-take of conversation on every topic, human and divine. From her earliest youth she is broken into an inviolable charm of manner incomprehensible to the finest European, yet she is almost invariably a blossom of the lower classes, with dumpy claws, and squat, ugly nails. Her education, physical and moral, is far harder than that of the ballerina, and her success is achieved only after years of struggle and a bitter agony of torture.... And the geisha's social position may be compared with that of the European actress. The Geisha-house offers prizes as desirable as any of the Western stage. A great geisha with twenty nobles sitting round her, contending for her laughter, and kept in constant check by the flashing bodkin of her wit, holds a position no less high and famous than that of Sarah Bernhardt in her prime. She is equally sought, equally flattered, quite as madly adored, that quiet little elderly plain girl in dull blue. But she is prized thus primarily for her tongue, whose power only ripens fully as her physical charms decline. She demands vast sums for her owners, and even so often appears and dances only at her own pleasure. Few, if any, Westerners ever see a really famous geisha. She is too great to come before a European, except for an august or imperial command. Finally she may, and frequently does, marry into exalted places. In all this there is not the slightest necessity for any illicit relation."

In some respects the position of the ancient Greek hetaira was more analogous to that of the Japanese geisha than to that of the prostitute in the strict sense. For the Greeks, indeed, the hetaira, was not strictly a porne or prostitute at all. The name meant friend or companion, and the woman to whom the name was applied held an honorable position, which could not be accorded to the mere prostitute. Athenæus (Bk. xiii, Chs. XXVIII-XXX) brings together passages showing that the hetaira could be regarded as an independent citizen, pure, simple, and virtuous, altogether distinct from the common crew of prostitutes, though these might ape her name. The hetairæ "were almost the only Greek women," says Donaldson (Woman, p. 59), "who exhibited what was best and noblest in women's nature." This fact renders it more intelligible why a woman of such intellectual distinction as Aspasia should have been a hetaira. There seems little doubt as to her intellectual distinction. "Æschines, in his dialogue entitled 'Aspasia,'" writes Gomperz, the historian of Greek philosophy (Greek Thinkers, vol. iii, pp. 124 and 343), "puts in the mouth of that distinguished woman an incisive criticism of the mode of life traditional for her sex. It would be exceedingly strange," Gomperz adds, in arguing that an inference may thus be drawn concerning the historical Aspasia, "if three authors—Plato, Xenophon and Æschines—had agreed in fictitiously enduing the companion of Pericles with what we might very reasonably have expected her to possess—a highly cultivated mind and intellectual influence." It is even possible that the movement for woman's right which, as we dimly divine through the pages of Aristophanes, took place in Athens in the fourth century B. C., was led by hetairæ. According to Ivo Bruns (Frauenemancipation in Athen, 1900, p. 19) "the most certain information which we possess concerning Aspasia bears a strong resemblance to the picture which Euripides and Aristophanes present to us of the leaders of the woman movement." It was the existence of this movement which made Plato's ideas on the community of women appear far less absurd than they do to us. It may perhaps be thought by some that this movement represented on a higher plane that love of distruction, or, as we should better say, that spirit of revolt and aspiration, which Simmel finds to mark the intellectual and artistic activity of those who are unclassed or dubiously classed in the social hierarchy. Ninon de Lenclos, as we have seen, was not strictly a courtesan, but she was a pioneer in the assertion of woman's rights. Aphra Behn who, a little later in England, occupied a similarly dubious social position, was likewise a pioneer in generous humanitarian aspirations, which have since been adopted in the world at large.

These refinements of prostitution may be said to be chiefly the outcome of the late and more developed stages in civilization. As Schurtz has put it (Altersklassen und Männerbünde, p. 191): "The cheerful, skilful and artistically accomplished hetaira frequently stands as an ideal figure in opposition to the intellectually uncultivated wife banished to the interior of the house. The courtesan of the Italian Renaissance, Japanese geishas, Chinese flower-girls, and Indian bayaderas, all show some not unnoble features, the breath of a free artistic existence. They have achieved—with, it is true, the sacrifice of their highest worth—an independence from the oppressive rule of man and of household duties, and a part of the feminine endowment which is so often crippled comes in them to brilliant development. Prostitution in its best form may thus offer a path by which these feminine characteristics may exert a certain influence on the development of civilization. We may also believe that the artistic activity of women is in some measure able to offer a counterpoise to the otherwise less pleasant results of sexual abandonment, preventing the coarsening and destruction of the emotional life; in his Magda Sudermann has described a type of woman who, from the standpoint of strict morality, is open to condemnation, but in her art finds a foothold, the strength of which even ill-will must unwillingly recognize." In his Sex and Character, Weininger has developed in a more extreme and extravagant manner the conception of the prostitute as a fundamental and essential part of life, a permanent feminine type.

Prostitutes, a distinguished man of science has said (Duclaux, L'Hygiène Sociale, p. 243), "have become things which the public uses when it wants them, and throws on the dungheap when it has made them vile. In its pharisaism it even has the insolence to treat their trade as shameful, as though it were not just as shameful to buy as to sell in this market." Bloch (Sexualleben unserer Zeit, Ch. XV) insists that prostitution must be ennobled, and that only so can it be even diminished. Isidore Dyer, of New Orleans, also argues that we cannot check prostitution unless we create "in the minds of men and women a spirit of tolerance instead of intolerance of fallen women." This point may be illustrated by a remark by the prostitute author of the Tagebuch einer Verlorenen. "If the profession of yielding the body ceased to be a shameful one," she wrote, "the army of 'unfortunates' would diminish by four-fifths—I will even say nine-tenths. Myself, for example! How gladly would I take a situation as companion or governess!" "One of two things," wrote the eminent sociologist Tarde ("La Morale Sexuelle," Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, January, 1907), "either prostitution will disappear through continuing to be dishonorable and will be replaced by some other institution which will better remedy the defects of monogamous marriage, or it will survive by becoming respectable, that is to say, by making itself respected, whether liked or disliked." Tarde thought this might perhaps come about by a better organization of prostitutes, a more careful selection among those who desired admission to their ranks and the cultivation of professional virtues which would raise their moral level. "If courtesans fulfil a need," Balzac had already said in his Physiologie du Mariage, "they must become an institution."

Canon Lyttelton's remarks may be taken to refer chiefly to young men of the upper middle class. Concerning what is perhaps the usual attitude of lower middle class people towards prostitution, I may quote from a remarkable communication which has reached me from Australia: "What are the views of a young man brought up in a middle-class Christian English family on prostitutes? Take my father, for instance. He first mentioned prostitutes to me, if I remember rightly, when speaking of his life before marriage. And he spoke of them as he would speak of a horse he had hired, paid for, and dismissed from his mind when it had rendered him service. Although my mother was so kind and good she spoke of abandoned women with disgust and scorn as of some unclean animal. As it flatters vanity and pride to be able with good countenance and universal consent to look down on something, I soon grasped the situation and adopted an attitude which is, in the main, that of most middle-class Christian Englishmen towards prostitutes. But as puberty develops this attitude has to be accommodated with the wish to make use of this scum, these moral lepers. The ordinary young man, who likes a spice of immorality and has it when in town, and thinks it is not likely to come to his mother's or sisters' ears, does not get over his arrogance and disgust or abate them in the least. He takes them with him, more or less disguised, to the brothel, and they color his thoughts and actions all the time he is sleeping with prostitutes, or kissing them, or passing his hands over them, as he would over a mare, getting as much as he can for his money. To tell the truth, on the whole, that was my attitude too. But if anyone had asked me for the smallest reason for this attitude, for this feeling of superiority, pride, hauteur, and prejudice, I should, like any other 'respectable' young man, have been entirely at a loss, and could only have gaped foolishly."

The revolt of many serious reformers against the injustice and degradation now involved by our system of prostitution is so profound that some have declared themselves ready to accept any revolution of ideas which would bring about a more wholesome transmutation of moral values. "Better indeed were a saturnalia of free men and women," exclaims Edward Carpenter (Love's Coming of Age, p. 62), "than the spectacle which, as it is, our great cities present at night."

Even those who would be quite content with as conservative a treatment as possible of social institutions still cannot fail to realize that prostitution is unsatisfactory, unless we are content to make very humble claims of the sexual act. "The act of prostitution," Godfrey declares (The Science of Sex, p. 202), "may be physiologically complete, but it is complete in no other sense. All the moral and intellectual factors which combine with physical desire to form the perfect sexual attraction are absent. All the higher elements of love—admiration, respect, honor, and self-sacrificing devotion—are as foreign to prostitution as to the egoistic act of masturbation. The principal drawbacks to the morality of the act lie in its associations more than in the act itself. Any affectional quality which a more or less promiscuous connection might possess is at once destroyed by the intrusion of the monetary element. In the resulting degradation the woman has the largest share, since it makes her a pariah and involves her in all the hardening and depraving influences of social ostracism. But her degradation only serves to render her influence on her partners more demoralizing. Prostitution," he concludes, "has a strong tendency towards emphasizing the naturally selfish attitude of men towards women, and encouraging them in the delusion, born of unregulated passions, that the sexual act itself is the aim and end of the sex life. Prostitution can therefore make no claim to afford even a temporary solution to the sex problem. It fulfils only that mission which has made it a 'necessary evil'—the mission of palliative to the physical rigors of celibacy and monogamy. It does so at the cost of a considerable amount of physical and moral deterioration, much of which is undoubtedly due to the action of society in completing the degradation of the prostitute by persistent ostracism. Prostitution was not so great an evil when it was not thought so great, yet even at its best it was a real evil, a melancholy and sordid travesty of sincere and natural passional relations. It is an evil which we are bound to have with us so long as celibacy is a custom and monogamy a law." It is the wife as well as the prostitute who is degraded by a system which makes venal love possible. "The time has gone past," the same writer remarks elsewhere (p. 195) "when a mere ceremony can really sanctify what is base and transform lust and greed into the sincerity of sexual affection. If, to enter into sexual connections with a man for a solely material end is a disgrace to humanity, it is a disgrace under the marriage bond just as much as apart from the hypocritical blessing of the church or the law. If the public prostitute is a being who deserves to be treated as a pariah, it is hopelessly irrational to withhold every sort of moral opprobrium from the woman who leads a similar life under a different set of external circumstances. Either the prostitute wife must come under the moral ban, or there must be an end to the complete ostracism under which the prostitute labors."

The thinker who more clearly and fundamentally than others, and first of all, realized the dynamical relationships of prostitution, as dependent upon a change in the other social relationships of life, was James Hinton. More than thirty years ago, in fragmentary writings that still remain unpublished, since he never worked them into an orderly form, Hinton gave vigorous and often passionate expression to this fundamental idea. It may be worth while to quote a few brief passages from Hinton's MSS.: "I feel that the laws of force should hold also amid the waves of human passion, that the relations of mechanics are true, and will rule also in human life.... There is a tension, a crushing of the soul, by our modern life, and it is ready for a sudden spring to a different order in which the forces shall rearrange themselves. It is a dynamical question presented in moral terms.... Keeping a portion of the woman population without prospect of marriage means having prostitutes, that is women as instruments of man's mere sensuality, and this means the killing, in many of them, of all pure love or capacity of it. This is the fact we have to face.... To-day I saw a young woman whose life was being consumed by her want of love, a case of threatened utter misery: now see the price at which we purchase her ill-health; for her ill-health we pay the crushing of another girl into hell. We give that for it; her wretchedness of soul and body are bought by prostitution; we have prostitutes made for that.... We devote some women recklessly to perdition to make a hothouse Heaven for the rest.... One wears herself out in vainly trying to endure pleasures she is not strong enough to enjoy, while other women are perishing for lack of these very pleasures. If marriage is this, is it not embodied lust? The happy Christian homes are the true dark places of the earth.... Prostitution for man, restraint for woman—they are two sides of the same thing, and both are denials of love, like luxury and asceticism. The mountains of restraint must be used to fill up the abysses of luxury."

Some of Hinton's views were set forth by a writer intimately acquainted with him in a pamphlet entitled The Future of Marriage: An Eirenicon for a Question of To-day, by a Respectable Woman (1885). "When once the conviction is forced home upon the 'good' women," the writer remarks, "that their place of honor and privilege rests upon the degradation of others as its basis, they will never rest till they have either abandoned it or sought for it some other pedestal. If our inflexible marriage system has for its essential condition the existence side by side with it of prostitution, then one of two things follows: either prostitution must be shown to be compatible with the well-being, moral and physical, of the women who practice it, or our marriage system must be condemned. If it was clearly put before anyone, he could not seriously assert that to be 'virtue' which could only be practiced at the expense of another's vice.... Whilst the laws of physics are becoming so universally recognized that no one dreams of attempting to annihilate a particle of matter, or of force, yet we do not instinctively apply the same conception to moral forces, but think and act as if we could simply do away with an evil, while leaving unchanged that which gives it its strength. This is the only view of the social problem which can give us hope. That prostitution should simply cease, leaving everything else as it is, would be disastrous if it were possible. But it is not possible. The weakness of all existing efforts to put down prostitution is that they are directed against it as an isolated thing, whereas it is only one of the symptoms proceeding from a common disease."

Ellen Key, who during recent years has been the chief apostle of a gospel of sexual morality based on the needs of women as the mothers of the race, has, in a somewhat similar spirit, denounced alike prostitution and rigid marriage, declaring (in her Essays on Love and Marriage) that "the development of erotic personal consciousness is as much hindered by socially regulated 'morality' as by socially regulated 'immorality,'" and that "the two lowest and socially sanctioned expressions of sexual dualism, rigid marriage and prostitution, will gradually become impossible, because with the conquest of the idea of erotic unity they will no longer correspond to human needs."

The Significance of the Venereal Diseases—The History of Syphilis—The Problem of Its Origin—The Social Gravity of Syphilis—The Social Dangers of Gonorrhœa—The Modern Change in the Methods of Combating Venereal Diseases—Causes of the Decay of the System of Police Regulation—Necessity of Facing the Facts—The Innocent Victims of Venereal Diseases—Diseases Not Crimes—The Principle of Notification—The Scandinavian System—Gratuitous Treatment—Punishment for Transmitting Venereal Diseases—Sexual Education in Relation to Venereal Diseases—Lectures, Etc.—Discussion in Novels and on the Stage—The "Disgusting" Not the "Immoral."

Although the weight of authoritative opinion now seems to incline towards the belief that syphilis was brought to Europe from America, on the discovery of the New World, it is only within quite recent years that that belief has gained ground, and it scarcely even yet seems certain that what the Spaniards brought back from America was really a disease absolutely new to the Old World, and not a more virulent form of an old disease of which the manifestations had become benign. Buret, for instance (Le Syphilis Aujourd'hui et chez les Anciens, 1890), who some years ago reached "the deep conviction that syphilis dates from the creation of man," and believed, from a minute study of classic authors, that syphilis existed in Rome under the Cæsars, was of opinion that it has broken out at different places and at different times, in epidemic bursts exhibiting different combinations of its manifold symptoms, so that it passed unnoticed at ordinary times, and at the times of its more intense manifestation was looked upon as a hitherto unknown disease. It was thus regarded in classic times, he considers, as coming from Egypt, though he looked upon its real home as Asia. Leopold Glück has likewise quoted (Archiv für Dermatologie und Syphilis, January, 1899) passages from the medical epigrams of a sixteenth century physician, Gabriel Ayala, declaring that syphilis is not really a new disease, though popularly supposed to be so, but an old disease which has broken out with hitherto unknown violence. There is, however, no conclusive reason for believing that syphilis was known at all in classic antiquity. A. V. Notthaft ("Die Legende von der Althertums-syphilis," in the Rindfleisch Festschrift, 1907, pp. 377-592) has critically investigated the passages in classic authors which were supposed by Rosenbaum, Buret, Proksch and others to refer to syphilis. It is quite true, Notthaft admits, that many of these passages might possibly refer to syphilis, and one or two would even better fit syphilis than any other disease. But, on the whole, they furnish no proof at all, and no syphilologist, he concludes, has ever succeeded in demonstrating that syphilis was known in antiquity. That belief is a legend. The most damning argument against it, Notthaft points out, is the fact that, although in antiquity there were great physicians who were keen observers, not one of them gives any description of the primary, secondary, tertiary, and congenital forms of this disease. China is frequently mentioned as the original home of syphilis, but this belief is also quite without basis, and the Japanese physician, Okamura, has shown (Monatsschrift für praktische Dermatologie, vol. xxviii, pp. 296 et seq.) that Chinese records reveal nothing relating to syphilis earlier than the sixteenth century. At the Paris Academy of Medicine in 1900 photographs from Egypt were exhibited by Fouquet of human remains which date from B.C. 2400, showing bone lesions which seemed to be clearly syphilitic; Fournier, however, one of the greatest of authorities, considered that the diagnosis of syphilis could not be maintained until other conditions liable to produce somewhat similar bone lesions had been eliminated (British Medical Journal, September 29, 1900, p. 946). In Florida and various regions of Central America, in undoubtedly pre-Columbian burial places, diseased bones have been found which good authorities have declared could not be anything else than syphilitic (e.g., British Medical Journal, November 20, 1897, p. 1487), though it may be noted that so recently as 1899 the cautious Virchow stated that pre-Columbian syphilis in America was still for him an open question (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Heft 2 and 3, 1899, p. 216). From another side, Seler, the distinguished authority on Mexican antiquity, shows (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1895, Heft 5, p. 449) that the ancient Mexicans were acquainted with a disease which, as they described it, might well have been syphilis. It is obvious, however, that while the difficulty of demonstrating syphilitic diseased bones in America is as great as in Europe, the demonstration, however complete, would not suffice to show that the disease had not already an existence also in the Old World. The plausible theory of Ayala that fifteenth century syphilis was a virulent recrudescence of an ancient disease has frequently been revived in more modern times. Thus J. Knott ("The Origin of Syphilis," New York Medical Journal, October 31, 1908) suggests that though not new in fifteenth century Europe, it was then imported afresh in a form rendered more aggravated by coming from an exotic race, as is believed often to be the case.

It was in the eighteenth century that Jean Astruc began the rehabilitation of the belief that syphilis is really a comparatively modern disease of American origin, and since then various authorities of weight have given their adherence to this view. It is to the energy and learning of Dr. Iwan Bloch, of Berlin (the first volume of whose important work, Der Ursprung der Syphilis, was published in 1901) that we owe the fullest statement of the evidence in favor of the American origin of syphilis. Bloch regards Ruy Diaz de Isla, a distinguished Spanish physician, as the weightiest witness for the Indian origin of the disease, and concludes that it was brought to Europe by Columbus's men from Central America, more precisely from the Island of Haiti, to Spain in 1493 and 1494, and immediately afterwards was spread by the armies of Charles VIII in an epidemic fashion over Italy and the other countries of Europe.

It may be added that even if we have to accept the theory that the central regions of America constitute the place of origin of European syphilis, we still have to recognize that syphilis has spread in the North American continent very much more slowly and partially than it has in Europe, and even at the present day there are American Indian tribes among whom it is unknown. Holder, on the basis of his own experiences among Indian tribes, as well as of wide inquiries among agency physicians, prepared a table showing that among some thirty tribes and groups of tribes, eighteen were almost or entirely free from venereal disease, while among thirteen it was very prevalent. Almost without exception, the tribes where syphilis is rare or unknown refuse sexual intercourse with strangers, while those among whom such disease is prevalent are morally lax. It is the whites who are the source of infection among these tribes (A. B. Holder, "Gynecic Notes Among the American Indians," American Journal of Obstetrics, 1892, No. 1).

The objection to the regulation of prostitution is still of slow growth, but it is steadily developing everywhere, and may be traced equally in scientific opinion and in popular feeling. In France the municipalities of some of the largest cities have either suppressed the system of regulation entirely or shown their disapproval of it, while an inquiry among several hundred medical men showed that less than one-third were in favor of maintaining regulation (Die Neue Generation, June, 1909, p. 244). In Germany, where there is in some respects more patient endurance of interference with the liberty of the individual than in France, England, or America, various elaborate systems for organizing prostitution and dealing with venereal disease continue to be maintained, but they cannot be completely carried out, and it is generally admitted that in any case they could not accomplish the objects sought. Thus in Saxony no brothels are officially tolerated, though as a matter of fact they nevertheless exist. Here, as in many other parts of Germany, most minute and extensive regulations are framed for the use of prostitutes. Thus at Leipzig they must not sit on the benches in public promenades, nor go to picture galleries, or theatres, or concerts, or restaurants, nor look out of their windows, nor stare about them in the street, nor smile, nor wink, etc., etc. In fact, a German prostitute who possesses the heroic self-control to carry out conscientiously all the self-denying ordinances officially decreed for her guidance would seem to be entitled to a Government pension for life.

Two methods of dealing with prostitution prevail in Germany. In some cities public houses of prostitution are tolerated (though not licensed); in other cities prostitution is "free," though "secret." Hamburg is the most important city where houses of prostitution are tolerated and segregated. But, it is stated, "everywhere, by far the larger proportion of the prostitutes belong to the so-called 'secret' class." In Hamburg, alone, are suspected men, when accused of infecting women, officially examined; men of every social class must obey a summons of this kind, which is issued secretly, and if diseased, they are bound to go under treatment, if necessary under compulsory treatment in the city hospital, until no longer dangerous to the community.

In Germany it is only when a woman has been repeatedly observed to act suspiciously in the streets that she is quietly warned; if the warning is disregarded she is invited to give her name and address to the police, and interviewed. It is not until these methods fail that she is officially inscribed as a prostitute. The inscribed women, in some cities at all events, contribute to a sick benefit fund which pays their expenses when in hospital. The hesitation of the police to inscribe a woman on the official list is legitimate and inevitable, for no other course would be tolerated; yet the majority of prostitutes begin their careers very young, and as they tend to become infected very early after their careers begin, it is obvious that this delay contributes to render the system of regulation ineffective. In Berlin, where there are no officially recognized brothels, there are some six thousand inscribed prostitutes, but it is estimated that there are over sixty thousand prostitutes who are not inscribed. (The foregoing facts are taken from a series of papers describing personal investigations in Germany made by Dr. F. Bierhoff, of New York, "Police Methods for the Sanitary Control of Prostitution," New York Medical Journal, August, 1907.) The estimation of the amount of clandestine prostitution can indeed never be much more than guesswork; exactly the same figure of sixty thousand is commonly brought forward as the probable number of prostitutes not only in Berlin, but also in London and in New York. It is absolutely impossible to say whether it is under or over the real number, for secret prostitution is quite intangible. Even if the facts were miraculously revealed there would still remain the difficulty of deciding what is and what is not prostitution. The avowed and public prostitute is linked by various gradations on the one side to the respectable girl living at home who seeks some little relief from the oppression of her respectability, and on the other hand to the married woman who has married for the sake of a home. In any case, however, it is very certain that public prostitutes living entirely on the earnings of prostitution form but a small proportion of the vast army of women who may be said, in a wide sense of the word, to be prostitutes, i.e., who use their attractiveness to obtain from men not love alone, but money or goods.

The supreme importance of this key to the solution of a problem which has often seemed insoluble is to-day beginning to become recognized in all quarters, and in every country. Thus a distinguished German authority, Professor Finger (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. i, Heft 5) declares that venereal disease must not be regarded as the well-merited punishment for a debauched life, but as an unhappy accident. It seems to be in France, however, that this truth has been proclaimed with most courage and humanity, and not alone by the followers of science and medicine, but by many who might well be excused from interfering with so difficult and ungrateful a task. Thus the brothers, Paul and Victor Margueritte, who occupy a brilliant and honorable place in contemporary French letters, have distinguished themselves by advocating a more humane attitude towards prostitutes, and a more modern method of dealing with the question of venereal disease. "The true method of prevention is that which makes it clear to all that syphilis is not a mysterious and terrible thing, the penalty of the sin of the flesh, a sort of shameful evil branded by Catholic malediction, but an ordinary disease which may be treated and cured." It may be remarked that the aversion to acknowledge venereal disease is at least as marked in France as in any other country; "maladies honteuses" is a consecrated French term, just as "loathsome disease" is in English; "in the hospital," says Landret, "it requires much trouble to obtain an avowal of gonorrhœa, and we may esteem ourselves happy if the patient acknowledges the fact of having had syphilis."

I have been taking only syphilis into account, but nearly all that is said of the accidental infection of syphilis applies with equal or greater force to gonorrhœa, for though gonorrhœa does not enter into the system by so many channels as syphilis, it is a more common as well as a more subtle and elusive disease.

The literature of Syphilis Insontium is extremely extensive. There is a bibliography at the end of Duncan Bulkley's Syphilis in the Innocent, and a comprehensive summary of the question in a Leipzig Inaugural Dissertation by F. Moses, Zur Kasuistik der Extragenitalen Syphilis-infektion, 1904.

"I ask," says Duclaux, "whether when a young man, or a young girl, abandon themselves to a dangerous caress society has done what it can to warn them. Perhaps its intentions were good, but when the need came for precise knowledge a silly prudery has held it back, and it has left its children without viaticum.... I will go further, and proclaim that in a large number of cases the husbands who contaminate their wives are innocent. No one is responsible for the evil which he commits without knowing it and without willing it." I may recall the suggestive fact, already referred to, that the majority of husbands who infect their wives contracted the disease before marriage. They entered on marriage believing that their disease was cured, and that they had broken with their past. Doctors have sometimes (and quacks frequently) contributed to this result by too sanguine an estimate of the period necessary to destroy the poison. So great an authority as Fournier formerly believed that the syphilitic could safely be allowed to marry three or four years after the date of infection, but now, with increased experience, he extends the period to four or five years. It is undoubtedly true that, especially when treatment has been thorough and prompt, the diseased constitution, in a majority of cases, can be brought under complete control in a shorter period than this, but there is always a certain proportion of cases in which the powers of infection persist for many years, and even when the syphilitic husband is no longer capable of infecting his wife he may still perhaps be in a condition to effect a disastrous influence on the offspring.

In most countries there is a growing feeling in favor of the enlightenment of young women equally with young men as regards venereal diseases. Thus in Germany Max Flesch, in his Prostitution und Frauenkrankheiten, considers that at the end of their school days all girls should receive instruction concerning the grave physical and social dangers to which women are exposed in life. In France Duclaux (in his L'Hygiène Sociale) is emphatic that women must be taught. "Already," he states, "doctors who by custom have been made, in spite of themselves, the husband's accomplices, will tell you of the ironical gaze they sometimes encounter when they seek to lead a wife astray concerning the causes of her ills. The day is approaching of a revolt against the social lie which has made so many victims, and you will be obliged to teach women what they need to know in order to guard themselves against you." It is the same in America. Reform in this field, Isidore Dyer declares, must emblazon on its flag the motto, "Knowledge is Health," as well of mind as of body, for women as well as for men. In a discussion introduced by Denslow Lewis at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association in 1901 on the limitation of venereal diseases (Medico-Legal Journal, June and September, 1903), there was a fairly general agreement among all the speakers that almost or quite the chief method of prevention lay in education, the education of women as much as of men. "Education lies at the bottom of the whole thing," declared one speaker (Seneca Egbert, of Philadelphia), "and we will never gain much headway until every young man, and every young woman, even before she falls in love and becomes engaged, knows what these diseases are, and what it will mean if she marries a man who has contracted them." "Educate father and mother, and they will educate their sons and daughters," exclaims Egbert Grandin, more especially in regard to gonorrhœa (Medical Record, May 26, 1906); "I lay stress on the daughter because she becomes the chief sufferer from inoculation, and it is her right to know that she should protect herself against the gonorrhœic as well as against the alcoholic."

In Germany the principle of instruction by lectures concerning venereal diseases seems to have become established, at all events so far as young men are concerned, and such lectures are constantly becoming more usual. In 1907 the Minister of Education established courses of lectures by doctors on sexual hygiene and venereal diseases for higher schools and educational institutions, though attendance was not made compulsory. The courses now frequently given by medical men to the higher classes in German secondary schools on the general principles of sexual anatomy and physiology nearly always include sexual hygiene with special reference to venereal diseases (see, e.g., Sexualpädagogik, pp. 131-153). In Austria, also, lectures on personal hygiene and the dangers of venereal disease are delivered to students about to leave the gymnasium for the university; and the working men's clubs have instituted regular courses of lectures on the same subjects delivered by physicians. In France many distinguished men, both inside and outside the medical profession, are working for the cause of the instruction of the young in sexual hygiene, though they have to contend against a more obstinate degree of prejudice and prudery on the part of the middle class than is to be found in the Germanic lands. The Commission Extraparlementaire du Régime des Mœurs, with the conjunction of Augagneur, Alfred Fournier, Yves Guyot, Gide, and other distinguished professors, teachers, etc., has lately pronounced in favor of the official establishment of instruction in sexual hygiene, to be given in the highest classes at the lycées, or in the earliest class at higher educational colleges; such instruction, it is argued, would not only furnish needed enlightenment, but also educate the sense of moral responsibility. There is in France, also, an active and distinguished though unofficial Société Française de Prophylaxie Sanitaire et Morale, which delivers public lectures on sexual hygiene. Fournier, Pinard, Burlureaux and other eminent physicians have written pamphlets on this subject for popular distribution (see, e.g., Le Progrès Médical of September, 1907). In England and the United States very little has yet been done in this direction, but in the United States, at all events, opinion in favor of action is rapidly growing (see, e.g., W. A. Funk, "The Venereal Peril," Medical Record, April 13, 1907). The American Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis (based on the parent society founded in Paris in 1900 by Fournier) was established in New York in 1905. There are similar societies in Chicago and Philadelphia. The main object is to study venereal diseases and to work toward their social control. Doctors, laymen, and women are members. Lectures and short talks are now given under the auspices of these societies to small groups of young women in social settlements, and in other ways, with encouraging success; it is found to be an excellent method of reaching the young women of the working classes. Both men and women physicians take part in the lectures (Clement Cleveland, Presidential Address on "Prophylaxis of Venereal Diseases," Transactions American Gynecological Society, Philadelphia, vol. xxxii, 1907).

An important auxiliary method of carrying out the task of sexual hygiene, and at the same time of spreading useful enlightenment, is furnished by the method of giving to every syphilitic patient in clinics where such cases are treated a card of instruction for his guidance in hygienic matters, together with a warning of the risks of marriage within four or five years after infection, and in no case without medical advice. Such printed instruction, in clear, simple, and incisive language, should be put into the hands of every syphilitic patient as a matter of routine, and it might be as well to have a corresponding card for gonorrhœal patients. This plan has already been introduced at some hospitals, and it is so simple and unobjectionable a precaution that it will, no doubt, be generally adopted. In some countries this measure is carried out on a wider scale. Thus in Austria, as the result of a movement in which several university professors have taken an active part, leaflets and circulars, explaining briefly the chief symptoms of venereal diseases and warning against quacks and secret remedies, are circulated among young laborers and factory hands, matriculating students, and scholars who are leaving trade schools.

In France, where great social questions are sometimes faced with a more chivalrous daring than elsewhere, the dangers of syphilis, and the social position of the prostitute, have alike been dealt with by distinguished novelists and dramatists. Huysmans inaugurated this movement with his first novel, Marthe, which was immediately suppressed by the police. Shortly afterwards Edmond de Goncourt published La Fille Elisa, the first notable novel of the kind by a distinguished author. It was written with much reticence, and was not indeed a work of high artistic value, but it boldly faced a great social problem and clearly set forth the evils of the common attitude towards prostitution. It was dramatized and played by Antoine at the Théâtre Libre, but when, in 1891, Antoine wished to produce it at the Porte-Saint-Martin Theatre, the censor interfered and prohibited the play on account of its "contexture générale." The Minister of Education defended this decision on the ground that there was much in the play that might arouse repugnance and disgust. "Repugnance here is more moral than attraction," exclaimed M. Paul Déroulède, and the newspapers criticized a censure which permitted on the stage all the trivial indecencies which favor prostitution, but cannot tolerate any attack on prostitution. In more recent years the brothers Margueritte, both in novels and in journalism, have largely devoted their distinguished abilities and high literary skill to the courageous and enlightened advocacy of many social reforms. Victor Margueritte, in his Prostituée (1907)—a novel which has attracted wide attention and been translated into various languages—has sought to represent the condition of women in our actual society, and more especially the condition of the prostitute under what he regards as the odious and iniquitous system still prevailing. The book is a faithful picture of the real facts, thanks to the assistance the author received from the Paris Préfecture of Police, and largely for that reason is not altogether a satisfactory work of art, but it vividly and poignantly represents the cruelty, indifference, and hypocrisy so often shown by men towards women, and is a book which, on that account, cannot be too widely read. One of the most notable of modern plays is Brieux's Les Avariés (1902). This distinguished dramatist, himself a medical man, dedicates his play to Fournier, the greatest of syphilographers. "I think with you," he writes here, "that syphilis will lose much of its danger when it is possible to speak openly of an evil which is neither a shame nor a punishment, and when those who suffer from it, knowing what evils they may propagate, will better understand their duties towards others and towards themselves." The story developed in the drama is the old and typical story of the young man who has spent his bachelor days in what he considers a discrete and regular manner, having only had two mistresses, neither of them prostitutes, but at the end of this period, at a gay supper at which he bids farewell to his bachelor life, he commits a fatal indiscretion and becomes infected by syphilis; his marriage is approaching and he goes to a distinguished specialist who warns him that treatment takes time, and that marriage is impossible for several years; he finds a quack, however, who undertakes to cure him in six months; at the end of the time he marries; a syphilitic child is born; the wife discovers the state of things and forsakes her home to return to her parents; her indignant father, a deputy in Parliament, arrives in Paris; the last word is with the great specialist who brings finally some degree of peace and hope into the family. The chief morals Brieux points out are that it is the duty of the bride's parents before marriage to ascertain the bridegroom's health; that the bridegroom should have a doctor's certificate; that at every marriage the part of the doctors is at least as important as that of the lawyers. Even if it were a less accomplished work of art than it is, Les Avariés is a play which, from the social and educative point of view alone, all who have reached the age of adolescence should be compelled to see.

Another aspect of the same problem has been presented in Plus Fort que le Mal, a book written in dramatic form (though not as a properly constituted play intended for the stage) by a distinguished French medical author who here adopts the name of Espy de Metz. The author (who is not, however, pleading pro domo) calls for a more sympathetic attitude towards those who suffer from syphilis, and though he writes with much less dramatic skill than Brieux, and scarcely presents his moral in so unequivocal a form, his work is a notable contribution to the dramatic literature of syphilis.

It will probably be some time before these questions, poignant as they are from the dramatic point of view, and vitally important from the social point of view, are introduced on the English or the American stage. It is a remarkable fact that, notwithstanding the Puritanic elements which still exist in Anglo-Saxon thought and feeling generally, the Puritanic aspect of life has never received embodiment in the English or American drama. On the English stage it is never permitted to hint at the tragic side of wantonness; vice must always be made seductive, even though a deus ex machina causes it to collapse at the end of the performance. As Mr. Bernard Shaw has said, the English theatrical method by no means banishes vice; it merely consents that it shall be made attractive; its charms are advertised and its penalties suppressed. "Now, it is futile to plead that the stage is not the proper place for the representation and discussion of illegal operations, incest, and venereal disease. If the stage is the proper place for the exhibition and discussion of seduction, adultery, promiscuity, and prostitution, it must be thrown open to all the consequences of these things, or it will demoralize the nation."

The impulse to insist that vice shall always be made attractive is not really, notwithstanding appearances, a vicious impulse. It arises from a mental confusion, a common psychic tendency, which is by no means confined to Anglo-Saxon lands, and is even more well marked among the better educated in the merely literary sense, than among the worse educated people. The æsthetic is confused with the moral, and what arouses disgust is thus regarded as immoral. In France the novels of Zola, the most pedestrianally moralistic of writers, were for a long time supposed to be immoral because they were often disgusting. The same feeling is still more widespread in England. If a prostitute is brought on the stage, and she is pretty, well-dressed, seductive, she may gaily sail through the play and every one is satisfied. But if she were not particularly pretty, well-dressed, or seductive, if it were made plain that she was diseased and was reckless in infecting others with that disease, if it were hinted that she could on occasion be foul-mouthed, if, in short, a picture were shown from life—then we should hear that the unfortunate dramatist had committed something that was "disgusting" and "immoral." Disgusting it might be, but, on that very account, it would be moral. There is a distinction here that the psychologist cannot too often point out or the moralist too often emphasize.

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 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.

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."

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 Mœurs (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 Mœurs (there is an English translation).

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).

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.

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 happen that the girl becomes pregnant.

Rhys and Brynmor-Jones (Welsh People, pp. 582-4) have an interesting passage on this night-courtship with numerous references. As regards Germany see, e.g., Rudeck, Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit, pp. 146-154. With reference to trial-marriage generally many facts and references are given by M. A. Potter (Sohrab and Rustem, pp. 129-137).

The custom of free marriage unions, usually rendered legal before or after the birth of children, seems to be fairly common in many, or perhaps all, rural parts of England. The union is made legal, if found satisfactory, even when there is no prospect of children. In some counties it is said to be almost a universal practice for the women to have sexual relationships before legal marriage; sometimes she marries the first man whom she tries; sometimes she tries several before finding the man who suits her. Such marriages necessarily, on the whole, turn out better than marriages in which the woman, knowing nothing of what awaits her and having no other experiences for comparison, is liable to be disillusioned or to feel that she "might have done better." Even when legal recognition is not sought until after the birth of children, it by no means follows that any moral deterioration is involved. Thus in some parts of Staffordshire where it is the custom of the women to have a child before marriage, notwithstanding this "corruption," we are told (Burton, City of the Saints, Appendix IV), the women are "very good neighbors, excellent, hard-working, and affectionate wives and mothers."

"The lower social classes, especially peasants," remarks Dr. Ehrhard ("Auch Ein Wort zur Ehereform," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Jahrgang I, Heft 10), "know better than we that the marriage bed is the foundation of marriage. On that account they have retained the primitive custom of trial-marriage which, in the Middle Ages, was still practiced even in the best circles. It has the further advantage that the marriage is not concluded until it has shown itself to be fruitful. Trial-marriage assumes, of course, that virginity is not valued beyond its true worth." With regard to this point it may be mentioned that in many parts of the world a woman is more highly esteemed if she has had intercourse before marriage (see, e.g., Potter, op. cit., pp. 163 et seq.). While virginity is one of the sexual attractions a woman may possess, an attraction that is based on a natural instinct (see "The Evolution of Modesty," in vol. i of these Studies), yet an exaggerated attention to virginity can only be regarded as a sexual perversion, allied to paidophilia, the sexual attraction to children.

In very small coördinated communities the primitive custom of trial-marriage tends to decay when there is a great invasion of strangers who have not been brought up to the custom (which seems to them indistinguishable from the license of prostitution), and who fail to undertake the obligations which trial-marriage involves. This is what happened in the case of the so-called "island custom" of Portland, which lasted well on into the nineteenth century; according to this custom a woman before marriage lived with her lover until pregnant and then married him; she was always strictly faithful to him while living with him, but if no pregnancy occurred the couple might decide that they were not meant for each other, and break off relations. The result was that for a long period of years no illegitimate children were born, and few marriages were childless. But when the Portland stone trade was developed, the workmen imported from London took advantage of the "island custom," but refused to fulfil the obligation of marriage when pregnancy occurred. The custom consequently fell into disuse (see, e.g., translator's note to Bloch's Sexual Life of Our Time, p. 237, and the quotation there given from Hutchins, History and Antiquities of Dorset, vol. ii, p. 820).

It is, however, by no means only in rural districts, but in great cities also that marriages are at the outset free unions. Thus in Paris Després stated more than thirty years ago (La Prostitution à Paris, p. 137) that in an average arrondissement nine out of ten legal marriages are the consolidation of a free union; though, while that was an average, in a few arrondissements it was only three out of ten. Much the same conditions prevail in Paris to-day; at least half the marriages, it is stated, are of this kind.

In Teutonic lands the custom of free unions is very ancient and well-established. Thus in Sweden, Ellen Key states (Liebe und Ehe, p. 123), the majority of the population begin married life in this way. The arrangement is found to be beneficial, and "marital fidelity is as great as pre-marital freedom is unbounded." In Denmark, also, a large number of children are conceived before the unions of the parents are legalized (Rubin and Westergaard, quoted by Gaedeken, Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Feb. 15, 1909).

In Germany not only is the proportion of illegitimate births very high, since in Berlin it is 17 per cent., and in some towns very much higher, but ante-nuptial conceptions take place in nearly half the marriages, and sometimes in the majority. Thus in Berlin more than 40 per cent, of all legitimate firstborn children are conceived before marriage, while in some rural provinces (where the proportion of illegitimate births is lower) the percentage of marriages following ante-nuptial conceptions is much higher than in Berlin. The conditions in rural Germany have been especially investigated by a committee of Lutheran pastors, and were set forth a few years ago in two volumes, Die Geschlecht-sittlich Verhältnisse im Deutschen Reiche, which are full of instruction concerning German sexual morality. In Hanover, it is said in this work, the majority of authorities state that intercourse before marriage is the rule. At the very least, a probe, or trial, is regarded as a matter-of-course preliminary to a marriage, since no one wishes "to buy a pig in a poke." In Saxony, likewise, we are told, it is seldom that a girl fails to have intercourse before marriage, or that her first child is not born, or at all events conceived, outside marriage. This is justified as a proper proving of a bride before taking her for good. "One does not buy even a penny pipe without trying it," a German pastor was informed. Around Stettin, in twelve districts (nearly half the whole), sexual intercourse before marriage is a recognized custom, and in the remainder, if not exactly a custom, it is very common, and is not severely or even at all condemned by public opinion. In some districts marriage immediately follows pregnancy. In the Dantzig neighborhood, again, according to the Lutheran Committee, intercourse before marriage occurs in more than half the cases, but marriage by no means always follows pregnancy. Nearly all the girls who go as servants have lovers, and country people in engaging servants sometimes tell them that at evening and night they may do as they like. This state of things is found to be favorable to conjugal fidelity. The German peasant girl, as another authority remarks (E. H. Meyer, Deutsche Volkskunde, 1898, pp. 154, 164), has her own room; she may receive her lover; it is no great shame if she gives herself to him. The number of women who enter legal marriage still virgins is not large (this refers more especially to Baden), but public opinion protects them, and such opinion is unfavorable to the disregard of the responsibilities involved by sexual relationships. The German woman is less chaste before marriage than her French or Italian sister. But, Meyer adds, she is probably more faithful after marriage than they are.

It is assumed by many that this state of German morality as it exists to-day is a new phenomenon, and the sign of a rapid national degeneration. That is by no means the case. In this connection we may accept the evidence of Catholic priests, who, by the experience of the confessional, are enabled to speak with authority. An old Bavarian priest thus writes (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, 1907, Bd. ii, Heft I): "At Moral Congresses we hear laudation of 'the good old times' when, faith and morality prevailed among the people. Whether that is correct is another question. As a young priest I heard of as many and as serious sins as I now hear of as an old man. The morality of the people is not greater nor is it less. The error is the belief that immorality goes out of the towns and poisons the country. People talk as though the country were a pure Paradise of innocence. I will by no means call our country people immoral, but from an experience of many years I can say that in sexual respects there is no difference between town and country. I have learnt to know more than a hundred different parishes, and in the most various localities, in the mountain and in the plain, on poor land and on rich land. But everywhere I find the same morals and lack of morals. There are everywhere the same men, though in the country there are often better Christians than in the towns."

If, however, we go much farther back than the memories of a living man it seems highly probable that the sexual customs of the German people of the present day are not substantially different—though it may well be that at different periods different circumstances have accentuated them—from what they were in the dawn of Teutonic history. This is the opinion of one of the profoundest students of Indo-Germanic origins. In his Reallexicon (art. "Keuschheit") O. Schrader points out that the oft-quoted Tacitus, strictly considered, can only be taken to prove that women were chaste after marriage, and that no prostitution existed. There can be no doubt, he adds, and the earliest historical evidence shows, that women in ancient Germany were not chaste before marriage. This fact has been disguised by the tendency of the old classic writers to idealize the Northern peoples.

Thus we have to realize that the conception of "German virtue," which has been rendered so familiar to the world by a long succession of German writers, by no means involves any special devotion to the virtue of chastity. Tacitus, indeed, in the passage more often quoted in Germany than any other passage in classic literature, while correctly emphasizing the late puberty of the Germans and their brutal punishment of conjugal infidelity on the part of the wife, seemed to imply that they were also chaste. But we have always to remark that Tacitus wrote as a satirizing moralist as well as a historian, and that, as he declaimed concerning the virtues of the German barbarians, he had one eye on the Roman gallery whose vices he desired to lash. Much the same perplexing confusion has been created by Gildas, who, in describing the results of the Saxon Conquest of Britain, wrote as a preacher as well as a historian, and the same moral purpose (as Dill has pointed out) distorts Salvian's picture of the vices of fifth century Gaul. (I may add that some of the evidence in favor of the sexual freedom involved by early Teutonic faiths and customs is brought together in the study of "Sexual Periodicity" in the first volume of these Studies; cf. also, Rudeck, Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Deutschland, 1897, pp. 146 et seq.).

The freedom and tolerance of Russian sexual customs is fairly well-known. As a Russian correspondent writes to me, "the liberalism of Russian manners enables youths and girls to enjoy complete independence. They visit each other alone, they walk out alone, and they return home at any hour they please. They have a liberty of movement as complete as that of grown-up persons; some avail themselves of it to discuss politics and others to make love. They are able also to procure any books they please; thus on the table of a college girl I knew I saw the Elements of Social Science, then prohibited in Russia; this girl lived with her aunt, but she had her own room, which only her friends were allowed to enter: her aunt or other relations never entered it. Naturally, she went out and came back at what hours she pleased. Many other college girls enjoy the same freedom in their families. It is very different in Italy, where girls have no freedom of movement, and can neither go out alone nor receive gentlemen alone, and where, unlike Russia, a girl who has sexual intercourse outside marriage is really 'lost' and 'dishonored'" (cf. Sexual-Probleme, Aug., 1908, p. 506).

It would appear that freedom of sexual relationships in Russia—apart from the influence of ancient custom—has largely been rendered necessary by the difficulty of divorce. Married couples, who were unable to secure divorce, separated and found new partners without legal marriage. In 1907, however, an attempt was made to remedy this defect in the law; a liberal divorce law has been introduced, mutual consent with separation for a period of over a year being recognized as adequate ground for divorce (Beiblatt to Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. ii, Heft 5, p. 145).

During recent years there has developed among educated young men and women in Russia a movement of sexual license, which, though it is doubtless supported by the old traditions of sexual freedom, must by no means be confused with that freedom, since it is directly due to causes of an entirely different order. The strenuous revolutionary efforts made during the last years of the past century to attain political freedom absorbed the younger and more energetic section of the educated classes, involved a high degree of mental tension, and were accompanied by a tendency to asceticism. The prospect of death was constantly before their eyes, and any pre-occupation with sexual matters would have been felt as out of harmony with the spirit of revolution. But during the present century revolutionary activity has largely ceased. It has been, to a considerable extent, replaced by a movement of interest in sexual problems and of indulgence in sexual unrestraint, often taking on a somewhat licentious and sensual character. "Free love" unions have been formed by the students of both sexes for the cultivation of these tendencies. A novel, Artzibascheff's Ssanin, has had great influence in promoting these tendencies. It is not likely that this movement, in its more extravagant forms, will be of long duration. (For some account of this movement, see, e.g., Werner Daya, "Die Sexuelle Bewegung in Russland," Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, Aug., 1908; also, "Les Associations Erotiques en Russe," Journal du Droit International Privé, Jan., 1909, fully summarized in Revue des Idées, Feb., 1909.)

The movement of sexual freedom in Russia lies much deeper, however, than this fashion of sensual license; it is found in remote and uncontaminated parts of the country, and is connected with very ancient customs.

There is considerable interest in realizing the existence of long-continued sexual freedom—by some incorrectly termed "immorality," for what is in accordance with the customs or mores of a people cannot be immoral—among peoples so virile and robust, so eminently capable of splendid achievements, as the Germans and the Russians. There is, however, a perhaps even greater interest in tracing the development of the same tendency among new prosperous and highly progressive communities who have either not inherited the custom of sexual freedom or are now only reviving it. We may, for instance, take the case of Australia and New Zealand. This development may not, indeed, be altogether recent. The frankness of sexual freedom in Australia and the tolerance in regard to it were conspicuous thirty years ago to those who came from England to live in the Southern continent, and were doubtless equally visible at an earlier date. It seems, however, to have developed with the increase of self-conscious civilization. "After careful inquiry," says the Rev. H. Northcote, who has lived for many years in the Southern hemisphere (Christianity and Sex Problems, Ch. VIII), "the writer finds sufficient evidence that of recent years intercourse out of wedlock has tended towards an actual increase in parts of Australia." Coghlan, the chief authority on Australian statistics, states more precisely in his Childbirth in New South Wales, published a few years ago: "The prevalence of births of ante-nuptial conception—a matter hitherto little understood—has now been completely investigated. In New South Wales, during six years, there were 13,366 marriages, in respect of which there was ante-nuptial conception, and, as the total number of marriages was 49,641, at least twenty-seven marriages in a hundred followed conception. During the same period the illegitimate births numbered 14,779; there were, therefore, 28,145 cases of conception amongst unmarried women; in 13,366 instances marriage preceded the birth of the child, so that the children were legitimatized in rather more than forty-seven cases out of one hundred. A study of the figures of births of ante-nuptial conception makes it obvious that in a very large number of instances pre-marital intercourse is not an anticipation of marriage already arranged, but that the marriages are forced upon the parties, and would not be entered into were it not for the condition of the woman" (cf. Powys, Biometrika, vol. i, 1901-2, p. 30). That marriage should be, as Coghlan puts it, "forced upon the parties," is not, of course, desirable in the general moral interests, and it is also a sign of imperfect moral responsibility in the parties themselves.

The existence of such a state of things, in a young country belonging to a part of the world where the general level of prosperity, intelligence, morality and social responsibility may perhaps be said to be higher than in any other region inhabited by people of white race, is a fact of the very first significance when we are attempting to forecast the direction in which civilized morality is moving.

The active part taken by German girls in sexual matters is referred to again and again by the Lutheran pastors in their elaborate and detailed report. Of the Dantzig district it is said "the young girls give themselves to the youths, or even seduce them." The military manœuvres are frequently a source of unchastity in rural districts. "The fault is not merely with the soldiers, but chiefly with the girls, who become half mad as soon as they see a soldier," it is reported from the Dresden district. And in summarizing conditions in East Germany the report states: "In sexual wantonness girls are not behind the young men; they allow themselves to be seduced only too willingly; even grown-up girls often go with half-grown youths, and girls frequently give themselves to several men, one after the other. It is by no means always the youth who effects the seduction, it is very frequently the girls who entice the youth to sexual intercourse; they do not always wait till the men come to their rooms, but will go to the men's rooms and await them in their beds. With this inclination to sexual intercourse, it is not surprising that many believe that after sixteen no girl is a virgin. Unchastity among the rural laboring classes is universal, and equally pronounced in both sexes" (op. cit., vol. i, 218).

Among women of the educated classes the conditions are somewhat different. Restraints, both internal and external, are very much greater. Virginity, at all events in its physical fact, is retained, for the most part, till long past girlhood, and when it is lost that loss is concealed with a scrupulous care and prudence unknown to the working-classes. Yet the fundamental tendencies remain the same. So far as England is concerned, Geoffrey Mortimer quite truly writes (Chapters on Human Love, 1898, p. 117) that the two groups of (1) women who live in constant secret association with a single lover, and (2) women who give themselves to men, without fear, from the force of their passions, are "much larger than is generally supposed. In all classes of society there are women who are only virgins by repute. Many have borne children without being even suspected of cohabitation; but the majority adopt methods of preventing conception. A doctor in a small provincial town declared to me that such irregular intimacies were the rule, and not by any means the exception in his district." As regards Germany, a lady doctor, Frau Adams-Lehmann, states in a volume of the Transactions of the German Society for Combating Venereal Disease (Sexualpädagogik, p. 271): "I can say that during consultation hours I see very few virgins over thirty. These women," she adds, "are sensible, courageous and natural, often the best of their sex; and we ought to give them our moral support. They are working towards a new age."

The advantage for women of free sexual unions over compulsory marriage is well recognized in the case of the working classes of London, among whom sexual relationships before marriage are not unusual, and are indulgently regarded. It is, for instance, clearly asserted in the monumental work of C. Booth, Life and Labour of the People. "It is even said of rough laborers," we read, for instance, in the final volume of this work (p. 41), "that they behave best if not married to the woman with whom they live." The evidence on this point is often the more impressive because brought forward by people who are very far indeed from being anxious to base any general conclusions on it. Thus in the same volume a clergyman is quoted as saying: "These people manage to live together fairly peaceably so long as they are not married, but if they marry it always seems to lead to blows and rows."

It may be said that in such a case we witness not so much the operation of a natural law as the influences of a great centre of civilization exerting its moralizing effects even on those who stand outside the legally recognized institution of marriage. That contention may, however, be thrust aside. We find exactly the same tendency in Jamaica where the population is largely colored, and the stress of a high civilization can scarcely be said to exist. Legal marriage is here discarded to an even greater extent than in London, for little care is taken to legitimate children by marriage. It was found by a committee appointed to inquire into the marriage laws of Jamaica, that three out of every five births are illegitimate, that is to say that legal illegitimacy has ceased to be immoral, having become the recognized custom of the majority of the inhabitants. There is no social feeling against illegitimacy. The men approve of the decay of legal marriage, because they say the women work better in the house when they are not married; the women approve of it, because they say that men are more faithful when not bound by legal marriage. This has been well brought out by W. P. Livingstone in his interesting book, Black Jamaica (1899). The people recognize, he tells us (p. 210), that "faithful living together constitutes marriage;" they say that they are "married but not parsoned." One reason against legal marriage is that they are disinclined to incur the expense of the official sanction. (In Venezuela, it may be added, where also the majority of births take place outside official marriage, the chief reason is stated to be, not moral laxity, but the same disinclination to pay the expenses of legal weddings.) Frequently in later life, sometimes when they have grown up sons and daughters, couples go through the official ceremony. (In Abyssinia, also, it is stated by Hugues Le Roux, where the people are Christian and marriage is indissoluble and the ceremony expensive, it is not usual for married couples to make their unions legal until old age is coming on, Sexual-Probleme, April, 1908, p. 217.) It is significant that this condition of things in Jamaica, as elsewhere, is associated with the superiority of women. "The women of the peasant class," remarks Livingstone (p. 212), "are still practically independent of the men, and are frequently their superiors, both in physical and mental capacity." They refuse to bind themselves to a man who may turn out to be good for nothing, a burden instead of a help and protection. So long as the unions are free they are likely to be permanent. If made legal, the risk is that they will become intolerable, and cease by one of the parties leaving the other. "The necessity for mutual kindness and forbearance establishes a condition that is the best guarantee of permanency" (p. 214). It is said, however, that under the influence of religious and social pressure the people are becoming more anxious to adopt "respectable" ideas of sexual relationships, though it seems evident, in view of Livingstone's statement, that such respectability is likely to involve a decrease of real morality. Livingstone points out, however, one serious defect in the present conditions which makes it easy for immoral men to escape paternal responsibilities, and this is the absence of legal provision for the registration of the father's name on birth certificates (p. 256). In every country where the majority of births are illegitimate it is an obvious social necessity that the names of both parents should be duly registered on all birth certificates. It has been an unpardonable failure on the part of the Jamaican Government to neglect the simple measure needed to give "each child born in the country a legal father" (p. 258).

Among the Jews there seems to have been no intermediate stage of subordination of women, but instead a gradual progress throughout from complete subjection of the woman as wife to ever greater freedom. At first the husband could repudiate his wife at will without cause. (This was not an extension of patriarchal authority, but a purely marital authority.) The restrictions on this authority gradually increased, and begin to be observable already in the Book of Deuteronomy. The Mishnah went further and forbade divorce whenever the wife's condition inspired pity (as in insanity, captivity, etc.). By A.D. 1025, divorce was no longer possible except for legitimate reasons or by the wife's consent. At the same time, the wife also began to acquire the right of divorce in the form of compelling the husband to repudiate her on penalty of punishment in case of refusal. On divorce the wife became an independent woman in her own right, and was permitted to carry off the dowry which her husband gave her on marriage. Thus, notwithstanding Jewish respect for the letter of the law, the flexible jurisprudence of the Rabbis, in harmony with the growth of culture, accorded an ever-growing measure of sexual justice and equality to women (D. W. Amram, The Jewish Law of Divorce).

Among the Arabs the tendency of progress has also been favorable to women in many respects, especially as regards inheritance. Before Mahommed, in accordance with the system prevailing at Medina, women had little or no right of inheritance. The legislation of the Koran modified this rule, without entirely abolishing it, and placed women in a much better position. This is attributed largely to the fact that Mahommed belonged not to Medina, but to Mecca, where traces of matriarchal custom still survived (W. Marçais, Des Parents et des Alliés Successibles en Droit Musulman).

It may be pointed out—for it is not always realized—that even that stage of civilization—when it occurs—which involves the subordination and subjection of woman and her rights really has its origin in the need for the protection of women, and is sometimes even a sign of the acquirement of new privileges by women. They are, as it were, locked up, not in order to deprive them of their rights, but in order to guard those rights. In the later more stable phase of civilization, when women are no longer exposed to the same dangers, this motive is forgotten and the guardianship of woman and her rights seems, and indeed has really become, a hardship rather than an advantage.

On the strength of the statements of two satirical writers, Juvenal and Tacitus, it has been supposed by many that Roman women of the late period were given up to license. It is, however, idle to seek in satirists any balanced picture of a great civilization. Hobhouse (loc. cit., p. 216) concludes that on the whole, Roman women worthily retained the position of their husbands' companions, counsellors and friends which they had held when an austere system placed them legally in his power. Most authorities seem now to be of this opinion, though at an earlier period Friedländer expressed himself more dubiously. Thus Dill, in his judicious Roman Society (p. 163), states that the Roman woman's position, both in law and in fact, rose during the Empire; without being less virtuous or respected, she became far more accomplished and attractive; with fewer restraints she had greater charm and influence, even in public affairs, and was more and more the equal of her husband. "In the last age of the Western Empire there is no deterioration in the position and influence of women." Principal Donaldson, also, in his valuable historical sketch, Woman, considers (p. 113) that there was no degradation of morals in the Roman Empire; "the licentiousness of Pagan Rome is nothing to the licentiousness of Christian Africa, Rome, and Gaul, if we can put any reliance on the description of Salvian." Salvian's description of Christendom is probably exaggerated and one-sided, but exactly the same may be said in an even greater degree of the descriptions of ancient Rome left by clever Pagan satirists and ascetic Christian preachers.

Thus among the Franks, with whom the practice of monogamy prevailed, a woman was never free; she could not buy or sell or inherit without the permission of those to whom she belonged. She passed into the possession of her husband by acquisition, and when he fixed the wedding day he gave her parents coins of small money as arrha, and the day after the wedding she received from him a present, the morgengabe. A widow belonged to her parents again (Bedollière, Histoire de Mœurs des Français, vol. i, p. 180). It is true that the Salic law ordained a pecuniary fine for touching a woman, even for squeezing her finger, but it is clear that the offence thus committed was an offence against property, and by no means against the sanctity of a woman's personality. The primitive German husband could sell his children, and sometimes his wife, even into slavery. In the eleventh century cases of wife-selling are still heard of, though no longer recognized by law.

The traditions of Christianity were more favorable to sexual equality than were Teutonic customs, but in becoming amalgamated with those customs they added their own special contribution as to woman's impurity. This spiritual inferiority of woman was significantly shown by the restrictions sometimes placed on women in church, and even in the right to enter a church; in some places they were compelled to remain in the narthex, even in non-monastic churches (see for these rules, Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, art. "Sexes, Separation of").

By attempting to desexualize the idea of man and to oversexualize the idea of woman, Christianity necessarily degraded the position of woman and the conception of womanhood. As Donaldson well remarks, in pointing this out (op. cit., p. 182), "I may define man as a male human being and woman as a female human being.... What the early Christians did was to strike the 'male' out of the definition of man, and 'human being' out of the definition of woman." Religion generally appears to be a powerfully depressing influence on the position of woman notwithstanding the appeal which it makes to woman. Westermarck considers, indeed (Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. i, p. 669), that religion "has probably been the most persistent cause of the wife's subjection to her husband's rule."

It is sometimes said that the Christian tendency to place women in an inferior spiritual position went so far that a church council formally denied that women have souls. This foolish story has indeed been repeated in a parrot-like fashion by a number of writers. The source of the story is probably to be found in the fact, recorded by Gregory of Tours, in his history (lib. viii, cap. XX), that at the Council of Mâcon, in 585, a bishop was in doubt as to whether the term "man" included woman, but was convinced by the other members of the Council that it did. The same difficulty has presented itself to lawyers in more modern times, and has not always been resolved so favorably to woman as by the Christian Council of Mâcon.

The low estimate of women that prevailed even in the early Church is admitted by Christian scholars. "We cannot but notice," writes Meyrick (art. "Marriage," Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities), "even in the greatest of the Christian fathers a lamentably low estimate of woman, and consequently of the marriage relationship. Even St. Augustine can see no justification for marriage, except in a grave desire deliberately adopted of having children; and in accordance with this view, all married intercourse, except for this single purpose, is harshly condemned. If marriage is sought after for the sake of children, it is justifiable; if entered into as a remedium to avoid worse evils, it is pardonable; the idea of the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity, hardly existed, and could hardly yet exist."

From the woman's point of view, Lily Braun, in her important work on the woman question (Die Frauenfrage, 1901, pp. 28 et seq.) concludes that, in so far as Christianity was favorable to women, we must see that favorable influence in the placing of women on the same moral level as men, as illustrated in the saying of Jesus, "Let him who is without sin amongst you cast the first stone," implying that each sex owes the same fidelity. It reached, she adds, no further than this. "Christianity, which women accepted as a deliverance with so much enthusiasm, and died for as martyrs, has not fulfilled their hopes."

Even as regards the moral equality of the sexes in marriage, the position of Christian authorities was sometimes equivocal. One of the greatest of the Fathers, St. Basil, in the latter half of the fourth century, distinguished between adultery and fornication as committed by a married man; if with a married woman, it was adultery; if with an unmarried woman, it was merely fornication. In the former case, a wife should not receive her husband back; in the latter case, she should (art. "Adultery," Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities). Such a decision, by attaching supreme importance to a distinction which could make no difference to the wife, involved a failure to recognize her moral personality. Many of the Fathers in the Western Church, however, like Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose, could see no reason why the moral law should not be the same for the husband as for the wife, but as late Roman feeling both on the legal and popular side was already approximating to that view, the influence of Christianity was scarcely required to attain it. It ultimately received formal sanction in the Roman Canon Law, which decreed that adultery is equally committed by either conjugal party in two degrees: (1) simplex, of the married with the unmarried, and (2) duplex, of the married with the married.

It can scarcely be said, however, that Christianity succeeded in attaining the inclusion of this view of the moral equality of the sexes into actual practical morality. It was accepted in theory; it was not followed in practice. W. G. Sumner, discussing this question (Folkways, pp. 359-361), concludes: "Why are these views not in the mores? Undoubtedly it is because they are dogmatic in form, invented or imposed by theological authority or philosophical speculation. They do not grow out of the experience of life, and cannot be verified by it. The reasons are in ultimate physiological facts, by virtue of which one is a woman and the other is a man." There is, however, more to be said on this point later.

In his great work on chivalry Gautier brings forward much evidence to show that the feudal spirit, like the military spirit always and everywhere, on the whole involved at bottom a disdain for women, even though it occasionally idealized them. "Go into your painted and gilded rooms," we read in Renaus de Montauban, "sit in the shade, make yourselves comfortable, drink, eat, work tapestry, dye silk, but remember that you must not occupy yourselves with our affairs. Our business is to strike with the steel sword. Silence!" And if the woman insists she is struck on the face till the blood comes. The husband had a legal right to beat his wife, not only for adultery, but even for contradicting him. Women were not, however, entirely without power, and in a thirteenth century collection of Coutumes, it is set down that a husband must only beat his wife reasonably, resnablement. (As regards the husband's right to chastise his wife, see also Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, vol. i, p. 234. In England it was not until the reign of Charles II, from which so many modern movements date, that the husband was deprived of this legal right.)

In the eyes of a feudal knight, it may be added, the beauty of a horse competed, often successfully, with the beauty of a woman. In Girbers de Metz, two knights, Garin and his cousin Girbert, ride by a window at which sits a beautiful girl with the face of a rose and the white flesh of a lily. "Look, cousin Girbert, look! By Saint Mary, a beautiful woman!" "Ah," Girbert replies, "a beautiful beast is my horse!" "I have never seen anything so charming as that young girl with her fresh color and her dark eyes," says Garin. "I know no steed to compare with mine," retorts Girbert. When the men were thus absorbed in the things that pertain to war, it is not surprising that amorous advances were left to young girls to make. "In all the chansons de geste," Gautier remarks, "it is the young girls who make the advances, often with effrontery," though, he adds, wives are represented as more virtuous (L. Gautier, La Chevalerie, pp. 236-8, 348-50).

In England Pollock and Maitland (History of English Law, vol. ii, p. 437) do not believe that a life-long tutela of women ever existed as among other Teutonic peoples. "From the Conquest onwards," Hobhouse states (op. cit., vol. i, p. 224), "the unmarried English woman, on attaining her majority, becomes fully equipped with all legal and civil rights, as much a legal personality as the Babylonian woman had been three thousand years before." But the developed English law more than made up for any privileges thus accorded to the unmarried by the inconsistent manner in which it swathed up the wife in endless folds of irresponsibility, except when she committed the supreme offence of injuring her lord and master. The English wife, as Hobhouse continues (loc. cit.) was, if not her husband's slave, at any rate his liege subject; if she killed him it was "petty treason," the revolt of a subject against a sovereign in a miniature kingdom, and a more serious offence than murder. Murder she could not commit in his presence, for her personality was merged in him; he was responsible for most of her crimes and offences (it was that fact which gave him the right to chastise her), and he could not even enter into a contract with her, for that would be entering into a contract with himself. "The very being and legal existence of a woman is suspended during marriage," said Blackstone, "or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband, under whose wing, protection and cover she performs everything. So great a favorite," he added, "is the female sex of the laws of England." "The strength of woman," says Hobhouse, interpreting the sense of the English law, "was her weakness. She conquered by yielding. Her gentleness had to be guarded from the turmoil of the world, her fragrance to be kept sweet and fresh, away from the dust and the smoke of battle. Hence her need of a champion and guardian."

In France the wife of the mediæval and Renaissance periods occupied much the same position in her husband's house. He was her absolute master and lord, the head and soul of "the feminine and feeble creature" who owed to him "perfect love and obedience." She was his chief servant, the eldest of his children, his wife and subject; she signed herself "your humble obedient daughter and friend," when she wrote to him. The historian, De Maulde la Clavière, who has brought together evidence on this point in his Femmes de la Renaissance, remarks that even though the husband enjoyed this lofty and superior position in marriage, it was still generally he, and not the wife, who complained of the hardships of marriage.

Schrader, in his Reallexicon (art. "Brautkauf"), points out that, originally, the purchase of a wife was the purchase of her person, and not merely of the right of protecting her. The original conception probably persisted long in Great Britain on account of its remoteness from the centres of civilization. In the eleventh century Gregory VII desired Lanfranc to stop the sale of wives in Scotland and elsewhere in the island of the English (Pike, History of Crime in England, vol. i, p. 99). The practice never quite died out, however, in remote country districts.

Such transactions have taken place even in London. Thus in the Annual Register for 1767 (p. 99) we read: "About three weeks ago a bricklayer's laborer at Marylebone sold a woman, whom he had cohabited with for several years, to a fellow-workman for a quarter guinea and a gallon of beer. The workman went off with the purchase, and she has since had the good fortune to have a legacy of £200, and some plate, left her by a deceased uncle in Devonshire. The parties were married last Friday."

The Rev. J. Edward Vaux (Church Folk-lore, second edition, p. 146) narrates two authentic cases in which women had been bought by their husbands in open market in the nineteenth century. In one case the wife, with her own full consent, was brought to market with a halter round her neck, sold for half a crown, and led to her new home, twelve miles off by the new husband who had purchased her; in the other case a publican bought another man's wife for a two-gallon jar of gin.

It is the same conception of woman as property which, even to the present, has caused the retention in many legal codes of clauses rendering a man liable to pay pecuniary damages to a woman, previously a virgin, whom he has intercourse with and subsequently forsakes (Natalie Fuchs, "Die Jungfernschaft im Recht und Sitte," Sexual-Probleme, Feb., 1908). The woman is "dishonored" by sexual intercourse, depreciated in her market value, exactly as a new garment becomes "second-hand," even if it has but once been worn. A man, on the other hand, would disdain the idea that his personal value could be diminished by any number of acts of sexual intercourse.

This fact has even led some to advocate the "abolition of physical virginity." Thus the German authoress of Una Poenitentium (1907), considering that the protection of a woman is by no means so well secured by a little piece of membrane as by the presence of a true and watchful soul inside, advocates the operation of removal of the hymen in childhood. It is undoubtedly true that the undue importance attached to the hymen has led to a false conception of feminine "honor," and to an unwholesome conception of feminine purity.

The process by which a people acquires the sense of personal responsibility is slow, and perhaps it cannot be adequately acquired at all by races lacking a high grade of nervous organization. This is especially the case as regards sexual morality, and has often been illustrated on the contact of a higher with a lower civilization. It has constantly happened that missionaries—entirely against their own wishes, it need not be said—by overthrowing the strict moral system they have found established, and by substituting the freedom of European customs among people entirely unprepared for such freedom, have exerted the most disastrous effects on morality. This has been the case among the formerly well-organized and highly moral Baganda of Central Africa, as recorded in an official report by Colonel Lambkin (British Medical Journal, Oct. 3, 1908).

As regards Polynesia, also, R. L. Stevenson, in his interesting book, In the South Seas (Ch. V), pointed out that, while before the coming of the whites the Polynesians were, on the whole, chaste, and the young carefully watched, now it is far otherwise.

Even in Fiji, where, according to Lord Stanmore—who was High Commissioner of the Pacific, and an independent critic—missionary effort has been "wonderfully successful," where all own at least nominal allegiance to Christianity, which has much modified life and character, yet chastity has suffered. This was shown by a Royal Commission on the condition of the native races in Fiji. Mr. Fitchett, commenting on this report (Australasian Review of Reviews, Oct., 1897) remarks: "Not a few witnesses examined by the commission declare that the moral advance in Fiji is of a curiously patchy type. The abolition of polygamy, for example, they say, has not told at every point in favor of women. The woman is the toiler in Fiji; and when the support of the husband was distributed over four wives, the burden on each wife was less than it is now, when it has to be carried by one. In heathen times female chastity was guarded by the club; a faithless wife, an unmarried mother, was summarily put to death. Christianity has abolished club-law, and purely moral restraints, or the terror of the penalties of the next world, do not, to the limited imagination of the Fijian, quite take its place. So the standard of Fijian chastity is distressingly low."

It must always be remembered that when the highly organized primitive system of mixed spiritual and physical restraints is removed, chastity becomes more delicately and unstably poised. The controlling power of personal responsibility, valuable and essential as it is, cannot permanently and unremittingly restrain the volcanic forces of the passion of love even in high civilizations. "No perfection of moral constitution in a woman," Hinlon has well said, "no power of will, no wish and resolution to be 'good,' no force of religion or control of custom, can secure what is called the virtue of woman. The emotion of absolute devotion with which some man may inspire her will sweep them all away. Society, in choosing to erect itself on that basis, chooses inevitable disorder, and so long as it continues to choose it will continue to have that result."

There can be no doubt that the entrance of women into the field of industrial work, in rivalry with men and under somewhat the same conditions as men, raises serious questions of another order. The general tendency of civilization towards the economic independence and the moral responsibility of women is unquestionable. But it is by no means absolutely clear that it is best for women, and, therefore, for the community, that women should exercise all the ordinary avocations and professions of men on the same level as men. Not only have the conditions of the avocations and professions developed in accordance with the special aptitudes of men, but the fact that the sexual processes by which the race is propagated demand an incomparably greater expenditure of time and energy on the part of women than of men, precludes women in the mass from devoting themselves so exclusively as men to industrial work. For some biologists, indeed, it seems clear that outside the home and the school women should not work at all. "Any nation that works its women is damned," says Woods Hutchinson (The Gospel According to Darwin, p. 199). That view is extreme. Yet from the economic side, also, Hobson, in summing up this question, regards the tendency of machine-industry to drive women away from the home as "a tendency antagonistic to civilization." The neglect of the home, he states, is, "on the whole, the worst injury modern industry has inflicted on our lives, and it is difficult to see how it can be compensated by any increase of material products. Factory life for women, save in extremely rare cases, saps the physical and moral health of the family. The exigencies of factory life are inconsistent with the position of a good mother, a good wife, or the maker of a home. Save in extreme circumstances, no increase of the family wage can balance these losses, whose values stand upon a higher qualitative level" (J. A. Hobson, Evolution of Modern Capitalism, Ch. XII; cf. what has been said in Ch. I of the present volume). It is now beginning to be recognized that the early pioneers of the "woman's movement" in working to remove the "subjection of woman" were still dominated by the old ideals of that subjection, according to which the masculine is in all main respects the superior sex. Whatever was good for man, they thought, must be equally good for woman. That has been the source of all that was unbalanced and unstable, sometimes both a little pathetic and a little absurd, in the old "woman's movement." There was a failure to perceive that, first of all, women must claim their right to their own womanhood as mothers of the race, and thereby the supreme law-givers in the sphere of sex and the large part of life dependent on sex. This special position of woman seems likely to require a readjustment of economic conditions to their needs, though it is not likely that such readjustment would be permitted to affect their independence or their responsibility. We have had, as Madame Juliette Adam has put it, the rights of men sacrificing women, followed by the rights of women sacrificing the child; that must be followed by the rights of the child reconstituting the family. It has already been necessary to touch on this point in the first chapter of this volume, and it will again be necessary in the last chapter.

It is unnecessary to remark that there can be no question here as to any inherent moral superiority of one sex over the other. The answer to that question was well stated many years ago by one of the most subtle moralists of love. "Taken altogether," concluded Sénancour (De l'Amour, vol. ii, p. 85), "we have no reason to assert the moral superiority of either sex. Both sexes, with their errors and their good intentions, very equally fulfil the ends of nature. We may well believe that in either of the two divisions of the human species the sum of evil and that of good are about equal. If, for instance, as regards love, we oppose the visibly licentious conduct of men to the apparent reserve of women, it would be a vain valuation, for the number of faults committed by women with men is necessarily the same as that of men with women. There exist among us fewer scrupulous men than perfectly honest women, but it is easy to see how the balance is restored. If this question of the moral preëminence of one sex over the other were not insoluble it would still remain very complicated with reference to the whole of the species, or even the whole of a nation, and any dispute here seems idle."

This conclusion is in accordance with the general compensatory and complementary relationship of women to men (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, fourth edition, especially pp. 448 et seq.).

In a recent symposium on the question whether women are morally inferior to men, with special reference to aptitude for loyalty (La Revue, Jan. 1, 1909), to which various distinguished French men and women contributed their opinions, some declared that women are usually superior; others regarded it as a question of difference rather than of superiority or inferiority; all were agreed that when they enjoy the same independence as men, women are quite as loyal as men.

Bloch (Beiträge zur Ætiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Part II, p. 178), in agreement with Eulenburg, energetically denies that there is any such natural "sexual subjection" of women, regarding it as artificially produced, the result of the socially inferior position of women, and arguing that such subjection is in much higher degree a physiological characteristic of men than of women. (It has been necessary to discuss this question in dealing with "Love and Pain" in the third volume of these Studies.) It seems certainly clear that the notion that women are especially prone to self-sacrifice has little biological validity. Self-sacrifice by compulsion, whether physical or moral compulsion, is not worthy of the name; when it is deliberate it is simply the sacrifice of a lesser good for the sake of a greater good. Doubtless a man who eats a good dinner may be said to "sacrifice" his hunger. Even within the sphere of traditional morality a woman who sacrifices her "honor" for the sake of her love to a man has, by her "sacrifice," gained something that she values more. "What a triumph it is to a woman," a woman has said, "to give pleasure to a man she loves!" And in a morality on a sound biological basis no "sacrifice" is here called for. It may rather be said that the biological laws of courtship fundamentally demand self-sacrifice of the male rather than of the female. Thus the lioness, according to Gérard the lion-hunter, gives herself to the most vigorous of her lion wooers; she encourages them to fight among themselves for superiority, lying on her belly to gaze at the combat and lashing her tail with delight. Every female is wooed by many males, but she only accepts one; it is not the female who is called upon for erotic self-sacrifice, but the male. That is indeed part of the divine compensation of Nature, for since the heavier part of the burden of sex rests on the female, it is fitting that she should be less called upon for renunciation.

It has, of course, been said by abstract theorists that women have the matter in their own hands. They must never love a man until they have safely locked him up in the legal bonds of matrimony. Such an argument is absolutely futile, for it ignores the fact that, while love and even monogamy are natural, legal marriage is merely an external form, with a very feeble power of subjugating natural impulses, except when those impulses are weak, and no power at all of subjugating them permanently. Civilization involves the growth of foresight, and of self-control in both sexes; but it is foolish to attempt to place on these fine and ultimate outgrowths of civilization a strain which they could never bear. How foolish it is has been shown, once and for all, by Lea in his admirable History of Sacerdotal Celibacy.

Moreover, when we compare the respective aptitudes of men and women in this particular region, it must be remembered that men possess a greater power of forethought and self-control than women, notwithstanding the modesty and reserve of women. The sexual sphere is immensely larger in women, so that when its activity is once aroused it is much more difficult to master or control. (The reasons were set out in detail in the discussion of "The Sexual Impulse in Women" in volume iii of these Studies.) It is, therefore, unfair to women, and unduly favors men, when too heavy a premium is placed on forethought and self-restraint in sexual matters. Since women play the predominant part in the sexual field their natural demands, rather than those of men, must furnish the standard.

The Definition of Marriage—Marriage Among Animals—The Predominance of Monogamy—The Question of Group Marriage—Monogamy a Natural Fact, Not Based on Human Law—The Tendency to Place the Form of Marriage Above the Fact of Marriage—The History of Marriage—Marriage in Ancient Rome—Germanic Influence on Marriage—Bride-Sale—The Ring—The Influence of Christianity on Marriage—The Great Extent of This Influence—The Sacrament of Matrimony—Origin and Growth of the Sacramental Conception—The Church Made Marriage a Public Act—Canon Law—Its Sound Core—Its Development—Its Confusions and Absurdities—Peculiarities of English Marriage Law—Influence of the Reformation on Marriage—The Protestant Conception of Marriage as a Secular Contract—The Puritan Reform of Marriage—Milton as the Pioneer of Marriage Reform—His Views on Divorce—The Backward Position of England in Marriage Reform—Criticism of the English Divorce Law—Traditions of the Canon Law Still Persistent—The Question of Damages for Adultery—Collusion as a Bar to Divorce—Divorce in France, Germany, Austria, Russia, etc.—The United States—Impossibility of Deciding by Statute the Causes for Divorce—Divorce by Mutual Consent—Its Origin and Development—Impeded by the Traditions of Canon Law—Wilhelm von Humboldt—Modern Pioneer Advocates of Divorce by Mutual Consent—The Arguments Against Facility of Divorce—The Interests of the Children—The Protection of Women—The Present Tendency of the Divorce Movement—Marriage Not a Contract—The Proposal of Marriage for a Term of Years—Legal Disabilities and Disadvantages in the Position of the Husband and the Wife—Marriage Not a Contract But a Fact—Only the Non-Essentials of Marriage, Not the Essentials, a Proper Matter for Contract—The Legal Recognition of Marriage as a Fact Without Any Ceremony—Contracts of the Person Opposed to Modern Tendencies—The Factor of Moral Responsibility—Marriage as an Ethical Sacrament—Personal Responsibility Involves Freedom—Freedom the Best Guarantee of Stability—False Ideas of Individualism—Modern Tendency of Marriage—With the Birth of a Child Marriage Ceases to be a Private Concern—Every Child Must Have a Legal Father and Mother—How This Can be Effected—The Firm Basis of Monogamy—The Question of Marriage Variations—Such Variations Not Inimical to Monogamy—The Most Common Variations—The Flexibility of Marriage Holds Variations in Check—Marriage Variations versus Prostitution—Marriage on a Reasonable and Humane Basis—Summary and Conclusion.

Among birds, which from the point of view of erotic development stand at the head of the animal world, monogamy frequently prevails (according to some estimates among 90 per cent.), and unions tend to be permanent; there is an approximation to the same condition among some of the higher mammals, especially the anthropoid apes; thus among gorillas and oran-utans permanent monogamic marriages take place, the young sometimes remaining with the parents to the age of six, while any approach to loose behavior on the part of the wife is severely punished by the husband. The variations that occur are often simply matters of adaptation to circumstances; thus, according to J. G. Millais (Natural History of British Ducks, pp. 8, 63), the Shoveler duck, though normally monogamic, will become polyandric when males are in excess, the two males being in constant and amicable attendance on the female without signs of jealousy; among the monogamic mallards, similarly, polygyny and polyandry may also occur. See also R. W. Shufeldt, "Mating Among Birds," American Naturalist, March, 1907; for mammal marriages, a valuable paper by Robert Müller, "Säugethierehen," Sexual-Probleme, Jan., 1909, and as regards the general prevalence of monogamy, Woods Hutchinson, "Animal Marriage," Contemporary Review, Oct., 1904, and Sept., 1905.

There has long been a dispute among the historians of marriage as to the first form of human marriage. Some assume a primitive promiscuity gradually modified in the direction of monogamy; others argue that man began where the anthropoid apes left off, and that monogamy has prevailed, on the whole, throughout. Both these opposed views, in an extreme form, seem untenable, and the truth appears to lie midway. It has been shown by various writers, and notably Westermarck (History of Human Marriage, Chs. IV-VI), that there is no sound evidence in favor of primitive promiscuity, and that at the present day there are few, if any, savage peoples living in genuine unrestricted sexual promiscuity. This theory of a primitive promiscuity seems to have been suggested, as J. A. Godfrey has pointed out (Science of Sex, p. 112), by the existence in civilized societies of promiscuous prostitution, though this kind of promiscuity was really the result, rather than the origin, of marriage. On the other hand, it can scarcely be said that there is any convincing evidence of primitive strict monogamy beyond the assumption that early man continued the sexual habits of the anthropoid apes. It would seem probable, however, that the great forward step involved in passing from ape to man was associated with a change in sexual habits involving the temporary adoption of a more complex system than monogamy. It is difficult to see in what other social field than that of sex primitive man could find exercise for the developing intellectual and moral aptitudes, the subtle distinctions and moral restraints, which the strict monogamy practiced by animals could afford no scope for. It is also equally difficult to see on what basis other than that of a more closely associated sexual system the combined and harmonious efforts needed for social progress could have developed. It is probable that at least one of the motives for exogamy, or marriage outside the group, is (as was probably first pointed out by St. Augustine in his De Civitate Dei) the need of creating a larger social circle, and so facilitating social activities and progress. Exactly the same end is effected by a complex marriage system binding a large number of people together by common interests. The strictly small and confined monogamic family, however excellently it subserved the interests of the offspring, contained no promise of a wider social progress. We see this among both ants and bees, who of all animals, have attained the highest social organization; their progress was only possible through a profound modification of the systems of sexual relationship. As Espinas said many years ago (in his suggestive work, Des Sociétés Animales): "The cohesion of the family and the probabilities for the birth of societies are inverse." Or, as Schurtz more recently pointed out, although individual marriage has prevailed more or less from the first, early social institutions, early ideas and early religion involved sexual customs which modified a strict monogamy.

The most primitive form of complex human marriage which has yet been demonstrated as still in existence is what is called group-marriage, in which all the women of one class are regarded as the actual, or at all events potential, wives of all the men in another class. This has been observed among some central Australian tribes, a people as primitive and as secluded from external influence as could well be found, and there is evidence to show that it was formerly more widespread among them. "In the Urabunna tribe, for example," say Spencer and Gillen, "a group of men actually do have, continually and as a normal condition, marital relations with a group of women. This state of affairs has nothing whatever to do with polygamy any more than it has with polyandry. It is simply a question of a group of men and a group of women who may lawfully have what we call marital relations. There is nothing whatever abnormal about it, and, in all probability, this system of what has been called group marriage, serving as it does to bind more or less closely together groups of individuals who are mutually interested in one another's welfare, has been one of the most powerful agents in the early stages of the upward development of the human race" (Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 74; cf. A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia). Group-marriage, with female descent, as found in Australia, tends to become transformed by various stages of progress into individual marriage with descent in the male line, a survival of group-marriage perhaps persisting in the much-discussed jus primæ noctis. (It should be added that Mr. N. W. Thomas, in his book on Kinship and Marriage in Australia, 1908, concludes that group-marriage in Australia has not been demonstrated, and that Professor Westermarck, in his Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, as in his previous History of Human Marriage, maintains a skeptical opinion in regard to group-marriage generally; he thinks the Urabunna custom may have developed out of ordinary individual marriage, and regards the group-marriage theory as "the residuary legatee of the old theory of promiscuity." Durkheim also believes that the Australian marriage system is not primitive, "Organisation Matrimoniale Australienne," L'Année Sociologique, eighth year, 1905). With the attainment of a certain level of social progress it is easy to see that a wide and complicated system of sexual relationships ceases to have its value, and a more or less qualified monogamy tends to prevail as more in harmony with the claims of social stability and executive masculine energy.

The best historical discussion of marriage is still probably Westermarck's History of Human Marriage, though at some points it now needs to be corrected or supplemented; among more recent books dealing with primitive sexual conceptions may be specially mentioned Crawley's Mystic Rose, while the facts concerning the transformation of marriage among the higher human races are set forth in G. E. Howard's History of Matrimonial Institutions (3 vols.), which contains copious bibliographical references. There is an admirably compact, but clear and comprehensive, sketch of the development of modern marriage in Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, vol. ii.

It is necessary to bear in mind that the conclusion that monogamic marriage is natural, and represents an order which is in harmony with the instincts of the majority of people, by no means involves agreement with the details of any particular legal system of monogamy. Monogamic marriage is a natural biological fact, alike in many animals and in man. But no system of legal regulation is a natural biological fact. When a highly esteemed alienist, Dr. Clouston, writes (The Hygiene of Mind, p. 245) "there is only one natural mode of gratifying sexual nisus and reproductive instinct, that of marriage," the statement requires considerable exegesis before it can be accepted, or even receive an intelligible meaning, and if we are to understand by "marriage" the particular form and implications of the English marriage law, or even of the somewhat more enlightened Scotch law, the statement is absolutely false. There is a world of difference, as J. A. Godfrey remarks (The Science of Sex, 1901, p. 278), between natural monogamous marriage and our legal system; "the former is the outward expression of the best that lies in the sexuality of man; the latter is a creation in which religious and moral superstitions have played a most important part, not always to the benefit of individual and social health."

We must, therefore, guard against the tendency to think that there is anything rigid or formal in the natural order of monogamy. Some sociologists would even limit the naturalness of monogamy still further. Thus Tarde ("La Morale Sexuelle," Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Jan., 1907), while accepting as natural under present conditions the tendency for monogamy, mitigated by more or less clandestine concubinage, to prevail over all other forms of marriage, considers that this is not due to any irresistible influence, but merely to the fact that this kind of marriage is practiced by the majority of people, including the most civilized.

With the acceptance of the tendency to monogamy we are not at the end of sexual morality, but only at the beginning. It is not monogamy that is the main thing, but the kind of lives that people lead in monogamy. The mere acceptance of a monogamic rule carries us but a little way. That is a fact which cannot fail to impress itself on those who approach the questions of sex from the psychological side.

It must here again be repeated that it is the reality, and not the form or the permanence of the marriage union, which is its essential and valuable part. It is not the legal or religious formality which sanctifies marriage, it is the reality of the marriage which sanctifies the form. Fielding has satirized in Nightingale, Tom Jones's friend, the shallow-brained view of connubial society which degrades the reality of marriage to exalt the form. Nightingale has the greatest difficulty in marrying a girl with whom he has already had sexual relations, although he is the only man who has had relations with her. To Jones's arguments he replies: "Common-sense warrants all you say, but yet you well know that the opinion of the world is so contrary to it, that were I to marry a whore, though my own, I should be ashamed of ever showing my face again." It cannot be said that Fielding's satire is even yet out of date. Thus in Prussia, according to Adele Schreiber ("Heirathsbeschränkungen," Die Neue Generation, Feb., 1909), it seems to be still practically impossible for a military officer to marry the mother of his own illegitimate child.

The glorification of the form at the expense of the reality of marriage has even been attempted in poetry by Tennyson in the least inspired of his works, The Idylls of the King. In "Lancelot and Elaine" and "Guinevere" (as Julia Magruder points out, North American Review, April, 1905) Guinevere is married to King Arthur, whom she has never seen, when already in love with Lancelot, so that the "marriage" was merely a ceremony, and not a real marriage (cf., May Child, "The Weird of Sir Lancelot," North American Review, Dec., 1908).

It is important to remember that, while Christianity brought the idea of marriage as a sacrament into the main stream of the institutional history of Europe, that idea was merely developed, not invented, by the Church. It is an ancient and even primitive idea. The Jews believed that marriage is a magico-religious bond, having in it something mystical resembling a sacrament, and that idea, says Durkheim (L'Année Sociologique, eighth year, 1905, p. 419), is perhaps very archaic, and hangs on to the generally magic character of sex relations. "The mere act of union," Crawley remarks (The Mystic Rose, p. 318) concerning savages, "is potentially a marriage ceremony of the sacramental kind.... One may even credit the earliest animistic men with some such vague conception before any ceremony became crystallized." The essence of a marriage ceremony, the same writer continues, "is the 'joining together' of a man and a woman; in the words of our English service, 'for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall be joined unto his wife; and they two shall be one flesh.' At the other side of the world, amongst the Orang Benuas, these words are pronounced by an elder, when a marriage is solemnized: 'Listen all ye that are present; those that were distant are now brought together; those that were separated are now united.' Marriage ceremonies in all stages of culture may be called religious with as much propriety as any ceremony whatever. Those who were separated are now joined together, those who were mutually taboo now break the taboo." Thus marriage ceremonies prevent sin and neutralize danger.

The Catholic conception of marriage was, it is clear, in essentials precisely the primitive conception. Christianity drew the sacramental idea from the archaic traditions in popular consciousness, and its own ecclesiastical contribution lay in slowly giving that idea a formal and rigid shape, and in declaring it indissoluble. As among savages, it was in the act of consent that the essence of the sacrament lay; the intervention of the priest was not, in principle, necessary to give marriage its religiously binding character. The essence of the sacrament was mutual acceptance of each other by the man and the woman, as husband and wife, and technically the priest who presided at the ceremony was simply a witness of the sacrament. The essential fact being thus the mental act of consent, the sacrament of matrimony had the peculiar character of being without any outward and visible sign. Perhaps it was this fact, instinctively felt as a weakness, which led to the immense emphasis on the indissolubility of the sacrament of matrimony, already established by St. Augustine. The Canonists brought forward various arguments to account for that indissolubility, and a frequent argument has always been the Scriptural application of the term "one flesh" to married couples; but the favorite argument of the Canonists was that matrimony represents the union of Christ with the Church; that is indissoluble, and therefore its image must be indissoluble (Esmein, op. cit., vol. i, p. 64). In part, also, one may well believe, the idea of the indissolubility of marriage suggested itself to the ecclesiastical mind by a natural association of ideas: the vow of virginity in monasticism was indissoluble; ought not the vow of sexual relationship in matrimony to be similarly indissoluble? It appears that it was not until 1164, in Peter Lombard's Sentences, that clear and formal recognition is found of matrimony as one of the seven sacraments (Howard, op. cit., vol. i, p. 333).

Whatever hard things may be said about the Canon law, it must never be forgotten that it carried through the Middle Ages until the middle of the sixteenth century the great truth that the essence of marriage lies not in rites and forms, but in the mutual consent of the two persons who marry each other. When the Catholic Church, in its growing rigidity, lost that conception, it was taken up by the Protestants and Puritans in their first stage of ardent vital activity, though it was more or less dropped as they fell back into a state of subservience to forms. It continued to be maintained by moralists and poets. Thus George Chapman, the dramatist, who was both moralist and poet, in The Gentleman Usher (1606), represents the riteless marriage of his hero and heroine, which the latter thus introduces:—

And to-day, Ellen Key, the distinguished prophet of marriage reform, declares at the end of her Liebe und Ehe that the true marriage law contains only the paragraph: "They who love each other are husband and wife."

In England, where from the ninth century, marriage was generally accepted by the ecclesiastical and temporal powers as indissoluble, Canon law was, in the main, established as in the rest of Christendom. There were, however, certain points in which Canon law was not accepted by the law of England. By English law a ceremony before a priest was necessary to the validity of a marriage, though in Scotland the Canon law doctrine was accepted that simple consent of the parties, even exchanged secretly, sufficed to constitute marriage. Again, the issue of a void marriage contracted in innocence, and the issue of persons who subsequently marry each other, are legitimate by Canon law, but not by the common law of England (Geary, Marriage and Family Relations, p. 3; Pollock and Maitland, loc. cit.). The Canonists regarded the disabilities attaching to bastardy as a punishment inflicted on the offending parents, and considered, therefore, that no burden should fall on the children when there had been a ceremony in good faith on the part of one at least of the parents. In this respect the English law is less reasonable and humane. It was at the Council of Merton, in 1236, that the barons of England rejected the proposal to make the laws of England harmonize with the Canon law, that is, with the ecclesiastical law of Christendom generally, in allowing children born before wedlock to be legitimated by subsequent marriage. Grosseteste poured forth his eloquence and his arguments in favor of the change, but in vain, and the law of England has ever since stood alone in this respect (Freeman, "Merton Priory," English Towns and Districts). The proposal was rejected in the famous formula, "Nolumus leges Angliæ mutare," a formula which merely stood for an unreasonable and inhumane obstinacy.

In the United States, while by common law subsequent marriage fails to legitimate children born before marriage, in many of the States the subsequent marriage of the parents effects by statute the legitimacy of the child, sometimes (as in Maine) automatically, more usually (as in Massachusetts) through special acknowledgment by the father.

The English Reformers under Edward VI and his enlightened advisers, including Archbishop Cranmer, took liberal views of marriage, and were prepared to carry through many admirable reforms. The early death of that King exerted a profound influence on the legal history of English marriage. The Catholic reaction under Queen Mary killed off the more radical Reformers, while the subsequent accession of Queen Elizabeth, whose attitude towards marriage was grudging, illiberal, and old-fashioned, approximating to that of her father, Henry VIII (as witnessed, for instance, in her decided opposition to the marriage of the clergy), permanently affected English marriage law. It became less liberal than that of other Protestant countries, and closer to that of Catholic countries.

The reform of marriage attempted by the Puritans began in England in 1644, when an Act was passed asserting "marriage to be no sacrament, nor peculiar to the Church of God, but common to mankind and of public interest to every Commonwealth." The Act added, notwithstanding, that it was expedient marriage should be solemnized by "a lawful minister of the Word." The more radical Act of 1653 swept away this provision, and made marriage purely secular. The banns were to be published (by registrars specially appointed) in the Church, or (if the parties desired) the market-place. The marriage was to be performed by a Justice of the Peace; the age of consent to marriage for a man was made sixteen, for a woman fourteen (Scobell's Acts and Ordinances, pp. 86, 236). The Restoration abolished this sensible Act, and reintroduced Canon-law traditions, but the Puritan conception of marriage was carried over to America, where it took root and flourished.

It is to the honor of Milton, and one of his chief claims on our gratitude, that he is the first great protagonist in Christendom of the doctrine that marriage is a private matter, and that, therefore, it should be freely dissoluble by mutual consent, or even at the desire of one of the parties. We owe to him, says Howard, "the boldest defence of the liberty of divorce which had yet appeared. If taken in the abstract, and applied to both sexes alike, it is perhaps the strongest defence which can be made through an appeal to mere authority;" though his arguments, being based on reason and experience, are often ill sustained by his authority; he is really speaking the language of the modern social reformer, and Milton's writings on this subject are now sometimes ranked in importance above all his other work (Masson, Life of Milton, vol. iii; Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 86, vol. iii, p. 251; C. B. Wheeler, "Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce," Nineteenth Century, Jan., 1907).

Marriage, said Milton, "is not a mere carnal coition, but a human society; where that cannot be had there can be no true marriage" (Doctrine of Divorce, Bk. i, Ch. XIII); it is "a covenant, the very being whereof consists not in a forced cohabitation, and counterfeit performance of duties, but in unfeigned love and peace" (Ib., Ch. VI). Any marriage that is less than this is "an idol, nothing in the world." The weak point in Milton's presentation of the matter is that he never explicitly accords to the wife the same power of initiative in marriage and divorce as to the husband. There is, however, nothing in his argument to prevent its equal application to the wife, an application which, while never asserting he never denies; and it has been pointed out that he assumes that women are the equals of men and demands from them intellectual and spiritual companionship; however ready Milton may have been to grant complete equality of divorce to the wife, it would have been impossible for a seventeenth century Puritan to have obtained any hearing for such a doctrine; his arguments would have been received with, if that were possible, even more neglect than they actually met. (Milton's scornful sonnet concerning the reception of his book is well known.)

Milton insists that in the conventional Christian marriage exclusive importance is attached to carnal connection. So long as that connection is possible, no matter what antipathy may exist between the couple, no matter how mistaken they may have been "through any error, concealment, or misadventure," no matter if it is impossible for them to "live in any union or contentment all their days," yet the marriage still holds good, the two must "fadge together" (op. cit., Bk. i). It is the Canon law, he says, which is at fault, "doubtless by the policy of the devil," for the Canon law leads to licentiousness (op. cit.). It is, he argues, the absence of reasonable liberty which causes license, and it is the men who desire to retain the privileges of license who oppose the introduction of reasonable liberty.

The just ground for divorce is "indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature unchangeable, hindering, and ever likely to hinder, the main benefits of conjugal society, which are solace and peace." Without the "deep and serious verity" of mutual love, wedlock is "nothing but the empty husks of a mere outside matrimony," a mere hypocrisy, and must be dissolved (op. cit.).

Milton goes beyond the usual Puritan standpoint, and not only rejects courts and magistrates, but approves of self-divorce; for divorce cannot rightly belong to any civil or earthly power, since "ofttimes the causes of seeking divorce reside so deeply in the radical and innocent affections of nature, as is not within the diocese of law to tamper with." He adds that, for the prevention of injustice, special points may be referred to the magistrate, who should not, however, in any case, be able to forbid divorce (op. cit., Bk. ii, Ch. XXI). Speaking from a standpoint which we have not even yet attained, he protests against the absurdity of "authorizing a judicial court to toss about and divulge the unaccountable and secret reason of disaffection between man and wife."

In modern times Hinton was accustomed to compare the marriage law to the law of the Sabbath as broken by Jesus. We find exactly the same comparison in Milton. The Sabbath, he believes, was made for God. "Yet when the good of man comes into the scales, we have that voice of infinite goodness and benignity, that 'Sabbath was made for man and not man for Sabbath.' What thing ever was made more for man alone, and less for God, than marriage?" (op. cit., Bk. i, Ch. XI). "If man be lord of the Sabbath, can he be less than lord of marriage?"

The author of an able and temperate essay on The Question of English Divorce, summing up the characteristics of the English divorce law, concludes that it is: (1) unequal, (2) immoral, (3) contradictory, (4) illogical, (5) uncertain, and (6) unsuited to present requirements. It was only grudgingly introduced in a bill, presented to Parliament in 1857, which was stubbornly resisted during a whole session, not only on religious grounds by the opponents of divorce, but also by the friends of divorce, who desired a more liberal measure. It dealt with the sexes unequally, granting the husband but not the wife divorce for adultery alone. In introducing the bill the Attorney-General apologized for this defect, stating that the measure was not intended to be final, but merely as a step towards further legislation. That was more than half a century ago, but the further step has not yet been taken. Incomplete and unsatisfactory as the measure was, it seems to have been regarded by many as revolutionary and dangerous in the highest degree. The author of an article on "Modern Divorce" in the Universal Review for July, 1859, while approving in principle of the establishment of a special Divorce Court, yet declared that the new court was "tending to destroy marriage as a social institution and to sap female chastity," and that "everyone now is a husband and wife at will." "No one," he adds, "can now justly quibble at a deficiency of matrimonial vomitories."

Yet, according to this law, it is not even possible for a wife to obtain a divorce for her husband's adultery, unless he is also cruel or deserts her. At first "cruelty" meant physical cruelty and of a serious kind. But in course of time the meaning of the word was extended to pain inflicted on the mind, and now coldness and neglect may almost of themselves constitute cruelty, though the English court has sometimes had the greatest hesitation in accepting the most atrocious forms of refined cruelty, because it involved no "physical" element. "The time may very reasonably be looked forward to, however," a legal writer has stated (Montmorency, "The Changing Status of a Married Woman," Law Quarterly Review, April, 1897), "when almost any act of misconduct will, in itself, be considered to convey such mental agony to the innocent party as to constitute the cruelty requisite under the Act of 1857." (The question of cruelty is fully discussed in J. R. Bishop's Commentaries on Marriage, Divorce and Separation, 1891, vol. i, Ch. XLIX; cf. Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 111).

There can be little doubt, however, that cruelty alone is a reasonable cause for divorce. In many American States, where the facilities for divorce are much greater than in England, cruelty is recognized as itself sufficient cause, whether the wife or the husband is the complainant. The acts of cruelty alleged have sometimes been seemingly very trivial. Thus divorces have been pronounced in America on the ground of the "cruel and inhuman conduct" of a wife who failed to sew her husband's buttons on, or because a wife "struck plaintiff a violent blow with her bustle," or because a husband does not cut his toe-nails, or because "during our whole married life my husband has never offered to take me out riding. This has been a source of great mental suffering and injury." In many other cases, it must be added, the cruelty inflicted by the husband, even by the wife—for though usually, it is not always, the husband who is the brute—is of an atrocious and heart-rending character (Report on Marriage and Divorce in the United States, issued by Hon. Carroll D. Wright, Commissioner of Labor, 1889). But even in many of the apparently trivial cases—as of a husband who will not wash, and a wife who is constantly evincing a hasty temper—it must be admitted that circumstances which, in the more ordinary relationships of life may be tolerated, become intolerable in the intimate relationship of sexual union. As a matter of fact, it has been found by careful investigation that the American courts weigh well the cases that come before them, and are not careless in the granting of decrees of divorce.

In 1859 an exaggerated importance was attached to the gross reasons for divorce, to the neglect of subtle but equally fatal impediments to the continuance of marriage. This was pointed out by Gladstone, who was opposed to making adultery a cause of divorce at all. "We have many causes," he said, "more fatal to the great obligation of marriage, as disease, idiocy, crime involving punishment for life." Nowadays we are beginning to recognize not only such causes as these, but others of a far more intimate character which, as Milton long ago realized, cannot be embodied in statutes, or pleaded in law courts. The matrimonial bond is not merely a physical union, and we have to learn that, as the author of The Question of English Divorce (p. 49) remarks, "other than physical divergencies are, in fact, by far the most important of the originating causes of matrimonial disaster."

In England and Wales more husbands than wives petition for divorce, the wives who petition being about 40 per cent, of the whole. Divorces are increasing, though the number is not large, in 1907 about 1,300, of whom less than half remarried. The inadequacy of the divorce law is shown by the fact that during the same year about 7,000 orders for judicial separation were issued by magistrates. These separation orders not only do not give the right to remarry, but they make it impossible to obtain divorce. They are, in effect, an official permission to form relationships outside State marriage.

In the United States during the years 1887-1906 nearly 40 per cent, of the divorces granted were for "desertion," which is variously interpreted in different States, and must often mean a separation by mutual consent. Of the remainder, 19 per cent, were for unfaithfulness, and the same proportion for cruelty; but while the divorces granted to husbands for the infidelity of their wives are nearly three times as great proportionately as those granted to wives for their husband's adultery, with regard to cruelty it is the reverse, wives obtaining 27 per cent, of their divorces on that ground and husbands only 10 per cent.

In Prussia divorce is increasing. In 1907 there were eight thousand divorces, the cause in half the cases being adultery, and in about a thousand cases malicious desertion. In cases of desertion the husbands were the guilty parties nearly twice as often as the wives, in cases of adultery only a fifth to an eighth part.

The English Divorce Act of 1857 refused divorce when there was collusion, as well as when there was any countercharge against the petitioner, and the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1860 provided the machinery for guaranteeing these bars to divorce. This question of collusion is discussed by G. P. Bishop (op. cit., vol. ii, Ch. IX). "However just a cause may be," Bishop remarks, "if parties collude in its management, so that in real fact both parties are plaintiffs, while by the record the one appears as plaintiff and the other as defendant, it cannot go forward. All conduct of this sort, disturbing to the course of justice, falls within the general idea of fraud on the court. Such is the doctrine in principle everywhere."

There is an influential movement in England for the reform of divorce, on the grounds that the present law is unjust, illogical, and immoral, represented by the Divorce Law Reform Union. Even the former president of the Divorce Court, Lord Gorell, declared from the bench in 1906 that the English law produces deplorable results, and is "full of inconsistencies, anomalies and inequalities, amounting almost to absurdities." The points in the law which have aroused most protest, as being most behind the law of other nations, are the great expense of divorce, the inequality of the sexes, the failure to grant divorces for desertion and in cases of hopeless insanity, and the failure of separation orders to enable the separated parties to marry again. Separation orders are granted by magistrates for cruelty, adultery, and desertion. This "separation" is really the direct descendant of the Canon law divorce a mensa et thoro, and the inability to marry which it involves is merely a survival of the Canon law tradition. At the present time magistrates—exercising their discretion, it is admitted, in a careful and prudent manner—issue some 7,000 separation orders annually, so that every year the population is increased by 14,000 individuals mostly in the age of sexual vigor, and some little more than children, who are forbidden by law to form legal marriages. They contribute powerfully to the great forward movement which, as was shown in the previous chapter, marks the morality of our age. But it is highly undesirable that free marriages should be formed, helplessly, by couples who have no choice in the matter, for it is unlikely that under such circumstances any high level of personal responsibility can be reached. The matter could be easily remedied by dropping altogether a Canon law tradition which no longer has any vitality or meaning, and giving to the magistrate's separation order the force of a decree of divorce.

New Zealand and the Australian colonies, led by Victoria in 1889, have passed divorce laws which, while more or less framed on the English model, represent a distinct advance. Thus in New Zealand the grounds for divorce are adultery on either side, wilful desertion, habitual drunkenness, and conviction to imprisonment for a term of years.

In Japan, according to the new Civil Code, much as in ancient Rome, marriage is effected by giving notice of the fact to the registrar in the presence of two witnesses, and with the consent (in the case of young couples) of the heads of their families. There may be a ceremony, but it is not demanded by the law. Divorce is effected in exactly the same way, by simply having the registration cancelled, provided both husband and wife are over twenty-five years of age. For younger couples unhappily married, and for cases in which mutual consent cannot be obtained, judicial divorce exists. This is granted for various specific causes, of which the most important is "grave insult, such as to render living together unbearable" (Ernest W. Clement, "The New Woman in Japan," American Journal Sociology, March, 1903). Such a system, like so much else achieved by Japanese organization, seems reasonable, guarded, and effective.

In the very different and far more ancient marriage system of China, divorce by mutual consent is equally well-established. Such divorce by mutual consent takes place for incompatibility of temperament, or when both husband and wife desire it. There are, however, various antiquated and peculiar provisions in the Chinese marriage laws, and divorce is compulsory for the wife's adultery or serious physical injuries inflicted by either party on the other. (The marriage laws of China are fully set forth by Paul d'Enjoy, La Revue, Sept. 1, 1905.)

Among the Eskimo (who, as readers of Nansen's fascinating books on their morals will know, are in some respects a highly socialized people) the sexes are absolutely equal, marriages are perfectly free, and separation is equally free. The result is that there are no uncongenial unions, and that no unpleasant word is heard between man and wife (Stefánsson, Harper's Magazine, Nov., 1908).

Among the ancient Welsh, women, both before and after marriage, enjoyed great freedom, far more than was afforded either by Christianity or the English Common law. "Practically either husband or wife could separate when either one or both chose" (Rhys and Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People, p. 214). It was so also in ancient Ireland. Women held a very high position, and the marriage tie was very free, so as to be practically, it would appear, dissoluble by mutual consent. So far as the Brehon laws show, says Ginnell (The Brehon Laws, p. 212), "the marriage relation was extremely loose, and divorce was as easy, and could be obtained on as slight ground, as is now the case in some of the States of the American Union. It appears to have been obtained more easily by the wife than by the husband. When obtained on her petition, she took away with her all the property she had brought her husband, all her husband had settled upon her on their marriage, and in addition so much of her husband's property as her industry appeared to have entitled her to."

Even in early French history we find that divorce by mutual consent was very common. It was sufficient to prepare in duplicate a formal document to this effect: "Since between N. and his wife there is discord instead of charity according to God, and that in consequence it is impossible for them to live together, it has pleased both to separate, and they have accordingly done so." Each of the parties was thus free either to retire into a cloister or to contract another union (E. de la Bedollière, Histoire des Mœurs des Français, vol. i, p. 317). Such a practice, however it might accord with the germinal principle of consent embodied in the Canon law, was far too opposed to the ecclesiastical doctrine of the sacramental indissolubility of matrimony to be permanently allowed, and it was completely crushed out.

The subtle and complex character of the sexual relationships in a high civilization and the unhappy results of their State regulation were well expressed by Wilhelm von Humboldt in his Ideen zu einen Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen, so long ago as 1792. "A union so closely allied with the very nature of the respective individuals must be attended with the most hurtful consequences when the State attempts to regulate it by law, or, through the force of its institutions, to make it repose on anything save simple inclination. When we remember, moreover, that the State can only contemplate the final results of such regulations on the race, we shall be still more ready to admit the justice of this conclusion. It may reasonably be argued that a solicitude for the race only conducts to the same results as the highest solicitude for the most beautiful development of the inner man. For, after careful observation, it has been found that the uninterrupted union of one man with one woman is most beneficial to the race, and it is likewise undeniable that no other union springs from true, natural, harmonious love. And further, it may be observed, that such love leads to the same results as those very relations which law and custom tend to establish. The radical error seems to be that the law commands; whereas such a relation cannot mould itself according to external arrangements, but depends wholly on inclination; and wherever coercion or guidance comes into collision with inclination, they divert it still farther from the proper path. Wherefore it appears to me that the State should not only loosen the bonds in this instance and leave ampler freedom to the citizen, but that it should entirely withdraw its active solicitude from the institution of marriage, and, both generally and in its particular modifications, should rather leave it wholly to the free choice of the individuals, and the various contracts they may enter into with respect to it. I should not be deterred from the adoption of this principle by the fear that all family relations might be disturbed, for, although such a fear might be justified by considerations of particular circumstances and localities, it could not fairly be entertained in an inquiry into the nature of men and States in general. For experience frequently convinces us that just where law has imposed no fetters, morality most surely binds; the idea of external coercion is one entirely foreign to an institution which, like marriage, reposes only on inclination and an inward sense of duty; and the results of such coercive institutions do not at all correspond to the intentions in which they originate."

A long succession of distinguished thinkers—moralists, sociologists, political reformers—have maintained the social advantages of divorce by mutual consent, or, under guarded circumstances, at the wish of one party. Mutual consent was the corner-stone of Milton's conception of marriage. Montesquieu said that true divorce must be the result of mutual consent and based on the impossibility of living together. Sénancour seems to agree with Montesquieu. Lord Morley (Diderot, vol. ii, Ch. I), echoing and approving the conclusions of Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1772), adds that the separation of husband and wife is "a transaction in itself perfectly natural and blameless, and often not only laudable, but a duty." Bloch (Sexual Life of Our Time, p. 240), with many other writers, emphasizes the truth of Shelley's saying, that the freedom of marriage is the guarantee of its durability. (That the facts of life point in the same direction has been shown in the previous chapter.) The learned Caspari (Die Soziale Frage über die Freiheit der Ehe), while disclaiming any prevision of the future, declares that if sexual relationships are to remain or to become moral, there must be an easier dissolution of marriage. Howard, at the conclusion of his exhaustive history of matrimonial institutions (vol. iii p. 220), though he himself believes that marriage is peculiarly in need of regulation by law, is yet constrained to admit that it is perfectly clear to the student of history that the modern divorce movement is "but a part of the mighty movement for social liberation which has been gaining in volume and strength since the Reformation." Similarly the cautious and judicial Westermarck concludes the chapter on marriage of his Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (vol. ii, p. 398) with the statement that "when both husband and wife desire to separate, it seems to many enlightened minds that the State has no right to prevent them from dissolving the marriage contract, provided the children are properly cared for; and that, for the children, also, it is better to have the supervision of one parent only than of two who cannot agree."

In France the leaders of the movement of social reform seem to be almost, or quite, unanimous in believing that the next step in regard to divorce is the establishment of divorce by mutual consent. This was, for instance, the result reached in a symposium to which thirty-one distinguished men and women contributed. All were in favor of divorce by mutual consent; the only exception was Madame Adam, who said she had reached a state of skepticism with regard to political and social forms, but admitted that for nearly half a century she had been a strong advocate of divorce. A large number of the contributors were in favor of divorce at the desire of one party only (La Revue, March 1, 1901). In other countries, also, there is a growing recognition that this solution of the question, with due precautions to avoid any abuses to which it might otherwise be liable, is the proper and inevitable solution.

As to the exact method by which divorce by mutual consent should be effected, opinions differ, and the matter is likely to be differently arranged in different countries. The Japanese plan seems simple and judicious (see ante, p. 461). Paul and Victor Margueritte (Quelques Idées, pp. 3 et seq.), while realizing that the conflict of feeling in the matter of personal associations involves decisions which are entirely outside the competence of legal tribunals, recognize that such tribunals are necessary in order to deal with the property of divorced persons, and also, in the last resort, with the question of the care of the children. They should not act in public. These writers propose that each party should choose a representative, and that these two should choose a third; and that this tribunal should privately investigate, and if they agreed should register the divorce, which should take place six or twelve months later, or three years later, if only desired by one of the parties. Dr. Shufeldt ("Psychopathia Sexualis and Divorce") proposes that a divorce-court judge should conduct, alone, the hearing of any cases of marital discord, the husband and wife appearing directly before him, without counsel, though with their witnesses, if necessary; should medical experts be required the judge alone would be empowered to call them.

Various writers have treated marriage as an actual contract or argued that it ought to be converted into a true contract. Mrs. Mona Caird, for instance ("The Morality of Marriage," Fortnightly Review, 1890), believes that when marriage becomes really a contract "a couple would draw up their agreement, or depute the task to their friends, as is now generally done as regards marriage settlements. They agree to live together on such and such terms, making certain stipulations within the limits of the code." The State, she holds, should, however, demand an interval of time between notice of divorce and the divorce itself, if still desired when that interval has passed. Similarly, in the United States Dr. Shufeldt ("Needed Revision of the Laws of Marriage and Divorce," Medico-Legal Journal, Dec., 1897) insists that marriage must be entirely put into the hands of the legal profession and "made a civil contract, explicit in detail, and defining terms of divorce, in the event that a dissolution of the contract is subsequently desired." He adds that medical certificates of freedom from hereditary and acquired disease should be required, and properly regulated probationary marriages also be instituted.

In France, a deputy of the Chamber was, in 1891, so convinced that marriage is a contract, like any other contract, that he declared that "to perform music at the celebration of a marriage is as ridiculous as it would be to send for a tenor to a notary's to celebrate a sale of timber." He was of quite different mind from Pepys, who, a couple of centuries earlier, had been equally indignant at the absence of music from a wedding, which, he said, made it like a coupling of dog and bitch.

A frequent demand of those who insist that marriage must be regarded as a contract is marriage contracted for a term of years. Marriages could be contracted for a term of five years or less in old Japan, and it is said that they were rarely or never dissolved at the end of the term. Goethe, in his Wahlverwandtschaften (Part I, Ch. X) incidentally introduced a proposal for marriages for a term of five years and attached much moral significance to the prolongation of the marriage beyond that term without external compulsion. (Bloch considers that Goethe had probably heard of the Japanese custom, Sexual Life of Our Time, p. 241.) Professor E. D. Cope ("The Marriage Problem," Open Court, Nov. 15 and 22, 1888), likewise, in order to remove matrimony from the domain of caprice and to permit full and fair trial, advocated "a system of civil marriage contracts which shall run for a definite time. These contracts should be of the same value and effect as the existing marriage contract. The time limits should be increased rapidly, so as to prevent women of mature years being deprived of support. The first contract ought not to run for less than five years, so as to give ample opportunity for acquaintance, and for the recovery from temporary disagreements." This first contract, Cope held, should be terminable at the wish of either party; the second contract, for ten or fifteen years, should only be terminable at the wish of both parties, and the third should be permanent and indissoluble. George Meredith, the distinguished novelist, also, more recently, threw out the suggestion that marriages should be contracted for a term of years.

It can scarcely be said that marriages for a term of years constitute a very satisfactory solution of the difficulties at present encountered. They would not commend themselves to young lovers, who believe that their love is eternal, nor, so long as the union proves satisfactory, is there any need to introduce the disturbing idea of a legal termination of the contract. On the other hand, if the union proves unhappy, it is not reasonable to insist on the continuation for ten or even five years of an empty form which corresponds to no real marriage union. Even if marriage is placed on the most prosaic contractive basis it is a mistake, and indeed an impossibility, to pre-ordain the length of its duration. The system of fixing the duration of marriage beforehand for a term of years involves exactly the same principle as the system of fixing it beforehand for life. It is open to the same objection that it is incompatible with any vital relationship. As the demand for vital reality and effectiveness in social relationships grows, this fact is increasingly felt. We see exactly the same change among us in regard to the system of inflicting fixed sentences of imprisonment on criminals. To send a man to prison for five years or for life, without any regard to the unknown problem of the vital reaction of imprisonment on the man—a reaction which will be different in every individual case—is slowly coming to be regarded as an absurdity.

When a woman marries she gives up the right to her own person. Thus, according to the law of England, a man "cannot be guilty of a rape upon his lawful wife." Stephen, who, in the first edition of his Digest of Criminal Law, thought that under some circumstances a man might be indicted for rape upon his wife, in the last edition withdrew that opinion. A man may rape a prostitute, but he cannot rape his wife. Having once given her consent to sexual intercourse by the act of marrying a man, she has given it forever, whatever new circumstances may arise, and he has no need to ask her consent to sexual intercourse, not even if he is knowingly suffering at the time from a venereal disease (see, e.g., an article on "Sex Bias," Westminster Review, March, 1888).

The duty of the wife to allow "conjugal rights" to her husband is another aspect of her legal subjection to him. Even in the nineteenth century a Suffolk lady of good family was imprisoned in Ipswich Goal for many years and fed on bread and water, though suffering from various diseases, till she died, simply because she continued to disregard the decree requiring her to render conjugal rights to her husband. This state of things was partly reformed by the Matrimonial Causes Bill of 1884, and that bill was passed, not to protect women, but men, against punishment for refusal to restore conjugal rights. Undoubtedly, the modern tendency, although it has progressed very slowly, is against applying compulsion to either husband or wife to yield "conjugal rights;" and since the Jackson case it is not possible in England for a husband to use force in attempting to compel his wife to live with him. This tendency is still more marked in the United States; thus the Iowa Supreme Court, a few years ago, decided that excessive demands for coitus constituted cruelty of a degree justifying divorce (J. G. Kiernan, Alienist and Neurologist, Nov. 1906, p. 466).

The slender tenure of the wife over her person is not confined to the sexual sphere, but even extends to her right to life. In England, if a wife kills her husband, it was formerly the very serious offence of "petit treason," and it is still murder. But, if a husband kills his wife and is able to plead her adultery and his jealousy, it is only manslaughter. (In France, where jealousy is regarded with extreme indulgence, even a wife who kills her husband is often acquitted.)

It must not, however, be supposed that all the legal inequalities involved by marriage are in favor of the husband. A large number of injustices are also inflicted on the husband. The husband, for instance, is legally responsible for the libels uttered by his wife, and he is equally responsible civilly for the frauds she commits, even if she is living apart from him. (This was, for instance, held by an English judge in 1908; "he could only say he regretted it, for it seems a hard case. But it was the law.") Belfort Bax has, in recent years, especially insisted on the hardships inflicted by English law in such ways as these. There can be no doubt that marriage, as at present constituted, inflicts serious wrongs on the husband as well as on the wife.

The notion that such a relationship as that of marriage can rest on so fragile a basis as a pre-ordained contract has naturally never prevailed widely in its extreme form, and has been unknown altogether in many parts of the world. The Romans, as we know, explicitly rejected it, and even at a comparatively early period recognized the legality of marriage by usus, thus declaring in effect that marriage must be a fact, and not a mere undertaking. There has been a widespread legal tendency, especially where the traditions of Roman law have retained any influence, to regard the cohabitation of marriage as the essential fact of the relationship. It was an old rule even under the Catholic Church that marriage may be presumed from cohabitation (see, e.g., Zacchia, Questionum Medico-legalium Opus, edition of 1688, vol. iii, p. 234). Even in England cohabitation is already one of the presumptions in favor of the existence of marriage (though not necessarily by itself regarded as sufficient), provided the woman is of unblemished character, and does not appear to be a common prostitute (Nevill Geary, The Law of Marriage, Ch. III). If, however, according to Lord Watson's judicial statement in the Dysart Peerage case, a man takes his mistress to a hotel or goes with her to a baby-linen shop and speaks of her as his wife, it is to be presumed that he is acting for the sake of decency, and this furnishes no evidence of marriage. In Scotland the presumption of marriage arises on much slighter grounds than in England. This may be connected with the ancient and deep-rooted custom in Scotland of marriage by exchange of consent (Geary, op. cit. Ch. XVIII; cf., Howard, Matrimonial Institutions, vol. i, p. 316).

In the Bredalbane case (Campbell v. Campbell, 1867), which was of great importance because it involved the succession to the vast estates of the Marquis of Bredalbane, the House of Lords decided than even an adulterous connection may, on ceasing to be adulterous, become matrimonial by the simple consent of the parties, as evidenced by habit and repute, without any need for the matrimonial character of the connection to be indicated by any public act, nor any necessity to prove the specific period when the consent was interchanged. This decision has been confirmed in the Dysart case (Geary, loc. cit.; cf. C. G. Garrison, "Limits of Divorce," Contemporary Review, Feb., 1894). Similarly, as decided by Justice Kekewich in the Wagstaff case in 1907, if a man leaves money to his "widow," on condition that she never marries again, although he has never been married to her, and though she has been legally married to another man, the testator's intentions must be upheld. Garrison, in his valuable discussion of this aspect of legal marriage (loc. cit.), forcibly insists that by English law marriage is a fact and not a contract, and that where "conduct characterized by connubial purpose and constancy" exists, there marriage legally exists, marriage being simply "a name for an existing fact."

In the United States, marriage "by habit and repute" similarly exists, and in some States has even been confirmed and extended by statute (J. P. Bishop, Commentaries, vol. i, Ch. XV). "Whatever the form of the ceremony, and even if all ceremony was dispensed with," said Judge Cooley, of Michigan, in 1875 (in an opinion accepted as authoritative by the Federal courts), "if the parties agreed presently to take each other for husband and wife, and from that time lived together professedly in that relation, proof of these facts would be sufficient.... This has been the settled doctrine of the American courts." (Howard, op. cit., vol. iii, pp. 177 et seq. Twenty-three States sanction common-law marriage, while eighteen repudiate, or are inclined to repudiate, any informal agreement.)

This legal recognition by the highest judicial authorities, alike in Great Britain and the United States, that marriage is essentially a fact, and that no evidence of any form or ceremony of marriage is required for the most complete legal recognition of marriage, undoubtedly carries with it highly important implications. It became clear that the reform of marriage is possible even without change in the law, and that honorable sexual relationships, even when entered into without any legal forms, are already entitled to full legal recognition and protection. There are, however, it need scarcely be added here, other considerations which render reform along these lines incomplete.

It is supposed by some that to look upon sexual union as a sacrament is necessarily to accept the ancient Catholic view, embodied in the Canon law, that matrimony is indissoluble. That is, however, a mistake. Even the Canonists themselves were never able to put forward any coherent and consistent ground for the indissolubility of matrimony which could commend itself rationally, while Luther and Milton and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who maintained the religious and sacred nature of sexual union—though they were cautious about using the term sacrament on account of its ecclesiastical implications—so far from believing that its sanctity involved indissolubility, argued in the reverse sense. This point of view may be defended even from a strictly Protestant standpoint. "I take it," Mr. G. C. Maberly says, "that the Prayer Book definition of a sacrament, 'the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,' is generally accepted. In marriage the legal and physical unions are the outward and visible signs, while the inward and spiritual grace is the God-given love that makes the union of heart and soul: and it is precisely because I take this view of marriage that I consider the legal and physical union should be dissolved whenever the spiritual union of unselfish, divine love and affection has ceased. It seems to me that the sacramental view of marriage compels us to say that those who continue the legal or physical union when the spiritual union has ceased, are—to quote again from the Prayer Book words applied to those who take the outward sign of another sacrament when the inward and spiritual grace is not present—'eating and drinking their own damnation.'"

The great truth that compulsion is not really a force on the side of virtue, but on the side of vice, had been clearly realized by the genius of Rabelais, when he said of his ideal social state, the Abbey of Thelema, that there was but one clause in its rule: Fay ce que vouldras. "Because," said Rabelais (Bk. i, Ch. VII), "men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompts them unto virtuous actions and withdraws them from vice. These same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they freely were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude." So that when a man and a woman who had lived under the rule of Thelema married each other, Rabelais tells us, their mutual love lasted undiminished to the day of their death.

When the loss of autonomous freedom fails to lead to licentious rebellion it incurs the opposite risk and tends to become a flabby reliance on an external support. The artificial support of marriage by State regulation then resembles the artificial support of the body furnished by corset-wearing. The reasons for and against adopting artificial support are the same in one case as the other. Corsets really give a feeling of support; they really furnish without trouble a fairly satisfactory appearance of decorum; they are a real protection against various accidents. But the price at which they furnish these advantages is serious, and the advantages themselves only exist under unnatural conditions. The corset cramps the form and the healthy development of the organs; it enfeebles the voluntary muscular system; it is incompatible with perfect grace and beauty; it diminishes the sum of active energy. It exerts, in short, the same kind of influence on physical responsibility as formal marriage on moral responsibility.

It is too often forgotten, and must therefore be repeated, that married people do not remain together because of any religious or legal tie; that tie is merely the historical outcome of their natural tendency to remain together, a tendency which is itself far older than history. "Love would exist in the world to-day, just as pure and just as enduring," says Shufeldt (Medico-Legal Journal, Dec., 1897), "had man never invented 'marriage.' Truly affined mates would have remained faithful to each other as long as life lasted. It is only when men attempt to improve upon nature that crime, disease, and unhappiness step in." "The abolition of marriage in the form now practiced," wrote Godwin more than a century ago (Political Justice, second edition, 1796, vol. i, p. 248), "will be attended with no evils. We are apt to represent it to ourselves as the harbinger of brutal lust and depravity. But it really happens in this, as in other cases, that the positive laws which are made to restrain our vices irritate and multiply them." And Professor Lester Ward, in insisting on the strength of the monogamic sentiment in modern society, truly remarks (International Journal of Ethics, Oct., 1896) that the rebellion against rigid marriage bonds "is, in reality, due to the very strengthening of the true bonds of conjugal affection, coupled with a rational and altogether proper determination on the part of individuals to accept, in so important a matter, nothing less than the genuine article." "If by a single stroke," says Professor Woods Hutchinson (Contemporary Review, Sept., 1905), "all marriage ties now in existence were struck off or declared illegal, eight-tenths of all couples would be remarried within forty eight hours, and seven-tenths could not be kept asunder with bayonets." An experiment of this kind on a small scale was witnessed in 1909 in an English village in Buckinghamshire. It was found that the parish church had never been licensed for marriages, and that in consequence all the people who had gone through the ceremony of marriage in that church during the previous half century had never been legally married. Yet, so far as could be ascertained, not a single couple thus released from the legal compulsion of marriage took advantage of the freedom bestowed. In the face of such a fact it is obviously impossible to attach any moral value to the form of marriage.

Dr. Felix Adler (in an address before the Society of Ethical Culture of New York, Nov. 17, 1889) called attention to what he regarded as the most deep-rooted cause of an undue prevalence of divorce in America. "The false idea of individual liberty is largely held in America," and when applied to family life it often leads to an impatience with these duties which the individual is either born into or has voluntarily accepted. "I am constrained to think that the prevalence of divorce is to be ascribed in no small degree to the influence of democratic ideas—that is, of false democratic ideas—and our hope lies in advancing towards a higher and truer democracy." A more recent American writer, this time a woman, Anna A. Rogers ("Why American Marriages Fail," Atlantic Monthly, Sept., 1907) speaks in the same sense, though perhaps in too unqualified a manner. She states that the frequency of divorce in America is due to three causes: (1) woman's failure to realize that marriage is her work in the world; (2) her growing individualism; (3) her lost art of giving, replaced by a highly developed receptive faculty. The American woman, this writer states, in discovering her own individuality has not yet learnt how to manage it; it is still "largely a useless, uneasy factor, vouchsafing her very little more peace than it does those in her immediate surcharged vicinity." Her circumstances tend to make of her "a curious anomalous hybrid; a cross between a magnificent, rather unmannerly boy, and a spoiled, exacting demi-mondaine, who sincerely loves in this world herself alone." She has not yet learnt that woman's supreme work in the world can only be attained through the voluntary acceptance of the restraints of marriage. The same writer points out that the fault is not alone with American women, but also with American men. Their idolatry of their women is largely responsible for that intolerance and selfishness which causes so many divorces; "American women are, as a whole, pampered and worshipped out of all reason." But the men, who lend themselves to this, do not feel that they can treat their wives with the same comradeship as the French treat their wives, nor seek their advice with the same reliance; the American woman is placed on an unreal pedestal. Yet another American writer, Rafford Pyke ("Husbands and Wives," Cosmopolitan, 1902), points out that only a small proportion of American marriages are really unhappy, these being chiefly among the more cultured classes, in which the movement of expansion in women's interests and lives is taking place; it is more often the wife than the husband who is disappointed in marriage, and this is largely due to her inability to merge, not necessarily subordinate, her individuality in an equal union with his. "Marriage to-day is becoming more and more dependent for its success upon the adjustment of conditions that are psychical. Whereas in former generations it was sufficient that the union should involve physical reciprocity, in this age of ours the union must involve a psychic reciprocity as well. And whereas, heretofore, the community of interest was attained with ease, it is now becoming far more difficult because of the tendency to discourage a woman who marries from merging her separate individuality in her husband's. Yet, unless she does this, how can she have a complete and perfect interest in the life together, and, for that matter, how can he have such an interest either?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hebrews had erotic dances, which were doubtless related to the art of love in marriage, and among the Greeks, and their disciples the Romans, the conception of love as an art which needs training, skill, and cultivation, was still extant. That conception was crushed by Christianity which, although it sanctified the institution of matrimony, degraded that sexual love which is normally the content of marriage.

In 1176 the question was brought before a Court of Love by a baron and lady of Champagne, whether love is compatible with marriage. "No," said the baron, "I admire and respect the sweet intimacy of married couples, but I cannot call it love. Love desires obstacles, mystery, stolen favors. Now husbands and wives boldly avow their relationship; they possess each other without contradiction and without reserve. It cannot then be love that they experience." And after mature deliberation the ladies of the Court of Love adopted the baron's conclusions (E. de la Bedollière, Histoire des Mœurs des Français, vol. iii, p. 334). There was undoubtedly an element of truth in the baron's arguments. Yet it may well be doubted whether in any non-Christian country it would ever have been possible to obtain acceptance for the doctrine that love and marriage are incompatible. This doctrine was, however, as Ribot points out in his Logique des Sentiments, inevitable, when, as among the medieval nobility, marriage was merely a political or domestic treaty and could not, therefore, be a method of moral elevation.

"Why is it," asked Rétif de la Bretonne, towards the end of the eighteenth century, "that girls who have no morals are more seductive and more loveable than honest women? It is because, like the Greek courtesans to whom grace and voluptuousness were taught, they have studied the art of pleasing. Among the foolish detractors of my Contemporaines, not one guessed the philosophic aim of nearly everyone of these tales, which is to suggest to honest women the ways of making themselves loved. I should like to see the institution of initiations, such as those of the ancients.... To-day the happiness of the human species is abandoned to chance; all the experience of women is individual, like that of animals; it is lost with those women who, being naturally amiable, might have taught others to become so. Prostitutes alone make a superficial study of it, and the lessons they receive are, for the most part, as harmful as those of respectable Greek and Roman matrons were holy and honorable, only tending to wantonness, to the exhaustion alike of the purse and of the physical faculties, while the aim of the ancient matrons was the union of husband and wife and their mutual attachment through pleasure. The Christian religion annihilated the Mysteries as infamous, but we may regard that annihilation as one of the wrongs done by Christianity to humanity, as the work of men with little enlightenment and bitter zeal, dangerous puritans who were the natural enemies of marriage" (Rétif de la Bretonne, Monsieur Nicolas, reprint of 1883, vol. x, pp. 160-3). It may be added that Dühren (Dr. Iwan Bloch) regards Rétif as "a master in the Ars Amandi," and discusses him from this point of view in his Rétif de la Bretonne (pp. 362-371).

This degenerate form of flirtation, cultivated not as a part of courtship, but for its own sake, has been well described by Forel (Die Sexuelle Frage, pp. 97-101). He defines it as including "all those expressions of the sexual instinct of one individual towards another individual which excite the other's sexual instinct, coitus being always excepted." In the beginning it may be merely a provocative look or a simple apparently unintentional touch or contact; and by slight gradations it may pass on to caresses, kisses, embraces, and even extend to pressure or friction of the sexual parts, sometimes leading to orgasm. Thus, Forel mentions, a sensuous woman by the pressure of her garments in dancing can produce ejaculation in her partner. Most usually the process is that voluptuous contact and revery which, in English slang, is called "spooning." From first to last there need not be any explicit explanations, proposals, or declarations on either side, and neither party is committed to any relationship with the other beyond the period devoted to flirtage. In one form, however, flirtage consists entirely in the excitement of a conversation devoted to erotic and indecorous topics. Either the man or the woman may take the active part in flirtage, but in a woman more refinement and skill is required to play the active part without repelling the man or injuring her reputation. Indeed, much the same is true of men also, for women, while they often like flirting, usually prefer its more refined forms. There are infinite forms of flirtage, and while as a preliminary part of courtship, it has its normal place and justification, Forel concludes that "as an end in itself, and never passing beyond itself, it is a phenomenon of degeneration."

From the French point of view, flirtage and flirtation generally have been discussed by Madame Bentzon ("Family Life in America," Forum, March, 1896) who, however, fails to realize the natural basis of flirtation in courtship. She regards it as a sin against the law "Thou shalt not play with love," for it ought to have the excuse of an irresistible passion, but she thinks it is comparatively inoffensive in America (though still a deteriorating influence on the women) on account of the temperament, education, and habits of the people. It must, however, be remembered that play has a proper relationship to all vital activities, and that a reasonable criticism of flirtation is concerned rather with its normal limitations than with its right to exist (see the observations on the natural basis of coquetry and the ends it subserves in "The Evolution of Modesty" in volume i of these Studies).

Everyone is probably acquainted with many cases of the extreme ignorance of women on entering marriage. The following case concerning a woman of twenty-seven, who had been asked in marriage, is somewhat extreme, but not very exceptional. "She did not feel sure of her affection and she asked a woman cousin concerning the meaning of love. This cousin lent her Ellis Ethelmer's pamphlet, The Human Flower. She learnt from this that men desired the body of a woman, and this so appalled her that she was quite ill for several days. The next time her lover attempted a caress she told him that it was 'lust.' Since then she has read George Moore's Sister Teresa, and the knowledge that 'women can be as bad as men' has made her sad." The "Histories" contained in the Appendices to previous volumes of these Studies reveal numerous instances of the deplorable ignorance of young girls concerning the most central facts of the sexual life. It is not surprising, under such circumstances, that marriage leads to disillusionment or repulsion.

It is commonly said that the duty of initiating the wife into the privileges and obligations of marriage properly belongs to the husband. Apart, however, altogether from the fact that it is unjust to a woman to compel her to bind herself in marriage before she has fully realized what marriage means, it must also be said that there are many things necessary for women to know that it is unreasonable to expect a husband to explain. This is, for instance, notably the case as regards the more fatiguing and exhausting effects of coitus on a man as compared with a woman. The inexperienced bride cannot know beforehand that the frequently repeated orgasms which render her vigorous and radiant exert a depressing effect on her husband, and his masculine pride induces him to attempt to conceal that fact. The bride, in her innocence, is unconscious that her pleasure is bought at her husband's expense, and that what is not excess to her, may be a serious excess to him. The woman who knows (notably, for instance, a widow who remarries) is careful to guard her husband's health in this respect, by restraining her own ardor, for she realizes that a man is not willing to admit that he is incapable of satisfying his wife's desires. (G. Hirth has also pointed out how important it is that women should know before marriage the natural limits of masculine potency, Wege zur Liebe, p. 571.)

"Complete abstinence during youth," says Freud (Sexual-Probleme, March, 1908), "is not the best preparation for marriage in a young man. Women divine this and prefer those of their wooers who have already proved themselves to be men with other women." Ellen Key, referring to the demand sometimes made by women for purity in men (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 96), asks whether women realize the effect of their admiration of the experienced and confident man who knows women, on the shy and hesitating youth, "who perhaps has been struggling hard for his erotic purity, in the hope that a woman's happy smile will be the reward of his conquest, and who is condemned to see how that woman looks down on him with lofty compassion and gazes with admiration at the leopard's spots." When the lover, in Laura Marholm's Was war es? says to the heroine, "I have never yet touched a woman," the girl "turns from him with horror, and it seemed to her that a cold shudder went through her, a chilling deception." The same feeling is manifested in an exaggerated form in the passion often experienced by vigorous girls of eighteen to twenty-four for old roués. (This has been discussed by Forel, Die Sexuelle Frage, pp. 217 et seq.)

Other factors may enter in a woman's preference for the man who has conquered other women. Even the most religious and moral young woman, Valera remarks (Doña Luz, p. 205), likes to marry a man who has loved many women; it gives a greater value to his choice of her; it also offers her an opportunity of converting him to higher ideals. No doubt when the inexperienced man meets in marriage the equally inexperienced woman they often succeed in adapting themselves to each other and a permanent modus vivendi is constituted. But it is by no means so always. If the wife is taught by instinct or experience she is apt to resent the awkwardness and helplessness of her husband in the art of love. Even if she is ignorant she may be permanently alienated and become chronically frigid, through the brutal inconsiderateness of her ignorant husband in carrying out what he conceives to be his marital duties. (It has already been necessary to touch on this point in discussing "The Sexual Impulse in Women" in vol. iii of these Studies.) Sometimes, indeed, serious physical injury has been inflicted on the bride owing to this ignorance of the husband.

"I take it that most men have had pre-matrimonial sex-relationships," a correspondent writes. "But I have known one man at least who, up till the age of twenty, had not even a rudimentary idea of sex matters. At twenty-nine, a few months before marriage, he came to ask me how coitus was performed, and displayed an ignorance that I could not believe to exist in the mind of an otherwise intelligent man. He had evidently no instinct to guide him, as the brutes have, and his reason was unable to supply the necessary knowledge. It is very curious that man should lose this instinctive knowledge. I have known another man almost equally ignorant. He also came to me for advice in marital duties. Both of these men masturbated, and they were normally passionate." Such cases are not so very rare. Usually, however, a certain amount of information has been acquired from some for the most part unsatisfactory source, and the ignorance is only partial, though not on that account less dangerous.

Balzac has compared the average husband to an orang-utan trying to play the violin. "Love, as we instinctively feel, is the most melodious of harmonies. Woman is a delicious instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its quivering strings, study the pose of it, its timid keyboard, the changing and capricious fingering. How many orangs—men, I mean, marry without knowing what a woman is!... Nearly all men marry in the most profound ignorance of women and of love" (Balzac, Physiologie du Mariage, Meditation VII).

Neugebauer (Monatsschrift für Geburtshülfe, 1889, Bk. ix, pp. 221 et seq.) has collected over one hundred and fifty cases of injury to women in coitus inflicted by the penis. The causes were brutality, drunkenness of one or both parties, unusual position in coitus, disproportion of the organs, pathological conditions of the woman's organs (Cf. R. W. Taylor, Practical Treatise on Sexual Disorders, Ch. XXXV). Blumreich also discusses the injuries produced by violent coitus (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. ii, pp. 770-779). C. M. Green (Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 13 Ap., 1893) records two cases of rupture of vagina by sexual intercourse in newly-married ladies, without evidence of any great violence. Mylott (British Medical Journal, Sept. 16, 1899) records a similar case occurring on the wedding night. The amount of force sometimes exerted in coitus is evidenced by the cases, occurring from time to time, in which intercourse takes place by the urethra.

Eulenburg finds (Sexuale Neuropathie, p. 69) that vaginismus, a condition of spasmodic contraction of the vulva and exaggerated sensibility on the attempt to effect coitus, is due to forcible and unskilful attempts at the first coitus. Adler (Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes, p. 160) also believes that the scarred remains of the hymen, together with painful memories of a violent first coitus, are the most frequent cause of vaginismus.

The occasional cases, however, of physical injury or of pathological condition produced by violent coitus at the beginning of marriage constitute but a very small portion of the evidence which witnesses to the evil results of the prevalent ignorance regarding the art of love. As regards Germany, Fürbringer writes (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 215): "I am perfectly satisfied that the number of young married women who have a lasting painful recollection of their first sexual intercourse exceeds by far the number of those who venture to consult a doctor." As regards England, the following experience is instructive: A lady asked six married women in succession, privately, on the same day concerning their bridal experiences. To all, sexual intercourse had come as a shock; two had been absolutely ignorant about sexual matters; the others had thought they knew what coitus was, but were none the less shocked. These women were of the middle class, perhaps above the average in intelligence; one was a doctor.

Breuer and Freud, in their Studien über Hysterie (p. 216), pointed out that the bridal night is practically often a rape, and that it sometimes leads to hysteria, which is not cured until satisfying sexual relationships are established. Even when there is no violence, Kisch (Sexual Life of Woman, Part II) regards awkward and inexperienced coitus, leading to incomplete excitement of the wife, as the chief cause of dyspareunia, or absence of sexual gratification, although gross disproportion in the size of the male and female organs, or disease in either party, may lead to the same result. Dyspareunia, Kisch adds, is astonishingly frequent, though sometimes women complain of it without justification in order to arouse sympathy for themselves as sacrifices on the altar of marriage; the constant sign is absence of ejaculation on the woman's part. Kisch also observes that wedding night deflorations are often really rapes. One young bride, known to him, was so ignorant of the physical side of love, and so overwhelmed by her husband's first attempt at intercourse, that she fled from the house in the night, and nothing would ever persuade her to return to her husband. (It is worth noting that by Canon law, under such circumstances, the Church might hold the marriage invalid. See Thomas Slater's Moral Theology, vol. ii, p. 318, and a case in point, both quoted by Rev. C. J. Shebbeare, "Marriage Law in the Church of England," Nineteenth Century, Aug., 1909, p. 263.) Kisch considers, also, that wedding tours are a mistake; since the fatigue, the excitement, the long journeys, sight-seeing, false modesty, bad hotel arrangements, often combine to affect the bride unfavorably and produce the germs of serious illness. This is undoubtedly the case.

The extreme psychic importance of the manner in which the act of defloration is accomplished is strongly emphasized by Adler. He regards it as a frequent cause of permanent sexual anæsthesia. "This first moment in which the man's individuality attains its full rights often decides the whole of life. The unskilled, over-excited husband can then implant the seed of feminine insensibility, and by continued awkwardness and coarseness develop it into permanent anæsthesia. The man who takes possession of his rights with reckless brutal masculine force merely causes his wife anxiety and pain, and with every repetition of the act increases her repulsion.... A large proportion of cold-natured women represent a sacrifice by men, due either to unconscious awkwardness, or, occasionally, to conscious brutality towards the tender plant which should have been cherished with peculiar art and love, but has been robbed of the splendor of its development. All her life long, a wistful and trembling woman will preserve the recollection of a brutal wedding night, and, often enough, it remains a perpetual source of inhibition every time that the husband seeks anew to gratify his desires without adapting himself to his wife's desires for love" (O. Adler, Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes, pp. 159 et seq., 181 et seq.). "I have seen an honest woman shudder with horror at her husband's approach," wrote Diderot long ago in his essay "Sur les Femmes"; "I have seen her plunge in the bath and feel herself never sufficiently washed from the stain of duty." The same may still be said of a vast army of women, victims of a pernicious system of morality which has taught them false ideas of "conjugal duty" and has failed to teach their husbands the art of love.

The extensive inquiries of Sanford Bell (loc. cit.) show that the emotions of sex-love may appear as early as the third year. It must also be remembered that, both physically and psychically, girls are more precocious, more mature, than boys (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, fourth edition, pp. 34 et seq., 200, etc.). Thus, by the time she has reached the age of puberty a girl has had time to become an accomplished mistress of the minor arts of love. That the age of puberty is for girls the age of love seems to be widely recognized by the popular mind. Thus in a popular song of Bresse a girl sings:—

This matter of the sexual precocity of girls has an important bearing on the question of the "age of consent," or the age at which it should be legal for a girl to consent to sexual intercourse. Until within the last twenty-five years there has been a tendency to set a very low age (even as low as ten) as the age above which a man commits no offence in having sexual intercourse with a girl. In recent years there has been a tendency to run to the opposite and equally unfortunate extreme of raising it to a very late age. In England, by the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the age of consent was raised to sixteen (this clause of the bill being carried in the House of Commons by a majority of 108). This seems to be the reasonable age at which the limit should be set and its extreme high limit in temperate climates. It is the age recognized by the Italian Criminal Code, and in many other parts of the civilized world. Gladstone, however, was in favor of raising it to eighteen, and Howard, in discussing this question as regards the United States (Matrimonial Institutions, vol. iii, pp. 195-203), thinks it ought everywhere to be raised to twenty-one, so coinciding with the age of legal majority at which a woman can enter into business or political relations. There has been, during recent years, a wide limit of variation in the legislation of the different American States on this point, the differences of the two limits being as much as eight years, and in some important States the act of intercourse with a girl under eighteen is declared to be "rape," and punishable with imprisonment for life.

Such enactments as these, however, it must be recognized, are arbitrary, artificial, and unnatural. They do not rest on a sound biological basis, and cannot be enforced by the common sense of the community. There is no proper analogy between the age of legal majority which is fixed, approximately, with reference to the ability to comprehend abstract matters of intelligence, and the age of sexual maturity which occurs much earlier, both physically and psychically, and is determined in women by a very precise biological event: the completion of puberty in the onset of menstruation. Among peoples living under natural conditions in all parts of the world it is recognized that a girl becomes sexually a woman at puberty; at that epoch she receives her initiation into adult life and becomes a wife and a mother. To declare that the act of intercourse with a woman who, by the natural instinct of mankind generally, is regarded as old enough for all the duties of womanhood, is a criminal act of rape, punishable by imprisonment for life, can only be considered an abuse of language, and, what is worse, an abuse of law, even if we leave all psychological and moral considerations out of the question, for it deprives the conception of rape of all that renders it naturally and properly revolting.

The sound view in this question is clearly the view that it is the girl's puberty which constitutes the criterion of the man's criminality in sexually approaching her. In the temperate regions of Europe and North America the average age of the appearance of menstruation, the critical moment in the establishment of complete puberty, is fifteen (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, Ch. XI; the facts are set forth at length in Kisch's Sexual Life of Woman, 1909). Therefore it is reasonable that the act of an adult man in having sexual connection with a girl under sixteen, with or without her consent, should properly be a criminal act, severely punishable. In those lands where the average age of puberty is higher or lower, the age of consent should be raised or lowered accordingly. (Bruno Meyer, arguing against any attempt to raise the age of consent above sixteen, considers that the proper age of consent is generally fourteen, for, as he rightly insists, the line of division is between the ripe and the unripe personality, and while the latter should be strictly preserved from the sphere of sexuality, only voluntary, not compulsory, influence should be brought to bear on the former. Sexual-Probleme, Ap., 1909.)

If we take into our view the wider considerations of psychology, morality, and law, we shall find ample justification for this point of view. We have to remember that a girl, during all the years of ordinary school life, is always more advanced, both physically and psychically, than a boy of the same age, and we have to recognize that this precocity covers her sexual development; for even though it is true, on the average, that active sexual desire is not usually aroused in women until a somewhat later age, there is also truth in the observation of Mr. Thomas Hardy (New Review, June, 1894): "It has never struck me that the spider is invariably male and the fly invariably female." Even, therefore, when sexual intercourse takes place between a girl and a youth somewhat older than herself, she is likely to be the more mature, the more self-possessed, and the more responsible of the two, and often the one who has taken the more active part in initiating the act. (This point has been discussed in "The Sexual Impulse in Women" in vol. iii of these Studies.) It must also be remembered that when a girl has once reached the age of puberty, and put on all the manner and habits as well as the physical development of a woman, it is no longer possible for a man always to estimate her age. It is easy to see that a girl has not yet reached the age of puberty; it is impossible to tell whether a mature woman is under or over eighteen; it is therefore, to say the least, unjust to make her male partner's fate for life depend on the recognition of a distinction which has no basis in nature. Such considerations are, indeed, so obvious that there is no chance of carrying out thoroughly in practice the doctrine that a man should be imprisoned for life for having intercourse with a girl who is over the age of sixteen. It is better, from the legal point of view, to cast the net less widely and to be quite sure that it is adapted to catch the real and conscious offender, who may be punished without offending the common sense of the community. (Cf. Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time, Ch. XXIV; he considers that the "age of consent" should begin with the completion of the sixteenth year.)

It may be necessary to add that the establishment of the "age of consent" on this basis by no means implies that intercourse with girls but little over sixteen should be encouraged, or even socially and morally tolerated. Here, however, we are not in the sphere of law. It is the natural tendency of the well-born and well-nurtured girl under civilized conditions to hold herself in reserve, and the pressure whereby that tendency is maintained and furthered must be supplied by the whole of her environment, primarily by the intelligent reflection of the girl herself when she has reached the age of adolescence. To foster in a young woman who has long passed the epoch of puberty the notion that she has no responsibility in the guardianship of her own body and soul is out of harmony with modern feeling, as well as unfavorable to the training of women for the world. The States which have been induced to adopt the high limit of the age of consent have, indeed, thereby made an abject confession of their inability to maintain a decent moral level by more legitimate means; they may profitably serve as a warning rather than as an example.

It may be remarked, in passing, that the estimates of the proper frequency of sexual intercourse may always be taken to assume that there is a cessation during the menstrual period. This is especially the case as regards early periods of culture when intercourse at this time is usually regarded as either dangerous or sinful, or both. (This point has been discussed in the "Phenomena of Periodicity" in volume i of these Studies.) Under civilized conditions the inhibition is due to æsthetic reasons, the wife, even if she desires intercourse, feeling a repugnance to be approached at a time when she regards herself as "disgusting," and the husband easily sharing this attitude. It may, however, be pointed out that the æsthetic objection is very largely the result of the superstitious horror of water which is still widely felt at this time, and would, to some extent, disappear if a more scrupulous cleanliness were observed. It remains a good general rule to abstain from sexual intercourse during the menstrual period, but in some cases there may be adequate reason for breaking it. This is so when desire is specially strong at this time, or when intercourse is physically difficult at other times but easier during the relaxation of the parts caused by menstruation. It must be remembered also that the time when the menstrual flow is beginning to cease is probably, more than any other period of the month, the biologically proper time for sexual intercourse, since not only is intercourse easiest then, and also most gratifying to the female, but it affords the most favorable opportunity for securing fertilization.

Schurig long since brought together evidence (Parthenologia, pp. 302 et seq.) showing that coitus is most easy during menstruation. Some of the Catholic theologians (like Sanchez, and later, Liguori), going against the popular opinion, have distinctly permitted intercourse during menstruation, though many earlier theologians regarded it as a mortal sin. From the medical side, Kossmann (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 249) advocates coitus not only at the end of menstruation, but even during the latter part of the period, as being the time when women most usually need it, the marked disagreeableness of temper often shown by women at this time, he says, being connected with the suppression, demanded by custom, of a natural desire. "It is almost always during menstruation that the first clouds appear on the matrimonial horizon."

It seems to be generally agreed that bad effects from excess in coitus, when they do occur, are rare in women (see, e.g., Hammond, Sexual Impotence, p. 127). Occasionally, however, evil effects occur in women. (The case, possibly to be mentioned in this connection, has been recorded of a man whose three wives all became insane after marriage, Journal of Mental Science, Jan., 1879, p. 611.) In cases of sexual excess great physical exhaustion, with suspicion and delusions, is often observed. Hutchinson has recorded three cases of temporary blindness, all in men, the result of sexual excess after marriage (Archives of Surgery, Jan., 1893). The old medical authors attributed many evil results to excess in coitus. Thus Schurig (Spermatologia, 1720, pp. 260 et seq.) brings together cases of insanity, apoplexy, syncope, epilepsy, loss of memory, blindness, baldness, unilateral perspiration, gout, and death attributed to this cause; of death many cases are given, some in women, but one may easily perceive that post was often mistaken for propter.

It is important to remember the wide limits of variation in sexual capacity, as well as the fact that such variations in either direction may be healthy and normal, though undoubtedly when they become extreme variations may have a pathological significance. In one case, for instance, a man has intercourse once a month and finds this sufficient; he has no nocturnal emissions nor any strong desires in the interval; yet he leads an idle and luxurious life and is not restrained by any moral or religious scruples; if he much exceeds the frequency which suits him he suffers from ill-health, though otherwise quite healthy except for a weak digestion. At the other extreme, a happily married couple, between forty-five and fifty, much attached to each other, had engaged in sexual intercourse every night for twenty years, except during the menstrual period and advanced pregnancy, which had only occurred once; they are hearty, full-blooded, intellectual people, fond of good living, and they attribute their affection and constancy to this frequent indulgence in coitus; the only child, a girl, is not strong, though fairly healthy.

The cases are numerous in which, on special occasions, it is possible for people who are passionately attached to each other to repeat the act of coitus, or at all events the orgasm, an inordinate number of times within a few hours. This usually occurs at the beginning of an intimacy or after a long separation. Thus in one case a newly-married woman experienced the orgasm fourteen times in one night, her husband in the same period experiencing it seven times. In another case a woman who had lived a chaste life, when sexual relationships finally began, once experienced orgasm fourteen or fifteen times to her partner's three times. In a case which, I have been assured may be accepted as authentic, a young wife of highly erotic, very erethic, slightly abnormal temperament, after a month's absence from her husband, was excited twenty-six times within an hour and a quarter; her husband, a much older man, having two orgasms during this period; the wife admitted that she felt a "complete wreck" after this, but it is evident that if this case may be regarded as authentic the orgasms were of extremely slight intensity. A young woman, newly married to a physically robust man, once had intercourse with him eight times in two hours, orgasm occurring each time in both parties. Guttceit (Dreissig Jahre Praxis, vol. ii. p. 311), in Russia, knew many cases in which young men of twenty-two to twenty-eight had intercourse more than ten times in one night, though after the fourth time there is seldom any semen. He had known some men who had masturbated in early boyhood, and began to consort with women at fifteen, yet remained sexually vigorous in old age, while he knew others who began intercourse late and were losing force at forty. Mantegazza, who knew a man who had intercourse fourteen times in one day, remarks that the stories of the old Italian novelists show that twelve times was regarded as a rare exception. Burchard, Alexander VI's secretary, states that the Florentine Ambassador's son, in Rome in 1489, "knew a girl seven times in one hour" (J. Burchard, Diarium, ed. Thuasne, vol. i, p. 329). Olivier, Charlemagne's knight, boasted, according to legend, that he could show his virile power one hundred times in one night, if allowed to sleep with the Emperor of Constantinople's daughter; he was allowed to try, it is said, and succeeded thirty times (Schultz, Das Höfische Leben, vol. i, p. 581).

It will be seen that whenever the sexual act is repeated frequently within a short time it is very rarely indeed that the husband can keep pace with the wife. It is true that the woman's sexual energy is aroused more slowly and with more difficulty than the man's, but as it becomes aroused its momentum increases. The man, whose energy is easily aroused, is easily exhausted; the woman has often scarcely attained her energy until after the first orgasm is over. It is sometimes a surprise to a young husband, happily married, to find that the act of sexual intercourse which completely satisfies him has only served to arouse his wife's ardor. Very many women feel that the repetition of the act several times in succession is needed to, as they may express it, "clear the system," and, far from producing sleepiness and fatigue, it renders them bright and lively.

The young and vigorous woman, who has lived a chaste life, sometimes feels when she commences sexual relationships as though she really required several husbands, and needed intercourse at least once a day, though later when she becomes adjusted to married life she reaches the conclusion that her desires are not abnormally excessive. The husband has to adjust himself to his wife's needs, through his sexual force when he possesses it, and, if not, through his skill and consideration. The rare men who possess a genital potency which they can exert to the gratification of women without injury to themselves have been, by Professor Benedikt, termed "sexual athletes," and he remarks that such men easily dominate women. He rightly regards Casanova as the type of the sexual athlete (Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Jan., 1896). Näcke reports the case of a man whom he regards as a sexual athlete, who throughout his life had intercourse once or twice daily with his wife, or if she was unwilling, with another woman, until he became insane at the age of seventy-five (Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, Aug., 1908, p. 507). This should probably, however, be regarded rather as a case of morbid hyperæsthesia than of sexual athleticism.

The image of the musical instrument constantly recurs to those who write of the art of love. Balzac's comparison of the unskilful husband to the orang-utan attempting to play the violin has already been quoted. Dr. Jules Guyot, in his serious and admirable little book, Bréviaire de l'Amour Expérimental, falls on to the same comparison: "There are an immense number of ignorant, selfish, and brutal men who give themselves no trouble to study the instrument which God has confided to them, and do not so much as suspect that it is necessary to study it in order to draw out its slightest chords.... Every direct contact, even with the clitoris, every attempt at coitus [when the feminine organism is not aroused], exercises a painful sensation, an instinctive repulsion, a feeling of disgust and aversion. Any man, any husband, who is ignorant of this fact, is ridiculous and contemptible. Any man, any husband, who, knowing it, dares to disregard it, has committed an outrage.... In the final combination of man and woman, the positive element, the husband, has the initiative and the responsibility for the conjugal life. He is the minstrel who will produce harmony or cacophony by his hand and his bow. The wife, from this point of view, is really the many-stringed instrument who will give out harmonious or discordant sounds, according as she is well or ill handled" (Guyot, Bréviaire, pp. 99, 115, 138).

That such love corresponds to the woman's need there cannot be any doubt. All developed women desire to be loved, says Ellen Key, not "en mâle" but "en artiste" (Liebe und Ehe, p. 92). "Only a man of whom she feels that he has also the artist's joy in her, and who shows this joy through his timid and delicate touch on her soul as on her body, can keep the woman of to-day. She will only belong to a man who continues to long for her even when he holds her locked in his arms. And when such a woman breaks out: 'You want me, but you cannot caress me, you cannot tell what I want,' then that man is judged." Love is indeed, as Remy de Gourmont remarks, a delicate art, for which, as for painting or music, only some are apt.

On the more physical side, Guttceit states that a month after marriage not more than two women out of ten have experienced the full pleasure of sexual intercourse, and it may not be for six months, a year, or even till after the birth of several children, that a woman experiences the full enjoyment of the physical relationship, and even then only with a man she completely loves, so that the conditions of sexual gratification are much more complex in women than in men. Similarly, on the psychic side, Ellen Key remarks (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 111): "It is certainly true that a woman desires sexual gratification from a man. But while in her this desire not seldom only appears after she has begun to love a man enough to give her life for him, a man often desires to possess a woman physically before he loves her enough to give even his little finger for her. The fact that love in a woman mostly goes from the soul to the senses and often fails to reach them, and that in a man it mostly goes from the senses to the soul and frequently never reaches that goal—this is of all the existing differences between men and women that which causes most torture to both." It will, of course, be apparent to the reader of the fourth volume of these Studies on "Sexual Selection in Man" that the method of stating the difference which has commended itself to Mary Wollstonecraft, Ellen Key, and others, is not strictly correct, and the chastest woman, after, for example, taking too hot a bath, may find that her heart is not the only path through which her senses may be affected. The senses are the only channels to the external world which we possess, and love must come through these channels or not at all. The difference, however, seems to be a real one, if we translate it to mean that, as we have seen reason to believe in previous volumes of these Studies, there are in women (1) preferential sensory paths of sexual stimuli, such as, apparently, a predominence of tactile and auditory paths as compared with men; (2) a more massive, complex, and delicately poised sexual mechanism; and, as a result of this, (3) eventually a greater amount of nervous and cerebral sexual irradiation.

It must be remembered, at the same time, that while this distinction represents a real tendency in sexual differentiation, with an organic and not merely traditional basis, it has about it nothing whatever that is absolute. There are a vast number of women whose sexual facility, again by natural tendency and not merely by acquired habits, is as marked as that of any man, if not more so. In the sexual field, as we have seen in a previous volume (Analysis of the Sexual Impulse), the range of variability is greater in women than in men.

"Love must be revealed by acts and not betrayed by words. I regard as abnormal the extraordinary method of a hasty avowal beforehand; for that represents not the direct but the reflex path of transmission. However sweet and normal the avowal may be when once reciprocity has been realized, as a method of conquest I consider it dangerous and likely to produce the reverse of the result desired." I take these wise words from a thoughtful "Essai sur l'Amour" (Archives de Psychologie, 1904) by a non-psychological Swiss writer who is recording his own experiences, and who insists much on the predominance of the spiritual and mental element in love.

It is worthy of note that this recognition that direct speech is out of place in courtship must not be regarded as a refinement of civilization. Among primitive peoples everywhere it is perfectly well recognized that the offer of love, and its acceptance or its refusal, must be made by actions symbolically, and not by the crude method of question and answer. Among the Indians of Paraguay, who allow much sexual freedom to their women, but never buy or sell love, Mantegazza states (Rio de la Plata e Tenerife, 1867, p. 225) that a girl of the people will come to your door or window and timidly, with a confused air, ask you, in the Guarani tongue, for a drink of water. But she will smile if you innocently offer her water. Among the Tarahumari Indians of Mexico, with whom the initiative in courting belongs to the women, the girl takes the first step through her parents, then she throws small pebbles at the young man; if he throws them back the matter is concluded (Carl Lumholtz, Scribner's Magazine, Sept., 1894, p. 299). In many parts of the world it is the woman who chooses her husband (see, e.g., M. A. Potter, Sohrab and Rustem, pp. 169 et seq.), and she very frequently adopts a symbolical method of proposal. Except when the commercial element predominates in marriage, a similar method is frequently adopted by men also in making proposals of marriage.

The fact that the needs of love cannot be expressed but must be divined has long been recognized by those who have written of the art of love, alike by writers within and without the European Christian traditions. Thus Zacchia, in his great medico-legal treatise, points out that a husband must be attentive to the signs of sexual desire in his wife. "Women," he says, "when sexual desire arises within them are accustomed to ask their husbands questions on matters of love; they flatter and caress them; they allow some part of their body to be uncovered as if by accident; their breasts appear to swell; they show unusual alacrity; they blush; their eyes are bright; and if they experience unusual ardor they stammer, talk beside the mark, and are scarcely mistress of themselves. At the same time their private parts become hot and swell. All these signs should convince a husband, however inattentive he may be, that his wife craves for satisfaction" (Zacchiæ Quæstionum Medico-legalium Opus, lib. vii, tit. iii, quæst. I; vol. ii, p. 624 in ed. of 1688).

The old Hindu erotic writers attributed great importance alike to the man's attentiveness to the woman's erotic needs, and to his skill and consideration in all the preliminaries of the sexual act. He must do all that he can to procure her pleasure, says Vatsyayana. When she is on her bed and perhaps absorbed in conversation, he gently unfastens the knot of her lower garment. If she protests he closes her mouth with kisses. Some authors, Vatsyayana remarks, hold that the lover should begin by sucking the nipples of her breasts. When erection occurs he touches her with his hands, softly caressing the various parts of her body. He should always press those parts of her body towards which she turns her eyes. If she is shy, and it is the first time, he will place his hands between her thighs which she will instinctively press together. If she is young he will put his hands on her breasts, and she will no doubt cover them with her own. If she is mature he will do all that may seem fitting and agreeable to both parties. Then he will take her hair and her chin between his fingers and kiss them. If she is very young she will blush and close her eyes. By the way in which she receives his caresses he will divine what pleases her most in union. The signs of her enjoyment are that her body becomes limp, her eyes close, she loses all timidity, and takes part in the movements which bring her most closely to him. If, on the other hand, she feels no pleasure, she strikes the bed with her hands, will not allow the man to continue, is sullen, even bites or kicks, and continues the movements of coitus when the man has finished. In such cases, Vatsyayana adds, it is his duty to rub the vulva with his hand before union until it is moist, and he should perform the same movements afterwards if his own orgasm has occurred first.

With regard to Indian erotic art generally, and more especially Vatsyayana, who appears to have lived some sixteen hundred years ago, information will be found in Valentino, "L'Hygiène conjugale chez les Hindous," Archives Générales de Médecine, Ap. 25, 1905; Iwan Bloch, "Indische Medizin," Puschmann's Handbuch der Geschichte der Medizin, vol. i; Heimann and Stephan, "Beiträge zur Ehehygiene nach der Lehren des Kamasutram," Zeitschaft für Sexualwissenschaft, Sept., 1908; also a review of Richard Schmidt's German translation of the Kamashastra of Vatsyayana in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1902, Heft 2. There has long existed an English translation of this work. In the lengthy preface to the French translation Lamairesse points out the superiority of Indian erotic art to that of the Latin poets by its loftier spirit, and greater purity and idealism. It is throughout marked by respect for women, and its spirit is expressed in the well-known proverb: "Thou shalt not strike a woman even with a flower." See also Margaret Noble's Web of Indian Life, especially Ch. III, "On the Hindu Woman as Wife," and Ch. IV, "Love Strong as Death."

The advice given to husbands by Guyot (Bréviaire de l'Amour Expérimental, p. 422) closely conforms to that given, under very different social conditions, by Zacchia and Vatsyayana. "In a state of sexual need and desire the woman's lips are firm and vibrant, the breasts are swollen, and the nipples erect. The intelligent husband cannot be deceived by these signs. If they do not exist, it is his part to provoke them by his kisses and caresses, and if, in spite of his tender and delicate excitations, the lips show no heat and the breasts no swelling, and especially if the nipples are disagreeably irritated by slight suction, he must arrest his transports and abstain from all contact with the organs of generation, for he would certainly find them in a state of exhaustion and disposed to repulsion. If, on the contrary, the accessory organs are animated, or become animated beneath his caresses, he must extend them to the generative organs, and especially to the clitoris, which beneath his touch will become full of appetite and ardor."

The importance of the preliminary titillation of the sexual organs has been emphasized by a long succession alike of erotic writers and physicians, from Ovid (Ars Amatoria end of Bk. II) onwards. Eulenburg (Die Sexuale Neuropathie, p. 79) considers that titillation is sometimes necessary, and Adler, likewise insisting on the preliminaries of psychic and physical courtship (Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes, p. 188), observes that the man who is gifted with insight and skill in these matters possesses a charm which will draw sparks of sensibility from the coldest feminine heart. The advice of the physician is at one in this matter with the maxims of the erotic artist and with the needs of the loving woman. In making love there must be no haste, wrote Ovid:—

"Husbands, like spoiled children," a woman has written, "too often miss the pleasure which might otherwise be theirs, by clamoring for it at the wrong time. The man who thinks this prolonged courtship previous to the act of sex union wearisome, has never given it a trial. It is the approach to the marital embrace, as well as the embrace itself, which constitutes the charm of the relation between the sexes."

It not seldom happens, remarks Adler (op. cit., p. 186), that the insensibility of the wife must be treated—in the husband. And Guyot, bringing forward the same point, writes (op. cit., p. 130): "If by a delay of tender study the husband has understood his young bride, if he is able to realize for her the ineffable happiness and dreams of youth, he will be beloved forever; he will be her master and sovereign lord. If he has failed to understand her he will fatigue and exhaust himself in vain efforts, and finally class her among the indifferent and cold women. She will be his wife by duty, the mother of his children. He will take his pleasure elsewhere, for man is ever in pursuit of the woman who experiences the genesic spasm. Thus the vague and unintelligent search for a half who can unite in that delirious finale is the chief cause of all conjugal dissolutions. In such a case a man resembles a bad musician who changes his violin in the hope that a new instrument will bring the melody he is unable to play."

Even savages in a very low degree of culture are sometimes patient and considerate in evoking and waiting for the signs of sexual desire in their females. (I may refer to the significant case of the Caroline Islanders, as described by Kubary in his ethnographic study of that people and quoted in volume iv of these Studies, "Sexual Selection in Man," Sect. III.) In Catholic days theological influence worked wholesomely in the same direction, although the theologians were so keen to detect the mortal sin of lust. It is true that the Catholic insistence on the desirability of simultaneous orgasm was largely due to the mistaken notion that to secure conception it was necessary that there should be "insemination" on the part of the wife as well as of the husband, but that was not the sole source of the theological view. Thus Zacchia discusses whether a man ought to continue with his wife until she has the orgasm and feels satisfied, and he decides that that is the husband's duty; otherwise the wife falls into danger either of experiencing the orgasm during sleep, or, more probably, by self-excitation, "for many women, when their desires have not been satisfied by coitus, place one thigh on the other, pressing and rubbing them together until the orgasm occurs, in the belief that if they abstain from using the hands they have committed no sin." Some theologians, he adds, favor that belief, notably Hurtado de Mendoza and Sanchez, and he further quotes the opinion of the latter that women who have not been satisfied in coitus are liable to become hysterical or melancholic (Zacchiæ Quæstionum Medico-legalium Opus, lib. vii, tit. iii, quæst. VI). In the same spirit some theologians seem to have permitted irrumatio (without ejaculation), so long as it is only the preliminary to the normal sexual act.

Nowadays physicians have fully confirmed the belief of Sanchez. It is well recognized that women in whom, from whatever cause, acute sexual excitement occurs with frequency without being followed by the due natural relief of orgasm are liable to various nervous and congestive symptoms which diminish their vital effectiveness, and very possibly lead to a breakdown in health. Kisch has described, as a cardiac neurosis of sexual origin, a pathological tachycardia which is an exaggeration of the physiological quick heart of sexual excitement. J. Inglis Parsons (British Medical Journal, Oct. 22, 1904, p. 1062) refers to the ovarian pain produced by strong unsatisfied sexual excitement, often in vigorous unmarried women, and sometimes a cause of great distress. An experienced Austrian gynæcologist told Hirth (Wege zur Heimat, p. 613) that of every hundred women who come to him with uterine troubles seventy suffered from congestion of the womb, which he regarded as due to incomplete coitus.

It is frequently stated that the evil of incomplete gratification and absence of orgasm in women is chiefly due to male withdrawal, that is to say coitus interruptus, in which the penis is hastily withdrawn as soon as involuntary ejaculation is impending; and it is sometimes said that the same widely prevalent practice is also productive of slight or serious results in the male (see, e.g., L. B. Bangs, Transactions New York Academy of Medicine, vol. ix, 1893; D. S. Booth, "Coitus Interruptus and Coitus Reservatus as Causes of Profound Neurosis and Psychosis," Alienist and Neurologist, Nov., 1906; also, Alienist and Neurologist, Oct., 1897, p. 588).

It is undoubtedly true that coitus interruptus, since it involves sudden withdrawal on the part of the man without reference to the stage of sexual excitation which his partner may have reached, cannot fail to produce frequently an injurious nervous effect on the woman, though the injurious effect on the man, who obtains ejaculation, is little or none. But the practice is so widespread that it cannot be regarded as necessarily involving this evil result. There can, I am assured, be no doubt whatever that Blumreich is justified in his statement (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. ii, p. 783) that "interrupted coitus is injurious to the genital system of those women only who are disturbed in their sensation of delight by this form of cohabitation, in whom the orgasm is not produced, and who continue for hours subsequently to be tormented by feelings of an unsatisfied desire." Equally injurious effects follow in normal coitus when the man's orgasm occurs too soon. "These phenomena, therefore," he concludes, "are not characteristic of interrupted coitus, but consequences of an imperfectly concluded sexual cohabitation as such." Kisch, likewise, in his elaborate and authoritative work on The Sexual Life of Woman, also states that the question of the evil results of coitus interruptus in women is simply a question of whether or not they receive sexual satisfaction. (Cf. also Fürbringer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, pp. 232 et seq.) This is clearly the most reasonable view to take concerning what is the simplest, the most widespread, and certainly the most ancient of the methods of preventing conception. In the Book of Genesis we find it practiced by Onan, and to come down to modern times, in the sixteenth century it seems to have been familiar to French ladies, who, according to Brantôme, enjoined it on their lovers.

Coitus reservatus,—in which intercourse is maintained even for very long periods, during which the woman may have orgasm several times while the man succeeds in holding back orgasm,—so far from being injurious to the woman, is probably the form of coitus which gives her the maximum of gratification and relief. For most men, however, it seems probable that this self-control over the processes leading to the involuntary act of detumescence is difficult to acquire, while in weak, nervous, and erethic persons it is impossible. It is, however, a desirable condition for completely adequate coitus, and in the East this is fully recognized, and the aptitude carefully cultivated. Thus W. D. Sutherland states ("Einiges über das Alltagsleben und die Volksmedizin unter den Bauern Britischostindiens," Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift, No. 12, 1906) that the Hindu smokes and talks during intercourse in order to delay orgasm, and sometimes applies an opium paste to the glans of the penis for the same purpose. (See also vol. iii of these Studies, "The Sexual Impulse in Women.") Some authorities have, indeed, stated that the prolongation of the act of coitus is injurious in its effect on the male. Thus R. W. Taylor (Practical Treatise on Sexual Disorders, third ed., p. 121) states that it tends to cause atonic impotence, and Löwenfeld (Sexualleben und Nervenleiden, p. 74) thinks that the swift and unimpeded culmination of the sexual act is necessary in order to preserve the vigor of the reflex reactions. This is probably true of extreme and often repeated cases of indefinite prolongation of pronounced erection without detumescence, but it is not true within fairly wide limits in the case of healthy persons. Prolonged coitus reservatus was a practice of the complex marriage system of the Oneida community, and I was assured by the late Noyes Miller, who had spent the greater part of his life in the community, that the practice had no sort of evil result. Coitus reservatus was erected into a principle in the Oneida community. Every man in the community was theoretically the husband of every woman, but every man was not free to have children with every woman. Sexual initiation took place soon after puberty in the case of boys, some years later in the case of girls, by a much older person of the opposite sex. In intercourse the male inserted his penis into the vagina and retained it there for even an hour without emission, though orgasm took place in the woman. There was usually no emission in the case of the man, even after withdrawal, and he felt no need of emission. The social feeling of the community was a force on the side of this practice, the careless, unskilful men being avoided by women, while the general romantic sentiment of affection for all the women in the community was also a force. Masturbation was unknown, and no irregular relations took place with persons outside the community. The practice was maintained for thirty years, and was finally abandoned, not on its demerits, but in deference to the opinions of the outside world. Mr. Miller admitted that the practice became more difficult in ordinary marriage, which favors a more mechanical habit of intercourse. The information received from Mr. Miller is supplemented in a pamphlet entitled Male Continence (the name given to coitus reservatus in the community), written in 1872 by the founder, John Humphrey Noyes. The practice is based, he says, on the fact that sexual intercourse consists of two acts, a social and a propagative, and that if propagation is to be scientific there must be no confusion of these two acts, and procreation must never be involuntary. It was in 1844, he states, that this idea occurred to him as a result of a resolve to abstain from sexual intercourse in consequence of his wife's delicate health and inability to bear healthy children, and in his own case he found the practice "a great deliverance. It made a happy household." He points out that the chief members of the Oneida community "belonged to the most respectable families in Vermont, had been educated in the best schools of New England morality and refinement, and were, by the ordinary standards, irreproachable in their conduct so far as sexual matters are concerned, till they deliberately commenced, in 1846, the experiment of a new state of society, on principles which they had been long maturing and were prepared to defend before the World." In relation to male continence, therefore, Noyes thought the community might fairly be considered "the Committee of Providence to test its value in actual life." He states that a careful medical comparison of the statistics of the community had shown that the rate of nervous disease in the community was considerably below the average outside, and that only two cases of nervous disorder had occurred which could be traced with any probability to a misuse of male continence. This has been confirmed by Van de Warker, who studied forty-two women of the community without finding any undue prevalence of reproductive diseases, nor could he find any diseased condition attributable to the sexual habits of the community (cf. C. Reed, Text-Book of Gynecology, 1901, p. 9).

Noyes believed that "male continence" had never previously been a definitely recognized practice based on theory, though there might have been occasional approximation to it. This is probably true if the coitus is reservatus in the full sense, with complete absence of emission. Prolonged coitus, however, permitting the woman to have orgasm more than once, while the man has none, has long been recognized. Thus in the seventeenth century Zacchia discussed whether such a practice is legitimate (Zacchiæ Quæstionum Opus, ed. of 1688, lib. vii, tit. iii, quæst. VI). In modern times it is occasionally practiced, without any theory, and is always appreciated by the woman, while it appears to have no bad effect on the man. In such a case it will happen that the act of coitus may last for an hour and a quarter or even longer, the maximum of the woman's pleasure not being reached until three-quarters of an hour have passed; during this period the woman will experience orgasm some four or five times, the man only at the end. It may occasionally happen that a little later the woman again experiences desire, and intercourse begins afresh in the same way. But after that she is satisfied, and there is no recurrence of desire.

It may be desirable at this point to refer briefly to the chief variations in the method of effecting coitus in their relationship to the art of love and the attainment of adequate and satisfying detumescence.

The primary and essential characteristic of the specifically human method of coitus is the fact that it takes place face to face. The fact that in what is usually considered the typically normal method of coitus the woman lies supine and the man above her is secondary. Psychically, this front-to-front attitude represents a great advance over the quadrupedal method. The two partners reveal to each other the most important, the most beautiful, the most expressive sides of themselves, and thus multiply the mutual pleasure and harmony of the intimate act of union. Moreover, this face-to-face attitude possesses a great significance, in the fact that it is the outward sign that the human couple has outgrown the animal sexual attitude of the hunter seizing his prey in the act of flight, and content to enjoy it in that attitude, from behind. The human male may be said to retain the same attitude, but the female has turned round; she has faced her partner and approached him, and so symbolizes her deliberate consent to the act of union.

The human variations in the exercise of coitus, both individual and national, are, however, extremely numerous. "To be quite frank," says Fürbringer (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 213), "I can hardly think of any combination which does not figure among my case-notes as having been practiced by my patients." We must not too hastily conclude that such variations are due to vicious training. That is far from being the case. They often occur naturally and spontaneously. Freud has properly pointed out (in the second series of his Beiträge zur Neurosenlehre, "Bruchstück" etc.) that we must not be too shocked even when the idea of fellatio spontaneously presents itself to a woman, for that idea has a harmless origin in the resemblance between the penis and the nipple. Similarly, it may be added, the desire for cunnilinctus, which seems to be much more often latently present in women than is the desire for its performance in men, has a natural analogy in the pleasure of suckling, a pleasure which is itself indeed often erotically tinged (see vol. iv of these Studies, "Sexual Selection in Man," Touch, Sect. III).

Every variation in this matter, remarks Remy de Gourmont (Physique de l'Amour, p. 264) partakes of the sin of luxury, and some of the theologians have indeed considered any position in coitus but that which is usually called normal in Europe as a mortal sin. Other theologians, however, regarded such variations as only venial sins, provided ejaculation took place in the vagina, just as some theologians would permit irrumatio as a preliminary to coitus, provided there was no ejaculation. Aquinas took a serious view of the deviations from normal intercourse; Sanchez was more indulgent, especially in view of his doctrine, derived from the Greek and Arabic natural philosophers, that the womb can attract the sperm, so that the natural end may be attained even in unusual positions.

Whatever difference of opinion there may have been among ancient theologians, it is well recognized by modern physicians that variations from the ordinary method of coitus are desirable in special cases. Thus Kisch points out (Sterilität des Weibes, p. 107) that in some cases it is only possible for the woman to experience sexual excitement when coitus takes place in the lateral position, or in the a posteriori position, or when the usual position is reversed; and in his Sexual Life of Woman, also, Kisch recommends several variations of position for coitus. Adler points out (op. cit., pp. 151, 186) the value of the same positions in some cases, and remarks that such variations often call forth latent sexual feelings as by a charm. Such cases are indeed, by no means infrequent, the advantage of the unusual position being due either to physical or psychic causes, and the discovery of the right variation is sometimes found in a merely playful attempt. It has occasionally happened, also, that when intercourse has habitually taken place in an abnormal position, no satisfaction is experienced by the woman until the normal position is adopted. The only fairly common variation of coitus which meets with unqualified disapproval is that in the erect posture. (See e.g., Hammond, op. cit. pp. 257 et seq.)

Lucretius specially recommended the quadrupedal variation of coitus (Bk. iv, 1258), and Ovid describes (end of Bk. iii of the Ars Amatoria) what he regards as agreeable variations, giving the preference, as the easiest and simplest method, to that in which the woman lies half supine on her side. Perhaps, however, the variation which is nearest to the normal attitude and which has most often and most completely commended itself is that apparently known to Arabic erotic writers as dok el arz, in which the man is seated and his partner is astride his thighs, embracing his body with her legs and his neck with her arms, while he embraces her waist; this is stated in the Arabic Perfumed Garden to be the method preferred by most women.

The other most usual variation is the inverse normal position in which the man is supine, and the woman adapts herself to this position, which permits of several modifications obviously advantageous, especially when the man is much larger than his partner. The Christian as well as the Mahommedan theologians appear, indeed, to have been generally opposed to this superior position of the female, apparently, it would seem, because they regarded the literal subjection of the male which it involves as symbolic of a moral subjection. The testimony of many people to-day, however, is decidedly in favor of this position, more especially as regards the woman, since it enables her to obtain a better adjustment and greater control of the process, and so frequently to secure sexual satisfaction which she may find difficult or impossible in the normal position.

The theologians seem to have been less unfavorably disposed to the position normal among quadrupeds, a posteriori, though the old Penitentials were inclined to treat it severely, the Penitential of Angers prescribing forty days penance, and Egbert's three years, if practiced habitually. (It is discussed by J. Petermann, "Venus Aversa," Sexual-Probleme, Feb., 1909). There are good reasons why in many cases this position should be desirable, more especially from the point of view of women, who indeed not infrequently prefer it. It must be always remembered, as has already been pointed out, that in the progress from anthropoid to man it is the female, not the male, whose method of coitus has been revolutionized. While, however, the obverse human position represents a psychic advance, there has never been a complete physical readjustment of the female organs to the obverse method. More especially, in Adler's opinion (op. cit., pp. 117-119), the position of the clitoris is such that, as a rule, it is more easily excited by coitus from behind than from in front. A more recent writer, Klotz, in his book, Der Mensch ein Vierfüssler (1908), even takes the too extreme position that the quadrupedal method of coitus, being the only method that insures due contact with the clitoris, is the natural human method. It must, however, be admitted that the posterior mode of coitus is not only a widespread, but a very important variation, in either of its two most important forms: the Pompeiian method, in which the woman bends forwards and the man approaches behind, or the method described by Boccaccio, in which the man is supine and the woman astride.

Fellatio and cunnilinctus, while they are not strictly methods of coitus, in so far as they do not involve the penetration of the penis into the vagina, are very widespread as preliminaries, or as vicarious forms of coitus, alike among civilized and uncivilized peoples. Thus, in India, I am told that fellatio is almost universal in households, and regarded as a natural duty towards the paterfamilias. As regards cunnilinctus Max Dessoir has stated (Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, 1894, Heft 5) that the superior Berlin prostitutes say that about a quarter of their clients desire to exercise this, and that in France and Italy the proportion is higher; the number of women who find cunnilinctus agreeable is without doubt much greater. Intercourse per anum must also be regarded as a vicarious form of coitus. It appears to be not uncommon, especially among the lower social classes, and while most often due to the wish to avoid conception, it is also sometimes practiced as a sexual aberration, at the wish either of the man or the woman, the anus being to some extent an erogenous zone.

The ethnic variations in method of coitus were briefly discussed in volume v of these Studies, "The Mechanism of Detumescence," Section II. In all civilized countries, from the earliest times, writers on the erotic art have formally and systematically set forth the different positions for coitus. The earliest writing of this kind now extant seems to be an Egyptian papyrus preserved at Turin of the date B.C. 1300; in this, fourteen different positions are represented. The Indians, according to Iwan Bloch, recognize altogether forty-eight different positions; the Ananga Ranga describes thirty-two main forms. The Mohammedan Perfumed Garden describes forty forms, as well as six different kinds of movement during coitus. The Eastern books of this kind are, on the whole, superior to those that have been produced by the Western world, not only by their greater thoroughness, but by the higher spirit by which they have often been inspired.

The ancient Greek erotic writings, now all lost, in which the modes of coitus were described, were nearly all attributed to women. According to a legend recorded by Suidas, the earliest writer of this kind was Astyanassa, the maid of Helen of Troy. Elephantis, the poetess, is supposed to have enumerated nine different postures. Numerous women of later date wrote on these subjects, and one book is attributed to Polycrates, the sophist.

Aretino—who wrote after the influence of Christianity had degraded erotic matters perilously near to that region of pornography from which they are only to-day beginning to be rescued—in his Sonnetti Lussuriosi described twenty-six different methods of coitus, each one accompanied by an illustrative design by Giulio Romano, the chief among Raphael's pupils. Veniero, in his Puttana Errante, described thirty-two positions. More recently Forberg, the chief modern authority, has enumerated ninety positions, but, it is said, only forty-eight can, even on the most liberal estimate, be regarded as coming within the range of normal variation.

The disgrace which has overtaken the sexual act, and rendered it a deed of darkness, is doubtless largely responsible for the fact that the chief time for its consummation among modern civilized peoples is the darkness of the early night in stuffy bedrooms when the fatigue of the day's labors is struggling with the artificial stimulation produced by heavy meals and alcoholic drinks. This habit is partly responsible for the indifference or even disgust with which women sometimes view coitus.

Many more primitive peoples are wiser. The New Guinea Papuans of Astrolabe Bay, according to Vahness (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1900, Heft 5, p. 414), though it must be remembered that the association of the sexual act with darkness is much older than Christianity, and connected with early religious notions (cf. Hesiod, Works and Days, Bk. II), always have sexual intercourse in the open air. The hard-working women of the Gebvuka and Buru Islands, again, are too tired for coitus at night; it is carried out in the day time under the trees, and the Serang Islanders also have coitus in the woods (Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib, Bk. i, Ch. XVII).

It is obviously impracticable to follow these examples in modern cities, even if avocation and climate permitted. It is also agreed that sexual intercourse should be followed by repose. There seems to be little doubt, however, that the early morning and the daylight are a more favorable time than the early night. Conception should take place in the light, said Michelet (L'Amour, p. 153); sexual intercourse in the darkness of night is an act committed with a mere female animal; in the day-time it is union with a loving and beloved individual person.

This has been widely recognized. The Greeks, as we gather from Aristophanes in the Archarnians, regarded sunrise as the appropriate time for coitus. The South Slavs also say that dawn is the time for coitus. Many modern authorities have urged the advantages of early morning coitus. Morning, said Roubaud (Traité de l'Impuissance, pp. 151-3) is the time for coitus, and even if desire is greater in the evening, pleasure is greater in the morning. Osiander also advised early morning coitus, and Venette, in an earlier century, discussing "at what hour a man should amorously embrace his wife" (La Génération de l'Homme, Part II, Ch. V), while thinking it is best to follow inclination, remarks that "a beautiful woman looks better by sunlight than by candlelight." A few authorities, like Burdach, have been content to accept the custom of night coitus, and Busch (Das Geschlechtsleben des Weibes, vol. i, p. 214) was inclined to think the darkness of night the most "natural" time, while Fürbringer (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, p. 217) thinks that early morning is "occasionally" the best time.

To some, on the other hand, the exercise of sexual intercourse in the sunlight and the open air seems so important that they are inclined to elevate it to the rank of a religious exercise. I quote from a communication on this point received from Australia: "This shameful thing that must not be spoken of or done (except in the dark) will some day, I believe, become the one religious ceremony of the human race, in the spring. (Oh, what springs!) People will have become very sane, well-bred, aristocratic (all of them aristocrats), and on the whole opposed to rites and superstitions, for they will have a perfect knowledge of the past. The coition of lovers in the springtime will be the one religious ceremony they will allow themselves. I have a vision sometimes of the holy scene, but I am afraid it is too beautiful to describe. 'The intercourse of the sexes, I have dreamed, is ineffably beautiful, too fair to be remembered,' wrote the chaste Thoreau. Verily human beauty, joy, and love will reach their divinest height during those inaugural days of springtide coupling. When the world is one Paradise, the consummation of the lovers, the youngest and most beautiful, will take place in certain sacred valleys in sight of thousands assembled to witness it. For days it will take place in these valleys where the sun will rise on a dream of passionate voices, of clinging human forms, of flowers and waters, and the purple and gold of the sunrise are reflected on hills illumined with pansies. [I know not if the writer recalled George Chapman's "Enamelled pansies used at nuptials still"], and repeated on golden human flesh and human hair. In these sacred valleys the subtle perfume of the pansies will mingle with the divine fragrance of healthy naked young women and men in the spring coupling. You and I shall not see that, but we may help to make it possible." This rhapsody (an unconscious repetition of Saint-Lambert's at Mlle. Quinault's table in the eighteenth century) serves to illustrate the revolt which tends to take place against the unnatural and artificial degradation of the sexual act.

In some parts of the world it has seemed perfectly natural and reasonable that so great and significant an act as that of coitus should be consecrated to the divinity, and hence arose the custom of prayer before sexual intercourse. Thus Zoroaster ordained that a married couple should pray before coitus, and after the act they should say together: "O, Sapondomad, I trust this seed to thee, preserve it for me, for it is a man." In the Gorong Archipelago it is customary also for husband and wife to pray together before the sexual act (Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib, Bd. i, Ch. XVII). The civilized man, however, has come to regard his stomach as the most important of his organs, and he utters his conventional grace, not before love, but only before food. Even the degraded ritual vestiges of the religious recognition of coitus are difficult to find in Europe. We may perhaps detect it among the Spaniards, with their tenacious instinct for ritual, in the solemn etiquette with which, in the seventeenth century, it was customary, according to Madame d'Aulnoy, for the King to enter the bedchamber of the Queen: "He has on his slippers, his black mantle over his shoulder, his shield on one arm, a bottle hanging by a cord over the other arm (this bottle is not to drink from, but for a quite opposite purpose, which you will guess). With all this the King must also have his great sword in one hand and a dark lantern in the other. In this way he must enter, alone, the Queen's chamber" (Madame d'Aulnoy, Relation du Voyage d'Espagne, 1692, vol. iii, p. 221).

Miss Clapperton, in discussing this problem (Scientific Meliorism, pp. 129-137), follows Darwin (Descent of Man, Part I, Ch. IV) in thinking that jealousy led to "the inculcation of female virtue," but she adds that it has also been a cause of woman's subjection, and now needs to be eliminated. "To rid ourselves as rapidly as may be of jealousy is essential; otherwise the great movement in favor of equality of sex will necessarily meet with checks and grave obstruction."

Ribot (La Logique des Sentiments, pp. 75 et seq.; Essai sur les Passions, pp. 91, 175), while stating that subjectively the estimate of jealousy must differ in accordance with the ideal of life held, considers that objectively we must incline to an unfavorable estimate "Even a brief passion is a rupture in the normal life; it is an abnormal, if not a pathological state, an excrescence, a parasitism."

Forel (Die Sexuelle Frage, Ch. V) speaks very strongly in the same sense, and considers that it is necessary to eliminate jealousy by non-procreation of the jealous. Jealousy is, he declares, "the worst and unfortunately the most deeply-rooted of the 'irradiations,' or, better, the 'contrast-reactions,' of sexual love inherited from our animal ancestors. An old German saying, 'Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft die mit Eifer sucht was Leider schafft,' says by no means too much.... Jealousy is a heritage of animality and barbarism; I would recall this to those who, under the name of 'injured honor,' attempt to justify it and place it on a high pedestal. An unfaithful husband is ten times more to be wished for a woman than a jealous husband.... We often hear of 'justifiable jealousy.' I believe, however, that there is no justifiable jealousy; it is always atavistic or else pathological; at the best it is nothing more than a brutal animal stupidity. A man who, by nature, that is by his hereditary constitution, is jealous is certain to poison his own life and that of his wife. Such men ought on no account to marry. Both education and selection should work together to eliminate jealousy as far as possible from the human brain."

Eric Gillard in an article on "Jealousy" (Free Review, Sept., 1896), in opposition to those who believe that jealousy "makes the home," declares that, on the contrary, it is the chief force that unmakes the home. "So long as egotism waters it with the tears of sentiment and shields it from the cold blasts of scientific inquiry, so long will it thrive. But the time will come when it will be burned in the Garden of Love as a noxious weed. Its mephitic influence in society is too palpable to be overlooked. It turns homes that might be sanctuaries of love into hells of discord and hate; it causes suicides, and it drives thousands to drink, reckless excesses, and madness. Makes the home! One of your married men friends sees a probable seducer in every man who smiles at his wife; another is jealous of his wife's women acquaintances; a third is wounded because his wife shows so much attention to the children. Some of the women you know display jealousy of every other woman, of their husband's acquaintances, and some, of his very dog. You must be completely monopolized or you do not thoroughly love. You must admire no one but the person with whom you have immured yourself for life. Old friendships must be dissolved, new friendships must not be formed, for fear of invoking the beautiful emotion that 'makes the home.'"

All the circumstances, accompaniments, and results of domestic jealousy in their completely typical form, are well illustrated by a very serious episode in the history of the Pepys household, and have been fully and faithfully set down by the great diarist. The offence—an embrace of his wife's lady-help, as she might now be termed—was a slight one, but, as Pepys himself admits, quite inexcusable. He is writing, being in his thirty-sixth year, on the 25th of Oct., 1668 (Lord's Day). "After supper, to have my hair combed by Deb, which occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world, for my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl.... I was at a wonderful loss upon it, and the girl also, and I endeavored to put it off, but my wife was struck mute and grew angry.... Heartily afflicted for this folly of mine.... So ends this month," he writes a few days later, "with some quiet to my mind, though not perfect, after the greatest falling out with my poor wife, and through my folly with the girl, that ever I had, and I have reason to be sorry and ashamed of it, and more to be troubled for the poor girl's sake. Sixth November. Up, and presently my wife up with me, which she professedly now do every day to dress me, that I may not see Willet [Deb], and do eye me, whether I cast my eye upon her, or no, and do keep me from going into the room where she is. Ninth November. Up, and I did, by a little note which I flung to Deb, advise her that I did continue to deny that ever I kissed her, and so she might govern herself. The truth is that I did adventure upon God's pardoning me this lie, knowing how heavy a thing it would be for me, to the ruin of the poor girl, and next knowing that if my wife should know all it would be impossible for her ever to be at peace with me again, and so our whole lives would be uncomfortable. The girl read, and as I bid her returned me the note, flinging it to me in passing by." Next day, however, he is "mightily troubled," for his wife has obtained a confession from the girl of the kissing. For some nights Mr. and Mrs. Pepys are both sleepless, with much weeping on either side. Deb gets another place, leaving on the 14th of November, and Pepys is never able to see her before she leaves the house, his wife keeping him always under her eye. It is evident that Pepys now feels strongly attracted to Deb, though there is no evidence of this before she became the subject of the quarrel. On the 13th of November, hearing she was to leave next day, he writes: "The truth is I have a good mind to have the maidenhead of this girl." He was, however, the "more troubled to see how my wife is by this means likely forever to have her hand over me, and that I shall forever be a slave to her—that is to say, only in matters of pleasure." At the same time his love for his wife was by no means diminished, nor hers for him. "I must here remark," he says, "that I have lain with my moher [i.e., muger, wife] as a husband more times since this falling out than in, I believe, twelve months before. And with more pleasure to her than in all the time of our marriage before." The next day was Sunday. On Monday Pepys at once begins to make inquiries which will put him on the track of Deb. On the 18th he finds her. She gets up into the coach with him, and he kisses her and takes liberties with her, at the same time advising her "to have a care of her honor and to fear God," allowing no one else to do what he has done; he also tells her how she can find him if she desires. Pepys now feels that everything is settled satisfactorily, and his heart is full of joy. But his joy is short-lived, for Mrs. Pepys discovers this interview with Deb on the following day. Pepys denies it at first, then confesses, and there is a more furious scene than ever. Pepys is now really alarmed, for his wife threatens to leave him; he definitely abandons Deb, and with prayers to God resolves never to do the like again. Mrs. Pepys is not satisfied, however, till she makes her husband write a letter to Deb, telling her that she is little better than a whore, and that he hates her, though Deb is spared this, not by any stratagem of Pepys, but by the considerateness of the friend to whom the letter was entrusted for delivery. Moreover, Mrs. Pepys arranges with her husband that, in future, whenever he goes abroad he shall be accompanied everywhere by his clerk. We see that Mrs. Pepys plays with what appears to be triumphant skill and success the part of the jealous and avenging wife, and digs her little French heels remorselessly into her prostrate husband and her rival. Unfortunately, we do not know what the final outcome was, for a little later, owing to trouble with his eyesight, Pepys was compelled to bring his Diary to an end. It is evident, however, when we survey the whole of this perhaps typical episode, that neither husband nor wife were in the slightest degree prepared for the commonplace position into which they were thrown; that each of them appears in a painful, undignified, and humiliating light; that as a result of it the husband acquires almost a genuine and strong affection for the girl who is the cause of the quarrel; and finally that, even though he is compelled, for the time at all events, to yield to his wife, he remains at the end exactly what he was at the beginning. Nor had husband or wife the very slightest wish to leave each other; the bond of marriage remained firm, but it had been degraded by insincerity on one side and the jealous endeavor on the other to secure fidelity by compulsion.

It is quite possible, Bloch remarks (The Sexual Life of Our Time, Ch. X), to love more than one person at the same time, with nearly equal tenderness, and to be honestly able to assure each of the passion felt for her or him. Bloch adds that the vast psychic differentiation involved by modern civilization increases the possibility of this double love, for it is difficult for anyone to find his complement in a single person, and that this applies to women as well as to men.

Georg Hirth likewise points out (Wege zur Heimat, pp. 543-552) that it is important to remember that women, as well as men, can love two persons at the same time. Men flatter themselves, he remarks, with the prejudice that the female heart, or rather brain, can only hold one man at a time, and that if there is a second man it is by a kind of prostitution. Nearly all erotic writers, poets, and novelists, even physicians and psychologists, belong to this class, he says; they look on a woman as property, and of course two men cannot "possess" a woman. (Regarding novelists, however, the remark may be interpolated that there are many exceptions, and Thomas Hardy, for instance, frequently represents a woman as more or less in love with two men at the same time.) As against this desire to depreciate women's psychic capacity, Hirth maintains that a woman is not necessarily obliged to be untrue to one man because she has conceived a passion for another man. "Today," Hirth truly declares, "only love and justice can count as honorable motives in marriage. The modern man accords to the beloved wife and life-companion the same freedom which he himself took before marriage, and perhaps still takes in marriage. If she makes no use of it, as is to be hoped—so much the better! But let there be no lies, no deception; the indispensable foundation of modern marriage is boundless sincerity and friendship, the deepest trust, affectionate devotion, and consideration. This is the best safeguard against adultery.... Let him, however, who is, nevertheless, overtaken by the outbreak of it console himself with the undoubted fact that of two real lovers the most noble-minded and deep-seeing friend will always have the preference." These wise words cannot be too deeply meditated. The policy of jealousy is only successful—when it is successful—in the hands of the man who counts the external husk of love more precious than the kernel.

"In the long run," a woman writes (in a letter published in Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. i, Heft 7), "the senses become discontented at their complete exclusion. And I believe that a man can only come into the closest mutual association with a woman by whom, consciously or unconsciously, he is physically attracted. He cannot enter into the closest psychic intercourse with a woman with whom he could not imagine himself in physical intercourse. His prevailing wish is for the possession of a woman, of the whole woman, her soul as well as her body. And a woman also cannot imagine an intimate relation to a man in which the heart and the body, as well as the mind, are not involved. (Naturally I am thinking of people with sound nerves and healthy blood.) Can a woman carry on a Platonic relation with a man from year to year without the thought sometimes coming to her: 'Why does he never kiss me? Have I no charm for him?' And in the most concealed corner of her heart will it not happen that she uses that word 'kiss' in the more comprehensive sense in which the French sometimes employ it?" There is undoubtedly an element of truth in this statement. The frontier between erotic love and friendship is vague, and an intimate psychic intercourse that is sternly debarred from ever manifesting itself in a caress, or other physical manifestation of tender intimacy, tends to be constrained, and arouses unspoken and unspeakable thoughts and desires which are fatal to any complete friendship.

Groos (Der Æsthetische Genuss, p. 249) has pointed out that "love" is really made up of both sexual instinct and parental instinct.

"So-called happy marriages," says Professor W. Thomas (Sex and Society, p. 246), "represent an equilibrium reached through an extension of the maternal interest of the woman to the man, whereby she looks after his personal needs as she does after those of the children—cherishing him, in fact, as a child—or in an extension to woman on the part of man of the nurture and affection which is in his nature to give to pets and all helpless (and preferably dumb) creatures."

"When the devotion in the tie between mother and son," a woman writes, "is added to the relation of husband and wife, the union of marriage is raised to the high and beautiful dignity it deserves, and can attain in this world. It comprehends sympathy, love, and perfect understanding, even of the faults and weaknesses of both sides." "The foundation of every true woman's love," another woman writes, "is a mother's tenderness. He whom she loves is a child of larger growth, although she may at the same time have a deep respect for him." (See also, for similar opinion of another woman of distinguished intellectual ability, footnote at beginning of "The Psychic State in Pregnancy" in volume v of these Studies.)

It is on the basis of these elemental human facts that the permanently seductive and inspiring relationships of sex are developed, and not by the emergence of personalities who combine impossibly exalted characteristics. "The task is extremely difficult," says Kisch in his Sexual Life of Woman, "but a clever and virtuous modern wife must endeavor to combine in her single personality the sensuous attractiveness of an Aspasia, the chastity of a Lucrece, and the intellectual greatness of a Cornelia." And in an earlier century we are told in the novel of La Tia Fingida, which has sometimes been attributed to Cervantes, that "a woman should be an angel in the street, a saint in church, beautiful at the window, honest in the house, and a demon in bed." The demands made of men by women, on the other hand, have been almost too lofty to bear definite formulation at all. "Ninety-nine out of a hundred loving women," says Helene Stöcker, "certainly believe that if a thousand other men have behaved ignobly, and forsaken, ill-used, and deceived the woman they love, the man they love is an exception, marked out from all other men; that is the reason they love him." It may be doubted, however, if the great lovers have ever stood very far above the ordinary level of humanity by their possession of perfection. They have been human, and their art of love has not always excluded the possession of human frailties; perfection, indeed, even if it could be found, would furnish a bad soil for love to strike deep roots in.

In the profoundly suggestive study of love which the distinguished sociologist Tarde left behind at his death (Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, loc. cit.), there are some interesting remarks on this point: "Society," he says, "has been far more, and more intelligently, preoccupied with the problem of answering the 'question of breed' than the 'question of love.' The first problem fills all our civil and commercial codes. The second problem has never been clearly stated, or looked in the face, not even in antiquity, still less since the coming of Christianity, for merely to offer the solutions of marriage and prostitution is manifestly inadequate. Statesmen have only seen the side on which it touches population. Hence the marriage laws. Sterile love they profess to disdain. Yet it is evident that, though born as the serf of generation, love tends by civilization to be freed from it. In place of a simple method of procreation it has become an end, it has created itself a title, a royal title. Our gardens cultivate flowers that are all the more charming because they are sterile; why is the double corolla of love held more infamous than the sterilized flowers of our gardens?" Tarde replies that the reason is that our politicians are merely ambitious persons thirsting for power and wealth, and even when they are lovers they are Don Juans rather than Virgils. "The future," he continues, "is to the Virgilians, because if the ambition of power, the regal wealth of American or European millionarism, once seemed nobler, love now more and more attracts to itself the best and highest parts of the soul, where lies the hidden ferment of all that is greatest in science and art, and more and more those studious and artist souls multiply who, intent on their peaceful activities, hold in horror the business men and the politicians, and will one day succeed in driving them back. That assuredly will be the great and capital revolution of humanity, an active psychological revolution: the recognized preponderance of the meditative and contemplative, the lover's side of the human soul, over the feverish, expansive, rapacious, and ambitious side. And then it will be understood that one of the greatest of social problems, perhaps the most arduous of all, has been the problem of love."

The Relationship of the Science of Procreation to the Art of Love—Sexual Desire and Sexual Pleasure as the Conditions of Conception—Reproduction Formerly Left to Caprice and Lust—The Question of Procreation as a Religious Question—The Creed of Eugenics—Ellen Key and Sir Francis Galton—Our Debt to Posterity—The Problem of Replacing Natural Selection—The Origin and Development of Eugenics—The General Acceptance of Eugenical Principles To-day—The Two Channels by Which Eugenical Principles are Becoming Embodied in Practice—The Sense of Sexual Responsibility in Women—The Rejection of Compulsory Motherhood—The Privilege of Voluntary Motherhood—Causes of the Degradation of Motherhood—The Control of Conception—Now Practiced by the Majority of the Population in Civilized Countries—The Fallacy of "Racial Suicide"—Are Large Families a Stigma of Degeneration?—Procreative Control the Outcome of Natural and Civilized Progress—The Growth of Neo-Malthusian Beliefs and Practices—Facultative Sterility as Distinct from Neo-Malthusianism—The Medical and Hygienic Necessity of Control of Conception—Preventive Methods—Abortion—The New Doctrine of the Duty to Practice Abortion—How Far is this Justifiable?—Castration as a Method of Controlling Procreation—Negative Eugenics and Positive Eugenics—The Question of Certificates for Marriage—The Inadequacy of Eugenics by Act of Parliament—The Quickening of the Social Conscience in Regard to Heredity—Limitations to the Endowment of Motherhood—The Conditions Favorable to Procreation—Sterility—The Question of Artificial Fecundation—The Best Age of Procreation—The Question of Early Motherhood—The Best Time for Procreation—The Completion of the Divine Cycle of Life.

Many primitive peoples, as well as the theologians of the Middle Ages, have believed that sexual excitement on the woman's part is necessary to conception, though they have sometimes mixed up that belief with false science and mere superstition. The belief itself is supported by some of the most cautious and experienced modern gynæcologists. Thus, Matthews Duncan (in his lectures on Sterility in Women) argued that the absence of sexual desire in women, and the absence of pleasure in the sexual act, are powerful influences making for sterility. He brought forward a table based on his case-books, showing that of nearly four hundred sterile women, only about one-fourth experienced sexual desire, while less than half experienced pleasure in the sexual act. In the absence, however, of a corresponding table concerning fertile women, nothing is hereby absolutely proved, and, at most, only a probability established.

Kisch, more recently (in his Sexual Life of Woman), has dealt fully with this question, and reaches the conclusion that it is "extremely probable" that the active erotic participation of the woman in coitus is an important link in the chain of conditions producing conception. It acts, he remarks, in either or both of two ways, by causing reflex changes in the cervical secretions, and so facilitating the passage of the spermatozoa, and by causing reflex erectile changes in the cervix itself, with slight descent of the uterus, so rendering the entrance of the semen easier. Kisch refers to the analogous fact that the first occurrence of menstruation is favored by sexual excitement.