But
to take a vital process in which we are keenly interested personal
instruments, and ask us to regard it, and feel about it, and
legislate on it, wholly as if it were an impersonal one, is to
make a higher demand than most people seem capable of responding
to. We all have personal interests in marriage which we are not
prepared to sink. It is not only the women who want to get
married: the men do too, sometimes on sentimental grounds,
sometimes on the more sordid calculation that bachelor life is
less comfortable and more expensive, since a wife pays for her
status with domestic service as well as with the other services
expected of her. Now that children are avoidable, this calculation
is becoming more common and conscious than it was: a result which
is regarded as "a steady improvement in general morality."
IMPERSONALITY IS NOT PROMISCUITY
There is, too, a really appalling prevalence of the superstition
that the sexual instinct in men is utterly promiscuous, and that
the least relaxation of law and custom must produce a wild
outbreak of licentiousness. As far as our moralists can grasp the
proposition that we should deal with the sexual relation as
impersonal, it seems to them to mean that we should encourage it
to be promiscuous: hence their recoil from it.
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