legal marriage as still being a stable fact, and see how we
can make the best of it. In it there are two things which both man and
woman forget--or refuse to face--and which are perhaps the chief
causes of most unhappiness. Man forgets that his kind _words_ of love
and sympathy matter far more to the actual happiness of the woman than
any of his _deeds_: because words fill and satisfy her imagination,
which is active whenever she is alone; and kind deeds, with few or
indifferent words, make very little impression upon it. Woman
forgets--or will not face--the fact that man is by nature a polygamous
animal. There is no use in arguing about this and saying he ought not
to be, and that it is a horrible idea. It is a physiological fact, and
to dispute it is to criticise the Almighty's scheme for ensuring a
continued population. That man should have polygamous instincts is
essential for this scheme to work against any odds.

Whatever we choose to say in contradiction to this resolves itself
into empty words, the fact of nature remaining. It would be just as
sensible to try to argue that, because we do not like to drink sea
water, it has no business to be salt! and to decide that it is _not_
salt! and that we will not recognise that _it is_ salt! The ocean
would just laugh at us, and remain briny! And no doubt Nature laughs
at silly woman too, when she tries to judge man without understanding
the elementary principle of creation.

This being grasped clearly, it must be seen that monogamous marriage
is _an ideal state_, not a _natural state_, and it must be admitted to
be such, and lived up to as an ideal, not undertaken with the notion
that fidelity in man is _natural_, and infidelity an _unnatural_
thing. It is the other way about because of the fundamental instincts
of man, which continuously and subconsciously suggest to him the
necessity for self-preservation, and in its larger sense
self-preservation means species-preservation.

Woman, on the other hand, although unconsciously inspired by this same
fundamental instinct of species-preservation, is not naturally
polygamous, or rather polyandrous, because such a state would militate
against this end by eventually destroying pure offspring. She only
becomes so under certain conditions. Fidelity, then, is, so to speak,
a natural state for woman, and she has not to fight against any
fundamental instinct of her sex in order to preserve it--she has only
to resist perverted de