uestion of sexual
variations is more than this, it is, as Hinton argued, a
dynamical method of working towards the abolition of the perilous
and dangerous promiscuity of prostitution. A rigid marriage order
involves prostitution; a flexible marriage order largely--though
not, it may be, entirely--renders prostitution unnecessary. The
democratic morality of the present day, so far as the indications
at present go, is opposed to the encouragement of a _quasi_-slave
class, with diminished social rights, such as prostitutes always
constitute in a more or less marked degree. It is fairly evident,
also, that the rapidly growing influence of medical hygiene is on
the same side. We may, therefore, reasonably expect in the future
a slow though steady increase in the recognition, and even the
extension, of those variations of the monogamic order which have,
in reality, never ceased to exist.

It is lamentable that at this period of the world's history, nearly two
thousand years after the wise legislators of Rome had completed their
work, it should still be necessary to conclude that we are to-day only
beginning to place marriage on a reasonable and humane basis. I have
repeatedly pointed out how largely the Canon law has been responsible for
this arrest of development. One may say, indeed, that the whole attitude
of the Church, after it had once acquired complete worldly dominance,
must be held responsible. In the earlier centuries the attitude of
Christianity was, on the whole, admirable. It held aloft great ideals but
it refrained from enforcing those ideals at all costs; thus its ideals
remained genuine and could not degenerate into mere hypocritical empty
forms; much flexibility was allowed when it seemed to be for human good
and made for the avoidance of evil and injustice. But when the Church
attained temporal power, and when that power was concentrated in the hands
of Popes who subordinated moral and religious interests to political
interests, all the claims of reason and humanity were flung to the winds.
The ideal was no more a fact than it was before, but it was now treated as
a fact. Human relationships remained what they were before, as complicated
and as various, but henceforth one rigid pattern, admirable as an ideal
but worse than empty as a form, was arbitrarily set up, and all deviations
from it treated either as non-existent or damnable. The vitality was
cru