disproportion--an excess in numbers of one sex over the other. And in this
country, whereas there was a disproportion of something like a million more
women than men before the war broke out, there is now a disproportion of
about one and three-quarter millions.

This accidental and (I believe) temporary difficulty--a difficulty not
"natural" and necessary to human life, but artificial and peculiar to
certain conditions which may be altered--does not, of course, create the
problem we have to deal with: but it forces that problem on our attention
by sheer force of suffering inflicted on so large a scale. It compels us
to ask ourselves on what we base, and at what we value the moral standard
which, if it is to be preserved, must mean a tremendous sacrifice on the
part of so large a number of women as is involved in their acceptance of
life-long celibacy.

There is no subject on which it is more difficult to find a common
ground than this. To some people it seems to be immoral even to ask the
question--on what are your moral standards based? To others what we call
our "moral standards" are so obviously absurd and "unnatural" that the
question has for them no meaning. And between these extremes there are so
many varieties of opinion that one can take nothing as generally accepted
by men and women.

I want, therefore, to leave aside the ordinary conventions--not because
they are necessarily bad, but because they are not to my purpose, which
is to discover whether there is a real morality which we can justify
to ourselves without appeal to any authority however great, or to any
tradition however highly esteemed: a morality which is based on the real
needs, the real aspirations of humanity itself.