Social morality requires the promotion of such lines of conduct as are beneficial to the maintenance and improvement of society. It will demand of both man and woman the full development of personal health and vigor, careful selection of the best mate by both, with recognition on her side of special responsibility as the natural arbiter. It will encourage such sex relations as are proved advantageous both to individual happiness and to the race. We are as yet so hag-ridden by domestic morality, with its arbitrary restrictions, and by the threats and punishments of law and religion, that we shrink from the broader biological judgment as if it involved blame, punishment, compulsory reform. Not at all. Men and women are no more to blame for being oversexed than a prize hog for being over-fat. The portly pig is not sick or wicked, he is merely overdeveloped in adipose tissue. Our condition does not call for condemnation, nor can we expect any sudden and violent change in our behavior resting on foolish ideals of celibacy, of self-denial, or of “sublimated sex.” It will take several generations of progressive selection, with widely different cultural influences, to reëstablish a normal sex development in _genus homo_, with its consequences in happier marriage, better children, and wide improvement in the public health. It is to this end, with all its widening range of racial progress, that social morality tends. Women--Free for What? By Edwin Muir Edwin Muir, _poet and essayist, has been assistant editor of the_ New Age (_London_) _as well as dramatic critic for the_ Scotsman _and the_ Athenæum. _He was a frequent contributor to_ The Freeman. WOMEN--FREE FOR WHAT? BY EDWIN MUIR In the beginning of the Scottish Shorter Catechism there is a beautiful affirmation. “The chief end of man,” it says, “is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” To any one nourished on the literature and thought of the last half-century that sentence, which defines the chief purpose of life as praise and enjoyment, comes like an audacious blasphemy, a blasphemy, however, bringing light and freedom. The terms of the dogma are a little antiquated now, but it would be easy to restate them in modern language. For “God” we might substitute “nature and man” or, if we were metaphysically inclined, “God in nature and man.” The authors of the Shorter Catechism, entangled as they were in a gloomy theology, recognized that the significance of life cannot reside in the labor by which men maintain it, but in some kind of realization of ourselves and of the world which is the highest enjoyment conceivable of both.