[51] The proportion of those who do not wait, to those who do, may be judged to some extent from the following figures:— Legitimate and illegitimate births in England and Wales during the nine years 1911-19. Legitimate. Illegitimate. 1911. 843,505 37,633 1912. 835,209 37,528 1913. 843,981 37,909 1914. 841,767 37,329 1915. 778,369 36,245 1916. 747,381 37,689 1917. 631,189 37,157 1918. 621,209 41,452 1919. 650,562 41,876 [52] See Ch. Letourneau, _The Evolution of Marriage_ (London, 1891): “Christianity, which taught that the earthly country was of no account, and taxed with impurity all that related to sexual union, made marriage a sacrament, and consequently an institution quite apart from humble considerations of social utility.... We shall see how hurtful the influence of Christianity has been on marriage, and we shall come to the conclusion that in order to manage earthly affairs well, it is not good to keep our looks constantly raised to the skies” (pp. 205-6). See also p. 245: “Abandoning the modest reality, it [Christianity] lost anchor from the first and was drowned in a sea of dreams. Marriage, instead of being simply the union of a man and woman in order to produce children, became mystic.” [53] As we shall point out later, these romantic obsessions in regard to matrimony are chiefly Woman’s work. [54] See the interesting treatise entitled _The Grammar of Life_ by my friend Dr. G. T. Wrench (Heinemann, 1908), p. 218. [55] That is why the world’s greatest love stories—those of Dante and Beatrice, Romeo and Juliet, and Heathcliff and the elder Catherine (in _Wuthering Heights_)—are all stories of a love that _was never consummated_. In poetry and fiction, as in life, it is felt that for a great love romance to remain at its lofty level of passion and desire, the couple enacting it must never have an opportunity of living together as man and wife. [56] Naturally these remarks do not apply to the large and ever-increasing number of women nowadays to whom every stage in the process of child-bearing, from the preliminaries to the weaning, is a torment and a source of disgust. But such women are too abnormal, whatsoever their numbers may be, and too sick and below par to be called positive healthy women, or to be reckoned with in any discussion regarding what is characteristic of happy and successful functioning. They are the kind of women who can truly regard matrimony and maternity as states of self-sacrifice. [57] Of course this can only happen where the woman is inclined to pronounced negativeness, otherwise the longing for children drives her away from a husband who cannot or does not give them to her.