fe, because they are more
difficult to rear in bad conditions. But bad conditions are not inevitable!
These babies die from preventable causes. It is not within the Providence
of God that these children _must_ die, nor is it a necessity of human
nature. It is due to preventable causes, and is, therefore, as I say,
artificial. Again, we have a very large empire, stretching out to the
remoter parts of the world, and to that empire men go out in very much
larger numbers than women, so that the disproportion here is, in part, the
reverse side of the disproportion in the great Overseas Dominions, where
there are more men than women. But that, too, is a purely artificial and
temporary state of things, which has nothing to do with the fundamental
conditions of human society. Finally, of course, there is the war, which
again creates an artificial state of affairs, by killing enormous numbers
of young men, just at the age--between twenty and forty or forty-five--when
they should be growing into manhood, and becoming husbands and fathers.
That again is artificial.

The reason why I emphasize this is because I feel very strongly that we
must not remodel our whole society, and recreate our moral standards, to
meet a passing and an artificial state of affairs. That is my answer to
those who seem to think the solution of all our difficulties is to be
found in the adoption of polygamy. Now polygamy is a perfectly respectable
institution in a large number of countries. It is quite an old idea. It has
not occurred to people for the first time between last Sunday and to-day.
It has been discussed in the Sunday newspapers, which are the most widely
read of any papers issued by the press. My answer to it is that such an
expedient would be just an instance of this remodelling of your whole moral
standard to meet an entirely artificial state of affairs. Polygamy is not
possible and never has been possible on a great scale, because in hardly
any country, certainly not in the world as a whole, is there a great
disproportion of the sexes under ordinary circumstances. The idea most
people appear to have about it is that in some parts of the world, like
India and China, every man is blessed with three or four wives. It is a
perfectly fantastic picture. The balance of the sexes--on the whole--is
equal. It is, therefore, a physical impossibility for polygamy to be a
universal custom. It cannot be practised, and has never been practised,
except among