virginity before marriage, and of surrender only to the husband after marriage, appear historically to have grown entirely by the pressure of male jealousy. Women were bought for wives and concubines, and were less valuable if they had been previously owned. As males were always in the position of purchasers, male virginity or continency did not come under discussion. Thus female incontinency has come to be regarded as a most serious, and male as a most trivial, sin. Even when it becomes a crime, as in adultery, sex decides the amount of criminality; if a wife is seduced, the husband may claim freedom from the wife whose value has been diminished, and damages from the seducer to recompense him for the loss; but if a husband is seduced, the wife can obtain neither freedom from her bad bargain, nor monetary consolation. Legal enactment makes a distinguishment in crime on the ground of sex, and the public conscience, being formed by legal enactment, of course endorses the distinction. Morality stamps as sin any sexual action which inflicts any real injury on an individual or on society, whether the act be incepted by man or woman, or be done with the full volition of both.
Taking as types of sins and crimes the particular cases dealt with above, the reason for the existence and the nature of both is readily distinguishable. The recognition of moral duty—and, by contrast, of moral lapse—has been of very slow growth, has been very gradually evolved. All individuals have not risen to the same point of evolution; sin and crime are the relics in modern society of our brute and savage ancestry; sinners and criminals are persons who have not developed up to the normal standard of their own time. It has been observed that the bully, the rowdy, the ruffian, of a village, turns out an admirable soldier. The result is only what might be expected, since the brutality, violence, and quarrelsomeness, characteristics of the savage, which make a man an intolerable nuisance in a decent, civilised community, are the very qualities which are required in the anti-social military condition. It is sometimes complained that the army is largely recruited from the scum of the population: it would be more reasonable to recognise that only the scum of the population is savage enough to make the thorough fighting animal. Unhappily, men to good for the trade often slip, or are
