That is our temptation, and I think that in the coming decade there will be a great fight about it; we are not so prepared as we ought to be to allow a free criticism of those social institutions on which our ideas of moral conduct are based, even when they cover (as at present constituted) a vast amount of double-dealing. Take for instance this Western civilization of ours which bases its social institutions of marriage, property, and inheritance on the monogamic principle, but persists in moral judgments and practices whose only possible justification is to be found in the rather divergent theory that the male is naturally polygamous and the female monogamous. These two ideals, or social practices, make mutually discrediting claims the one against the other. I am not concerned to say which I think is right. But on one side or the other we are blinking facts, and are behaving as though they had not a determining effect upon conduct and character which Society ought straightforwardly to recognise. The man who maintains that it is impossible for the male to live happily and contentedly in faithful wedlock with one wife and then goes and does so, commits himself by such matrimonial felicity to discreditable conduct--discreditable to his professions, I mean. And it is, of course, the same if his inconsistency takes him the other way about. There may, however, be an alternative and more honest solution to this conflict of claims; both may contain a measure of truth. It may be true that monogamy--or single mating--faithfully practised by man and woman alike, is ideally by far the best solution of the sex-relations, and the best for the State to recognise and encourage by all legitimate means; just as vegetarianism and total abstinence may be the best solution of our relation to food, or non-resistance of our relation to government, or abject submission of our relation to theological teaching. But though these may be ideals to strive for, it does not follow that human nature is so uniformly constructed upon one model as to justify us in making them compulsory, or in turning round and denouncing as moral obliquity either plural mating or the eating of meat, or the drinking of wine, or rebellion against civil authority, or free thought in matters of religion.