ve an immorality which favors vice and makes virtue
irrealizable, and, as she exclaims with pardonable extravagance, to preach
a sounder morality to the young, without at the same time condemning the
society which encourages the prevailing immorality, is "worse than folly,
it is crime."

It is on the lines along which Senancour a century ago and Ellen Key
to-day are great pioneers that the new forms of anterior or ideal
theoretical morality are now moving, in advance, according to the general
tendency in morals, of traditional morality and even of practice.

There is one great modern movement of a definite kind which will serve to
show how clearly sexual morality is to-day moving towards a new
standpoint. This is the changing attitude of the bulk of the community
towards both State marriage and religious marriage, and the growing
tendency to disallow State interference with sexual relationships, apart
from the production of children.

There has no doubt always been a tendency among the masses of the
population in Europe to dispense with the official sanction of sexual
relationships until such relationships have been well established and the
hope of offspring has become justifiable. This tendency has been
crystallized into recognized customs among numberless rural communities
little touched either by the disturbing influences of the outside world or
the controlling influences of theological Christian conceptions. But at
the present day this tendency is not confined to the more primitive and
isolated communities of Europe among whom, on the contrary, it has tended
to die out. It is an unquestionable fact, says Professor Bruno Meyer, that
far more than the half of sexual intercourse now takes place outside legal
marriage.[269] It is among the intelligent classes and in prosperous and
progressive communities that this movement is chiefly marked. We see
throughout the world the practical common sense of the people shaping
itself in the direction which has been pioneered by the ideal moralists
who invariably precede the new growth of practical morality.

The voluntary childless marriages of to-day have served to show the
possibility of such unions outside legal marriage, and such free unions
are becoming, as Mrs. Parsons points out, "a progressive substitute for
marriage."[270] The gradual but steady rise in the age for entering on
legal marriage also points in the same direction, though it indicates not
merely an increase