They encourage default.
"How are we to have all these children?" the married couple asks. "How
can we feed and educate them?"
Social pressure also tends in the same direction. Religious morality,
however, still persists in its idea of sin, although the potency of this
sanction is daily becoming less, even to the clerical eye.
If nature had a vote, it would surely be cast in favour of polygamy. Man
is forever sexual, and in equal degree, until the verge of decrepitude.
Woman passes through the stages of fecundation, pregnancy, and
lactation.
There can be no doubt but that the most convenient, the most logical and
the most moral system of sexual intercourse, naturally, is polygamy.
But the economic subdues the natural. Who proposes to have five wives
when he cannot feed one?
Society has made man an exclusively social product, and set him apart
from nature.
What can the husband and wife do, especially when they are poor? Must
they overload themselves with children, and then deliver them up to
poverty and neglect because God has given them, or shall they limit
their number?
If my opinion is asked, I advise a limit--although it may be artificial
and immoral.
Marriage presents us with this simple choice: we may either elect the
slow, filthy death of the indigent workingman, of the carabineer who
lives in a shack which teems with children, or else the clean life of
the French, who limit their offspring.
Pages:
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65