Sex and Common-Sense | Page 7

to the world a truer and a nobler moral standard than
the world has ever accepted yet.

II

A SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF THE UNMARRIED
Jesus said, "the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but
the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." (St. Luke ix. 58.)
In the last chapter I tried to deal with the actual problem created in this
country by the disproportion of the sexes--the fact that there are,
roughly, one and three-quarters to two million more women than men
in this country; and I was obliged to confine myself simply to stating
the problem, which, to my mind, is very greatly intensified by the fact,
generally ignored, that the sex needs of a woman are just as imperative,
their suppression just as hard to bear, as a man's; that woman is fully as
human as man, and that parenthood and loverhood and all that the
satisfaction of the sex instinct means to him, it means also to her. I do
not affirm that the difficulty of self-control or the suffering of
abstinence presents itself to men and women in just the same way; I am
sure it does not. I do not under-estimate the difference. But I do
emphasize the fact that, as far as I am able to judge, the suffering is
equal, although it is different in character. Therefore, the denial of
marriage to a very large number of women means that, although some
women, like some men, are naturally celibate, when so great a number
of women are denied the possibility of marriage, we must take it for
granted that among them the average will not be natural celibates, but
women who suffer a very great loss if they do not marry.
Now I want to add that this disproportion of the sexes is quite artificial,
and, therefore, should be temporary. From some of the letters I have
received I gather that people imagine that there has always been a very
much larger number of women than men, and not only in this country,
but throughout the world; and that, therefore, we ought to shape our
customs and our moral standards with this disproportion in mind as a
permanent fact. I want to point out that this is not the case. The causes
of the present excess of women over men in this country are quite
artificial. As a matter of fact, there are more boys born in this country
than girls--about 107 to 100 is the ratio--but the boys die in very much
larger numbers during the first twelve months of their life, because they
are more difficult to rear in bad conditions. But bad conditions are not

inevitable! These babies die from preventable causes. It is not within
the Providence of God that these children must die, nor is it a necessity
of human nature. It is due to preventable causes, and is, therefore, as I
say, artificial. Again, we have a very large empire, stretching out to the
remoter parts of the world, and to that empire men go out in very much
larger numbers than women, so that the disproportion here is, in part,
the reverse side of the disproportion in the great Overseas Dominions,
where there are more men than women. But that, too, is a purely
artificial and temporary state of things, which has nothing to do with
the fundamental conditions of human society. Finally, of course, there
is the war, which again creates an artificial state of affairs, by killing
enormous numbers of young men, just at the age--between twenty and
forty or forty-five--when they should be growing into manhood, and
becoming husbands and fathers. That again is artificial.
The reason why I emphasize this is because I feel very strongly that we
must not remodel our whole society, and recreate our moral standards,
to meet a passing and an artificial state of affairs. That is my answer to
those who seem to think the solution of all our difficulties is to be
found in the adoption of polygamy. Now polygamy is a perfectly
respectable institution in a large number of countries. It is quite an old
idea. It has not occurred to people for the first time between last
Sunday and to-day. It has been discussed in the Sunday newspapers,
which are the most widely read of any papers issued by the press. My
answer to it is that such an expedient would be just an instance of this
remodelling of your whole moral standard to meet an entirely artificial
state of affairs. Polygamy is not possible and never has been possible
on a great scale, because in hardly any country, certainly not in the
world as a whole, is there a great disproportion of the