anhood 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.

The only legitimately moral end of marriage--whether we regard it from the
wider biological standpoint or from the narrower standpoint of human
society--is as a sexual selection, effected in accordance with the laws of
sexual selection, and having as its direct object a united life of
complete mutual love and as its indirect object the procreation of the
race. Unless procreation forms part of the object of marriage, society has
nothing whatever to do with it and has no right to make its voice heard.
But if procreation is one of the ends of marriage, then it is imperative
from the biological and social points of view that no influences outside
the proper natural influence of sexual selection should be permitted to
affect the choice of conjugal partners, for in so far as wholesome sexual
selection is interfered with the offspring is likely to be injured and the
interests of the race affected.

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