_Thirdly._ A fine ideal, however impossible of attainment, is a force for good to be held up before the eyes of the mass of the people, who, however much actual education has advanced, are still too unendowed with personal brain to have any judgment themselves--their capacities only allowing them to see the effects of things upon their immediate surroundings without perceiving the causes, and therefore leaving them incapable of judging what could be good for the country, the race, or humanity in general. After all these centuries, legal marriage still holds, because no one has been able to suggest any other union which could take its place without bringing chaos. And it seems more than likely that no one will ever be sufficiently inspired so to do! Thus let us now consider the present legal marriage as still being a stable fact, and see how we can make the best of it. In it there are two things which both man and woman forget--or refuse to face--and which are perhaps the chief causes of most unhappiness. Man forgets that his kind _words_ of love and sympathy matter far more to the actual happiness of the woman than any of his _deeds_: because words fill and satisfy her imagination, which is active whenever she is alone; and kind deeds, with few or indifferent words, make very little impression upon it. Woman forgets--or will not face--the fact that man is by nature a polygamous animal. There is no use in arguing about this and saying he ought not to be, and that it is a horrible idea. It is a physiological fact, and to dispute it is to criticise the Almighty's scheme for ensuring a continued population. That man should have polygamous instincts is essential for this scheme to work against any odds. Whatever we choose to say in contradiction to this resolves itself into empty words, the fact of nature remaining. It would be just as sensible to try to argue that, because we do not like to drink sea water, it has no business to be salt! and to decide that it is _not_ salt! and that we will not recognise that _it is_ salt! The ocean would just laugh at us, and remain briny! And no doubt Nature laughs at silly woman too, when she tries to judge man without understanding the elementary principle of creation. This being grasped clearly, it must be seen that monogamous marriage is _an ideal state_, not a _natural state_, and it must be admitted to be such, and lived up to as an ideal, not undertaken with the notion that fidelity in man is _natural_, and infidelity an _unnatural_ thing. It is the other way about because of the fundamental instincts of man, which continuously and subconsciously suggest to him the necessity for self-preservation, and in its larger sense self-preservation means species-preservation.