about it; we are not so prepared as we ought to be to allow a free criticism of those social institutions on which our ideas of moral conduct are based, even when they cover (as at present constituted) a vast amount of double-dealing.
Take for instance this Western civilization of ours which bases its social institutions of marriage, property, and inheritance on the monogamic principle, but persists in moral judgments and practices whose only possible justification is to be found in the rather divergent theory that the male is naturally polygamous and the female monogamous.
These two ideals, or social practices, make mutually discrediting claims the one against the other. I am not concerned to say which I think is right. But on one side or the other we are blinking facts, and are behaving as though they had not a determining effect upon conduct and character which Society ought straightforwardly to recognise.
The man who maintains that it is impossible for the male to live happily and contentedly in faithful wedlock with one wife and then goes and does so, commits himself by such matrimonial felicity to discreditable conduct—discreditable to his professions, I mean. And it is, of course, the same if his inconsistency takes him the other way about.
There may, however, be an alternative and more honest solution to this conflict of claims; both may contain a measure of truth. It may be true that monogamy—or single mating—
