ry. The male being the stronger soon combines the
satisfaction of his sexual appetite with the advantage of property, by
placing the woman more and more under his dependence and exploiting
her. In this way woman becomes an object for sale and exchange, which
will procure the purchaser, besides satisfaction for his sexual
appetite, a docile slave and worker and a procreator of children, a
source of other workers.

This motive, so clearly revealed by ethnography and history,
sufficiently explains the ignoble traffic that man has made of love,
or rather of sexual appetite. We have seen in Chapter VI the profit
made by polygamous barbarians by the possession of many wives and
children, which led more and more to the buying and selling of the
latter. These customs are instinctively related to the traffic of
slaves. Our modern civilization has happily abolished these taints,
but money still influences our sexual life by measures which are
hardly any better. The complication and refinement of civilized life
have made women and children objects of luxury, and not a source of
wealth as in former times. This is due to two causes. On the one hand,
a wider and more humane conception of the social position of women and
children has extended their rights. Man cannot now exploit them to the
same extent as in the time of patriarchism, while the father of the
family has, on the contrary, the duty of maintaining his wife and
family, and of giving the latter a proper education. Among the poor,
the exploitation of the wife and children still exists; but in the
case of the rich and cultured the inverse phenomenon is produced. With
the intention of making his family happy and distinguished, the father
brings it up in luxury and idleness, and this produces a very harmful
result. The increasing refinement of modern life and its pleasures
leads to effeminacy. It bears upon the whole of society and
degenerates into an artificial desire for brilliancy and show, which
makes it increasingly difficult to obtain a simple and sober education
for the family. Men and women, especially the latter, do their best to
eclipse each other in their table, their toilet, the comfort and
luxury of their apartments, their pleasures and distractions, their
banquets and _fetes_. An enormous mass of the produce of human labor
is thus dissipated in futilities, for the benefit of unbridled
frivolity and luxury. It is owing to this that a civilization which,
thanks to s