ment, then the permanent single marriage has no organic justification, it must become after the honeymoon in most cases, or after the birth of the child, an empty form and a lie, and lead to conflicts between inclination and duty even when it was originally contracted from love. Of course a multitude of arguments array themselves at once against this conclusion whose logical sequence could only be the abolition of the institution of matrimony and a return to the uncontrolled mating of the animal world. The chief of these arguments is this: It may be true that man is polygamous according to his natural instincts, that he experiences an impulse within him to enter into intimate relations simultaneously or in succession, with more than one individual of the opposite sex; but he has also other instincts and it is the task of civilization to educate the will of man so that he can subdue and suppress his instincts when he learns to know that they are wrong. Unfortunately this argument is not convincing; for it must first be proved that the polygamous instinct would be injurious to the preservation and development of mankind, as this would be the sole foundation for calling it wrong; in addition it gives us cause for reflection as we realize that our civilization, which has succeeded in subduing other instincts, has never yet succeeded in suppressing 1 the polygamous instinct, in spite of the fact that the church threatens it with the torments of hell, the law condemns it and our conventional morality declares that it is indecent; man lives in a state of polygamy in the civilized countries in spite of the monogamy enforced by the laws; out of a hundred thousand men there would barely be one who could swear upon his death-bed that he had never known but one single woman during his whole life; and if the principles of monogamy are more strictly observed by women, it is not because they have never had
