rly
all civilized lands except England.

But from the standpoint of property and inheritance it is quite
intelligible, and on that ground it is still supported by the
majority of Englishmen. If the wife has intercourse with other
men there is a risk that the husband's property will be inherited
by a child who is not his own. But the sexual intercourse of the
husband with other women is followed by no such risk. The
infidelity of the wife is a serious offence against property; the
infidelity of the husband is no offence against property, and
cannot possibly, therefore, be regarded as a ground for divorce
from our legal point of view. The fact that his adultery
complicated by cruelty is such a ground, is simply a concession
to modern feeling. Yet, as Helena Stoecker truly points out
("Verschiedenheit im Liebesleben des Weibes und des Mannes,"
_Zeitschrift fuer Sexualwissenschaft_, Dec., 1908), a married man
who has an unacknowledged child with a woman outside of marriage,
has committed an act as seriously anti-social as a married woman
who has a child without acknowledging that the father is not her
husband. In the first case, the husband, and in the second case,
the wife, have placed an undue amount of responsibility on
another person. (The same point is brought forward by the author
of _The Question of English Divorce_, p. 56.)

I insist here on the economic element in our sexual morality,
because that is the element which has given it a kind of
stability and become established in law. But if we take a wider
view of our sexual morality, we cannot ignore the ancient element
of asceticism, which has given religious passion and sanction to
it. Our sexual morality is thus, in reality, a bastard born of
the union of property-morality with primitive ascetic morality,
neither in true relationship to the vital facts of the sexual
life. It is, indeed, the property element which, with a few
inconsistencies, has become finally the main concern of our law,
but the ascetic element (with, in the past, a wavering
relationship to law) has had an important part in moulding
popular sentiment and in creating an attitude of reprobation
towards sexual intercourse _per se_, although such intercourse is
regarded as an essential part of the property-based and
religiously sanctified instituti