ns are now such
that in our Colonies a woman can exercise her rightful function of
choosing the best man to be her husband and a father of the future,
while at home this is possible only for the very few, and for vast
numbers marriage is wholly impossible. I return, then, to the original
proposition: are we to follow the advice of our gay, irresponsible
sociologists so-called, who advise us to abolish monogamy in the
circumstances, or are we to alter the alterable conditions which so
disastrously prejudice and complicate that great institution in the
heart of our empire to-day? Surely there can be but one answer to this
question when we realize that all the causes of the present
disproportion between the sexes at home--causes such as infant
mortality, child mortality, war, and the exportation of one sex in great
excess to the Colonies--are evil in themselves quite apart from their
influence upon the practice of monogamy. Unfortunately, it is a modern
custom in this age of transition for clever people to criticize on
abstract, patriotic, sociological, quasi-ethical, and such like grounds,
institutions and practices which irk them personally. Unfortunately,
also, sociology is in the position, at present and yet for a little
while inevitable, of shall we say medicine in its earliest stages, when
anyone may be accepted as qualified who simply asserts that he is.
Lastly, sociology is the most complicated of all the sciences because
the chain of causation is longer; and very few of those who write or
read about it have the patience to go back through psychology to biology
and the laws of life in their analyses. An institution like marriage is
criticized by those who think that it is an ecclesiastical invention of
yesterday, and that what hands have made, hands can destroy, though
marriage is aeons older even than the mammalian order. They take
transient, artificial conditions, lasting not for a second in the
history of mankind seen as a whole, and simply accepting these
conditions as part of the order of nature, they ask us to overthrow an
institution which is immeasurable ages older than man himself. The odds
are somewhat against them, one may surmise, but they may do considerable
injury to their own age notwithstanding.

After having dealt with this fundamental biological condition of
marriage, we must next turn to a psychological question which is
scarcely less important. The human being is immensely complex both in
compo