s and the dark and furtive
ways of vice, because they may not love and marry as their temperaments
command, and so I want to make the meshes of the law as wide as
possible. But the common man will not understand this yet, and seeks to
make the meshes just as small as his own private case demands.

Then marriage, to resume my main discussion, does not necessarily mean
cohabitation. All women who desire children do not want to be entrusted
with their upbringing. Some women are sexual and philoprogenitive
without being sedulously maternal, and some are maternal without much
or any sexual passion. There are men and women in the world now, great
allies, fond and passionate lovers who do not live nor want to live
constantly together. It is at least conceivable that there are women
who, while desiring offspring, do not want to abandon great careers for
the work of maternity, women again who would be happiest managing and
rearing children in manless households that they might even share with
other women friends, and men to correspond with these who do not wish to
live in a household with wife and children. I submit, these temperaments
exist and have a right to exist in their own way. But one must recognize
that the possibility of these departures from the normal type of
household opens up other possibilities. The polygamy that is degrading
or absurd under one roof assumes a different appearance when one
considers it from the point of view of people whose habits of life do
not centre upon an isolated home.

All the relations I have glanced at above do as a matter of fact exist
to-day, but shamefully and shabbily, tainted with what seems to me an
unmerited and unnecessary ignominy. The punishment for bigamy seems to
me insane in its severity, contrasted as it is with our leniency to the
common seducer. Better ruin a score of women, says the law, than marry
two. I do not see why in these matters there should not be much ampler
freedom than there is, and this being so I can hardly be expected to
condemn with any moral fervour or exclude from my society those who have
seen fit to behave by what I believe may be the standards of A.D. 2000
instead of by the standards of 1850. These are offences, so far as
they are offences, on an altogether different footing from murder, or
exacting usury, or the sweating of children, or cruelty, or transmitting
diseases, or unveracity, or commercial or intellectual or physical
prostitution, or any s