[Sidenote: Gentility.] [Sidenote: Limitation of Offspring.] [Sidenote: The great Temptation of Women.] [Sidenote: Connection between Morality and plain Living.] [Sidenote: Luxurious Livers respected.] Here I leave this subject, the most difficult to treat in the volume, and the most unsatisfactory in many ways. It is unsatisfactory because the facts are usually concealed, and that leaves room for uncharitable minds to assume a concealed immorality in others, as, for example, when it is assumed, without any proof, that respectable French people are immoral. It is unsatisfactory, because there are two codes of morality, a severe one that is expressed, and a laxer one that is understood and acted upon. It is unsatisfactory, because language itself is so employed as to make the same actions pure or impure as they are or are not admitted by the customs of society. But the subject is most unsatisfactory because there is a permanent conflict between the animal nature of man and the situation in which a safe and peaceful civilisation places him. He is gifted with reproductive powers well adapted to fill up the ranks of primitive societies as they were continually decimated by disease, by famine, and by violent death; but in a state of civilisation in which diseased people live on, in which famine is all but unknown, and wars continually postponed, the reproductive force is so much in excess of the need for it that it bursts forth in tremendous moral evils. Nor is the difficulty lessening; it is, on the contrary, increasing year by year. The prudent classes avoid marriage more and more, thus exposing young men to the snare of the kept mistress or the peril of promiscuous concubinage. The imprudent classes marry with perfect recklessness, and even their marriages themselves are indirectly favourable to immorality, because they supply recruits for the army of vice by bringing up children in conditions that make decency impossible. The crowding of people together in industrial centres and the craving for town excitements all tend towards the one greatest and most natural of all excitements; the vast increase of military life tends to it also in other ways. But of all the influences directly or indirectly tending towards immorality _Gentility_ is the most subtle and deadly in its operation. Genteel young men dare not marry on small incomes because poverty will take the polish off their style of living; genteel young ladies cannot marry unless they are assured of incomes large enough to dress fashionably and have all the housework done by servants. In France, and not in France only, but much more in France than in England, the number of offspring is limited that the family may maintain a genteel position in life and not fall down into the working classes. In the poorer classes themselves the desire for a genteel appearance is the great temptation of women. I remember a dangerously beautiful young Frenchwoman