LAWS OF MULTIPLICATION. 297 



the happiness of the home; but there is danger lest, in re- 

 moving its result, sexual intemperance become increasingly- 

 organic. We would urge, in fact, the necessity of an ethical 

 rather than of a mechanical " prudence after marriage," of a 

 temperance recognised to be as binding on husband and wife 

 as chastity on the unmarried. When we consider the inevit- 

 able consequences of intemperance, even if the dangers of too 

 large families be avoided, and the possibility of exaggerated 

 sexuality becoming cumulative by inheritance, we cannot help 

 recognising that the intemperate pair are falling towards the 

 ethical level of the harlots and profligates of our streets. 



Just as we would protest against the dictum of false physi- 

 cians who preach indulgence rather than restraint, so we must 

 protest against regarding artificial means of preventing fertilisa- 

 tion as adequate solutions of sexual responsibility. After all, the 

 solution is primarily one of temperance. It is no new nor 

 unattainable ideal to retain, throughout married life, a large 

 measure of that self-control which must always form the organic 

 basis of the enthusiasm and idealism of lovers. But as old 

 attempts at the regulation of sexual life have constantly fallen 

 from a glowing idealism into pallor or morbidness, it need 

 hardly be said that the same fate will ever more or less 

 befall the endeavour after temperance, so long as that lacks 

 the collaboration of other necessary reforms. We need a 

 new ethic of the sexes ; and this not merely, or even mainly, 

 as an intellectual construction, but as a discipline of life; 

 and we need more. We need an increasing education and 

 civism of women, — in fact, an economic of the sexes very 

 different from that nowadays so common, which, while attack- 

 ing the old co-operation of men and women because of its 

 manifest imperfections, only offers us an unlimited and far 

 more mutually destructive industrial competition between them 

 instead. The practical problems of reproduction become in 

 fact, to a large extent, those of improved function and evolved 

 environment ; and limitation of population, just as we are be- 

 ginning to see the cure of the more individual forms of intem- 

 perance, is primarily to be reached, not solely by individual 

 restraint, but by a not merely isolated and individual, but aggre- 

 gate and social, reorganisation of life, work, and surroundings. 

 And while our biological studies of course for the most part 

 only point the way towards deeper social ones, they afford also 

 one luminous principle towards their prosecution, — that thorough 



