There has long been a vague idea in British bosoms that our neighbours in sexual matters are far more immoral than ourselves. This is not the occasion upon which to examine the causes and origin of such a decidedly erroneous view. One may, however, single out one of them. It is largely the fault of writers of fiction that we remain in ignorance, or rather--and this is worse--in error concerning the character of our amiable neighbours. In former days, putting aside the naughty farces not supposed to present a picture of actual life, most French dramas were quite sound in conventional morality. Augier presented some wicked people, such as Olympe, concerning whom he invented the phrase _la nostalgie de la boue_; but he was unequivocably moral in his aims, and preached the sanctity of marriage and maternity. Dumas _fils_, putting aside one indiscretion, was equally vigorous in his desire to support accepted views of morality. His illustrious father, it may be admitted, occasionally propounded startling propositions, but without prejudice, I fancy, to a sound belief in the idea that exceptional cases must be regarded as exceptions. None, however, of these writers, however artificial their views of life, ever offered pictures of society based upon the proposition that the chastity of woman is of no importance. Many of the present school of French dramatists write plays--unfortunately chosen for presentation in England--which assume the existence in society of a large class of people, otherwise amiable, who act upon the proposition that in Paris as in heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. Unmarried men and women live together, the males paying for the board and lodging, etc., of the females without there being any pretence that the intimacy of their relations is radically immoral under normal circumstances. They do not even indulge in fireworks in such plays. You do not have parodies of the famous phrase "Property is theft"; for the heroines fail to justify themselves by remarking that marriage is immorality. There is simply a business of union and disunion, _collage_ and _décollage_, coupled with what one may call cross-unions, all of them apparently free from the embarrassment of children and none of them involving any of the more dignified of the human emotions. One of the worst of the number was _L'Age d'Aimer_, by M. Pierre Wolff, a piece so cynically immoral, and written with such an air of truth, that it might well cause some of us to shrink in horror from the idea of an _entente cordiale_ with a people which, if truly represented by its fashionable dramatists, has no concept of cleanliness of life. Without posing as a champion of orthodox morality and certainly without taking objection to the study of sex questions on the stage, one may protest against works in which it is assumed there is no sex question, because every form of union, on any basis, except perhaps that of marriage, is permissible.