common security to his private passions. He reaches perfection
when he even ceases to love passionately--when he reduces the most
profound of all his instinctive experience from the level of an
ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing armies
and workshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the
infant death-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and
making it possible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at
any hour of the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by
producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion
formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it.


The advocates of monogamy, deceived by its moral overtones, fail
to get all the advantage out of it that is in it. Consider, for example,
the important moral business of safeguarding the virtue of the
unmarried--that is, of the still passionate. The present plan in
dealing, say, with a young man of twenty, is to surround him with
scare-crows and prohibitions--to try to convince him logically that
passion is dangerous. This is both supererogation and
imbecility--supererogation because he already knows that it is
dangerous, and imbecility because it is quite impossible to kill a
passion by arguing against it. The way to kill it is to give it rein
under unfavourable and dispiriting conditions--to bring it down, by
slow stages, to the estate of an absurdity and a horror. How
much more, then, could be accomplished if the wild young man
were forbidden polygamy, before marriage, but permitted
monogamy! The prohibition in this case would be relatively easy to
enforce, instead of impossible, as in the other. Curiosity would be
satisfied; nature would get out of her cage; even romance would get
an inning. Ninety-nine young men out of a hundred would submit,