the ultimate cause of prostitution--The demand for the
prostitute by men--Causes of this demand--Repression of the
primitive sexual instincts by civilisation--The foolishness
of casting blame upon men--The duplex morality of the
sexes--Its influence on the degradation of passion--Woman's
unprofitable service to chastity--The connection with
prostitution--My belief in passion as the only source of
help.

CHAPTER X

THE SOCIAL FORMS OF THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP

_I.--Marriage_

"The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the
incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement; it is a
statement of fact. In so far as we are individuals, in so far as
we seek to follow merely individual ends, we are accidental,
disconnected, without significance, the sport of chance. In so
far as we realise ourselves as experiments of the species for
the species, just in so far do we escape from the accidental and
the chaotic. We are episodes in an experience greater than
ourselves."--H.G. WELLS.

"There is no subject," says Bernard Shaw in his delightful preface to
_Getting Married_, "on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and
thought than marriage." And, in truth, it is not easy to avoid such
foolishness if we understand at all the complexity of the relationship
of the sexes. Sentiment rules our actions in this connection, whereas
our talk on the subject is directed by intellect. And the demands of
the emotions are at once more imperious and tyrannical, and more
fastidious and more critical, than are the demands of the mind. Thus
the more firmly reason checks the riot of imagination the greater the
danger of error. Of all of which what is the moral? This: It is
useless to talk or to think unless it is also possible and expedient
to act.

Be it noted, then, first that our marriage customs and laws are
founded and have been framed not for, or by, the personal needs--that
is, the likes and dislikes of men and women, but by the exigencies of
social and economic necessities. Now, from this it will be readily
seen that individual inclinations are very likely, even if not bound,
to clash with, as they seek to conform to, the usages of society.
Always there will tend to be prevalent everywhere a hostility--at
times latent, at others active--between these two forces; against the
special desires of women and men on the one hand, an