The iniquity of our bastardy laws and public opinion concerning illegitimacy both reflect the Anglo-Saxon habit of mind, which persists in ignoring all social problems arising from the sex relation. We have never yet squarely faced the question, we have just pushed it into the darkness, and pretended it was not there. It has even been a kind of disgrace to bring it forward; and the evil and the waste is so hidden up that most of us have been quite unaware of its immense existence among us. But we cannot thus escape from what we have done, or rather have left undone. The fact is, that all our thought on these questions has been obscured by the puritan view of punishment, based on the assumption that harshness in the treatment of sexual offences will make for a higher standard of morality. Do we really believe this? Surely the underlying fallacy of our morality has always rested here—in our desire to crucify the offender. We forget that, by doing this, we but open the way to make easy, even if not inevitable, the committal of further sin. By our attitude we drive men to desert the girls made pregnant through their lust, and open the way for them to escape from responsibility for their sexual sins and to disown their fatherhood; we do everything that we can to encourage unfit parenthood. Few people want to do wrong; they drift into wrong; the circumstances are too hard or their wills too weak to resist. We are suffering a great deal of confusion from demanding from men and women a rule of conduct in sex without taking any care that the conditions of life render such conduct practicable. In the last chapter I tried to make plain how short-sighted has been the attempt to force all types into a single mould. The plan I there outlined for an open acceptance of honourable unions outside of permanent marriage, would cut at the roots of many of these problems, and, in particular, by lessening the sufferings from enforced sexual abstinence, would render much less frequent those disgraceful and hidden unions which result in illegitimate births; it would also materially reduce the dire results of venereal diseases, and would be, in my opinion, more beneficial and far-reaching than anything that yet has been proposed. I would affirm again that I am not advocating license of conduct. It is necessary to proclaim allegiance to the God of morals, who has proclaimed for ever “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.” But it is necessary also to understand that repressive terrors may drive men and women into greater sins. Our bastardy laws act directly in this immoral way. The child born of unmarried parents has been branded under Christian teaching as “the child of sin,” and condemned from its birth as a member of an unclean caste. But, from the point of view of practical morality, this identification of the child with the sin of its parents is wholly unjustifiable.