_History of European Morals_,[9] deliberately proposes that the
difficulty of deferred marriage which advanced civilization
necessitates, at least for the upper classes, should be met by temporary
unions being permitted with a woman of a lower class. The daughters of
workingmen, according to this writer, are good enough as fleshly
stop-gaps, to be flung aside when a sufficient income makes the true
wife possible--an honorable proceeding indeed! to say nothing of the
children of such a temporary union, to whom the father can perform no
duty, and leave no inheritance, save the inestimable one of a mother
with a tainted name. Verily there must be some fault in our training of
men! Certainly an intelligent American mother put her finger on the
blot, so far as we are concerned, when, speaking to me many years ago,
she said what struck her so in our English homes was the way in which
the girls were subordinated to the boys; the boys seemed first
considered, the girls in comparison were nowhere. Doubtless our English
homes are more at fault here than in America; but, as a mother's pride
in her boys is the same all over the world, may not even American homes
admit of a little improvement in this respect as well? And, if we choose
to bring up our boys to look upon their mothers and sisters as more or
less the devoted slaves of their selfishness, can we wonder that they
should grow up to look upon all women as more or less the slaves of
their needs, fleshly or otherwise?

Now, what I want all boys taught from their earliest years is, roughly
speaking, that boys came into the world to take care of girls. Whatever
modification may take place in our view of the relation of the sexes,
Nature's great fact will remain, that the man is the stronger--a
difference which civilization and culture seem to strengthen rather than
diminish; and from his earliest years he ought to be taught that he,
therefore, is the one that has to serve. It is the strong that have to