Finally, in concluding this picture of our present-day sex arrangements, there is a brief word to be said about divorce. In the year 1916, the last statistics available as I write, there were just over a million marriages in the United States, and there were over one hundred and twelve thousand divorces. This would indicate that one marriage in every nine resulted in shipwreck. But as a matter of fact the proportion is greater, because the marriages necessarily precede the divorces, and the proportion of divorces in 1916 should be calculated upon the number of marriages which took place some five or ten years previously. Of the one million marriages in 1916, we may say that one in seven or one in eight will end in the divorce courts. Let this suffice for a glimpse of the system of marriage-plus-prostitution--a field of weeds which we have somehow to plow up and prepare for a harvest of rational and honest love! CHAPTER XXXIII SEX AND NATURE (Maintains that our sex disorders are not the result of natural or physical disharmony.) Elie Metchnikoff, one of the greatest of scientists, wrote a book entitled "The Nature of Man," in which he studied the human organism from the point of view of biology, demonstrating that in our bodies are a number of relics of past stages of evolution, no longer useful, but rather a source of danger and harm. We have, for example, in the inner corner of the eye a relic of that third eyelid whereby the eagle is enabled to look at the sun. This is a harmless relic. But we have also an appendix, a degenerate organ of digestion, or gland of secretion, which now serves as a center of infection and source of danger. We have likewise a lower bowel, a survival of our hay-eating days, and a cause of autointoxication and premature death. Among the sources of trouble, Metchnikoff names the fact that the human male possesses a far greater quantity of sexual energy than is required for purposes of procreation. This becomes a cause of disharmony and excess, it causes man to wreck his health and destroy himself. Manifestly, this is a serious matter; for if it is true, our efforts to find health and happiness in love are doomed to failure, and Lecky is right when he describes the prostitute as the "guardian of virtue," the eternal and necessary scapegoat of humanity. But I do not believe it is true; I think that here is one more case of the endless blundering of scientists and philosophers who attempt to teach physiology, politics, religion and law, without having made a study of economics. I do not believe that the sex troubles of mankind are physiological in their nature, but have their origin in our present system of class privilege. I believe they are caused, not by the blunders of nature, but by the blunders of man as a social animal.