Therefore I have chosen to apply to the issue the cold deductive processes with which experience as a professor of moral philosophy has made me familiar. As I said, the Christian is free to observe his supposed divine command, the Stoic may bow to a mystic and inscrutable law, the moral æsthete may enthuse over the charm of virtue; but I maintain that the sociological or utilitarian view of morals, which is now generally accepted by the vast number of people who have ceased to be Christian, cannot control sex-relations in any other sense than this. A man must avoid injustice and hardship: a woman must use her discretion. Indeed, as the clergy and the puritans now take their stand commonly on social grounds, these social considerations are effective against them. But the question is not merely academic. These cold and severe deductions are very properly opposed to the heated phraseology and sentimentality of Conservatives, who profess to be concerned about our social welfare, but I am really pleading for the greater happiness of the race, the lessening of hypocrisy, the curtailment of a system of prostitution which makes the lives of so many women end in horror. With all their talk about our "social welfare," the clergy and their puritan supporters are in this respect the gravest disturbers and restricters of our social welfare; and the insolence with which they assail every attempt at reform is ludicrous in view of their own record and gravely prejudicial to the advance of human happiness. It is not a question of abolishing marriage, or of interfering with the liberty of any. At one moment the clergy represent marriage as so beneficent, so solidly established in the hearts of our people, that only a morbid sensualist ever assails it; and the next moment they suggest, in effect, that if we relax our coercion, people will abandon marriage in such numbers that the social order will be overwhelmed. Let us have sincerity and liberty.