THE GREAT PROCREATION FETISH 179 



of terror in the Soudan, where the Mahdi made 

 a clean sweep of every one opposed to his moral 

 ideas — to his particular tapu system. 



I hope it will be observed that I am not 

 declaiming against moral systems, against tapus in 

 general — not even against the system held* by the 

 Mahdi. I am merely attempting to demonstrate 

 that the attempt to enforce such systems by secular 

 punishments has invariably led to crime, and that, 

 for hundreds if not thousands of years, the tendency 

 of legislation in civilised countries has been to 

 leave, more and more, the punishment of purely 

 moral offences to public opinion, which often 

 punishes heavily by social ostracism, while reserv- 

 ing the terrors of the law for offences against the 

 community — for offences, that is, in which one 

 person, by force or fraud, and against the consent 

 of a second person, interferes with the legal rights 

 of the latter. Thus at the present day the law 

 does not punish sexual immorality as such, whereas 

 it does punish adultery, the latter being an offence 

 against the community in that the guilty party 

 breaks a legal contract. Thus, also, we do not 

 punish a plurality of wives in India, nor in England 

 a man (did he exist) with a hundred willing 

 concubines. Since moral codes depend on the 

 associated religions, any attempt to enforce them 

 is essentially an act of religious intoleration, and 



