When Liberalism enfranchises
them politically, and Socialism emancipates them economically,
they will no longer allow the law to take immorality so easily.
Both men and women will be forced to behave morally in sex
matters; and when they find that this is inevitable they will
raise the question of what behavior really should be established
as moral. If they decide in favor of our present professed
morality they will have to make a revolutionary change in their
habits by becoming in fact what they only pretend to be at
present. If, on the other hand, they find that this would be an
unbearable tyranny, without even the excuse of justice or sound
eugenics, they will reconsider their morality and remodel the law.
THE PERSONAL SENTIMENTAL BASIS OF MONOGAMY
Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the
political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the
sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or
every hour Physically there is nothing to distinguish human
society from the farm-yard except that children are more
troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and
women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly,
the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-
quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the
slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly
demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of
more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be
distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of
freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more
liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself
provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a
product of slavery and not of liberty.
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