668 SOCIAL SCIENCE 



leads us to desire that this may be so, to seek in the facts a support 

 for our convictions. And yet it is ever a perilous procedure to 

 enter into transactions with empirical reality to such an extent as 

 to make the validity of an ideal depend on the countenance given to 

 it by the facts. The ethical rule is true, though no experience as 

 yet should bear it out, though the experience of the human race thus 

 far in some respects should rise up to testify against it. As regards 

 the above statement, however, two abatements at least need to be 

 considered. Pure monogamy, in Western civilization, does not 

 exist. What we actually find is a nucleus of sheltered homes sur- 

 rounded by an extensive fringe of baser types of the sex relation. 

 Premarital self-control especially is rare, in the great cities conspicu- 

 ously so, but also in the rural districts. Whoever has had the oppor- 

 tunity to look beneath the fair-seeming surface of things, and to 

 familiarize himself with the conditions that actually prevail, is aware 

 how deeply the poison which comes from the surrounding fringe or 

 margin penetrates into and infiltrates the monogamic nucleus, to 

 how alarming an extent the physically sound heredity claimed in 

 the above proposition is lacking. The question, therefore, which 

 we are bound to consider, always speaking from the standpoint of 

 social survival, is not whether monogamy and the premarital self- 

 control which is an indispensable adjunct to it, would conduce to 

 sound heredity if they were general, but in view of the fact that 

 they are not general, and that the strain which they put on the 

 instincts of men seems in many cases in excess of the moral force 

 adequate to sustain it, whether, in view of this fact, from the point 

 of view of survival, it were better to maintain the present condition 

 or to adopt Plato's plan, or some other like it, and to abandon 

 the mixed type, partly monogamic, partly extra-monogamic, which 

 is now prevalent, as tending under the circumstances toward social 

 degeneration? Or, to put the matter in another form, the question 

 is whether the proportion of perfectly sound men and women who 

 enter into marriage and remain sound is sufficient to guarantee that 

 the offspring of existing marriages as a whole shall possess the phys- 

 ical qualities necessary for survival; whether, in other words, the 

 remnant of the righteous is sufficiently numerous to leaven the lump? 

 I am not aware that the science of the family has any illumination 

 to give us on this question, or that our knowledge of the punaluan 

 family, and the rest, can be of use in enlightening us upon this 

 problem. 



(As a matter of fact I take it that those who are ethically minded 

 consider only a single point, namely, whether the monogamic constitu- 

 tion of the family comports with what is morally exacted. They do 

 not doubt that if a society existed in which perfect monogamy were 

 realized, such a society, among other excellent advantages, would 



