to the same results as those very relations which law and custom tend to establish. The radical error seems to be that the law commands; whereas such a relation cannot mould itself according to external arrangements, but depends wholly on inclination; and wherever coercion or guidance comes into collision with inclination, they divert it still farther from the proper path. Wherefore it appears to me that the State should not only loosen the bonds in this instance, and leave ampler freedom to the citizen, but that it should entirely withdraw its active solicitude from the institution of marriage, and both generally and in its particular modifications, should rather leave it wholly to the free choice of the individuals, and the various contracts they may enter into with respect to it. I should not be deterred from the adoption of this principle by the fear that all family relations might be disturbed, for although such a fear might be justified by considerations of particular circumstances and localities, it could not fairly be entertained in an inquiry into the nature of men and States in general. For experience frequently convinces us that just where law has imposed no fetters, morality most surely binds; the idea of external coercion is one entirely foreign to an institution which, like marriage, reposes only on inclination and an inward sense of duty; and the results of such coercive institutions do not at all correspond to the intentions in which they originate."
50
Such register should, as Bertillon rightly insisted, be of the most complete description—setting forth all the anthropological traits of the contracting parties—so that the characteristics of a human group at any time and place may be studied and compared. Registration of this kind would, beside its more obvious convenience, form an almost indispensable guide to the higher evolution of the race. I may here add that I have assumed, perhaps too rashly, that the natural tendency among civilized men and women is towards a monogamic and more or less permanent union; preceded, it may be in most individuals, by a more restless period of experiment. Undoubtedly, many variations will arise in the future, leading to more complex relationships. Such variations cannot be foreseen, and when they arise they will still have to prove their stability and their advantage to the race.
51
As among geese, and, occasionally, it is said, among elephants.
52
In 1787 Condorcet declared (Lettres d'un Bourgeois de New Haven, Lettre II) that women ought to have absolutely the same rights as men, and he repeated the same statement emphatically in 1790, in an article "Sur l'Admission des Femmes au Droit de Cité," published in the Journal de la Société de 1789. It must be added that Condorcet was not a democrat, and neither to men nor to women would he grant the vote unless they were proprietors.
53
Léopold Lacour has given a full and reliable account of Olympe de Gouges (who was born at Montauban in 1755) in his Trois Femmes de la Révolution, 1900.
54
It is noteworthy that the Empire had even a depressing effect on the physical activities of women. The eighteenth-century woman in France, although she was not athletic in the modern sense, enjoyed a free life in the open air and was fond of physical exercises. During the Directoire this tendency became very pronounced; women wore the scantiest of garments, were out of doors in all weathers, cultivated healthy appetites, and enjoyed the best of health. But with the establishment of the Empire these wholesome fashions were discarded, and women cultivated new ideals of fragile refinement indoors. (This evolution has been traced by Dr. Lucien Nars, L'Hygiène, September, 1911.)
55
Concerning the rise and progress of this movement in England much information is sympathetically and vivaciously set forth in W. Lyon Blease's Emancipation of English Women (1910), a book, however, which makes no claim to be judicial or impartial; the author regards "unregulated male egoism" as the source of the difficulties in the way of women's suffrage.
56
Thus, in 1911 the National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage took an impartial poll of the women voters on the municipal register in several large constituencies, by sending a reply-paid postcard to ask whether or not they favoured the extension to women of the Parliamentary franchise. Only 5579 were in favour of it; 18,850 were against; 12,621 did not take the trouble to answer, and it was claimed, probably with reason, that a majority of these were not in favour of the vote.
57
It must not be too hastily assumed. Unless we go back to ancient plots of the Guy Fawkes type (now only imitated by self-styled anarchists), the leaders of movements of political reform have rarely, if ever, organized outbursts of violence; such violence, when it occurred, has been the spontaneous and unpremeditated act of a mob.
58
Revue de l'Ecole d'Anthropologie, February, 1909, p. 50.
59
O. Schrader, Reallexicon, Art. "Keuschheit." He considers that Tacitus merely shows that German women were usually chaste after marriage. A few centuries later, Lea points out, Salvianus, while praising the barbarians generally for their chastity, makes an exception in the case of the Alemanni. (See also Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," pp. 382-4.)
60
Thus Kaan, anticipating Krafft-Ebing, published a Psychopathia Sexualis, in 1844, and Casper, in 1852, was the first medical authority to point out that sexual inversion is sometimes due to a congenital psychic condition.
61
Both Forel's and Bloch's books have become well known through translations in England and America. Dr. Bloch is also the author of an extremely erudite and thorough history of syphilis, which has gone far to demonstrate that this disease was introduced into Europe from America on the first discovery of the New World at the end of the fifteenth century.
62
This attitude is plainly reflected even in many books written by men; I may mention, for instance, Frenssen's well-known novel Hilligenlei (Holyland).
63
In most countries illegitimacy is decreasing; in Germany it is steadily increasing, alike in rural and urban districts. Illegitimate births are, however, more numerous in the cities than in the country. Of the constituent states of the German Empire, the illegitimate birth-rate is lowest in Prussia, highest in Saxony and Bavaria. In Munich 27 per cent of the births are illegitimate. (The facts are clearly brought out in an article by Dr. Arthur Grünspan in the Berliner Tagblatt for January 6, 1911, reproduced in Die Neue Generation, July, 1911.) Thus, in Prussia, while the total births between 1903 and 1908, notwithstanding a great increase in the population, have only increased 2.6 per cent, the illegitimate births have increased as much as 11.1 per cent. The increase is marked in nearly all the German States. It is specially marked in Saxony; here the proportion of illegitimate births to the total number of births was, in 1903, 12.51 per cent, and in 1908 it had already risen to 14.40 per cent. In Berlin it is most marked; here it began in 1891, when there were nearly 47,000 legitimate births; by 1909, however, the legitimate births had fallen to 38,000, a decrease of 19.4 per cent. But illegitimate births rose during the same period from nearly 7000 to over 9000, an increase of 35 per cent. The proportion of illegitimate births to the total births is now over 20 per cent, so that to every four legitimate children there is rather more than one illegitimate child. It may be said that this is merely due to an increasing proportion of unmarried women. That, however, is not the case. The marriage-rate is on the whole rising, and the average age of women at marriage is becoming lower rather than higher. Grünspan considers that this increase in illegitimacy is likely to continue, and he is inclined to attribute it less to economic than to social-psychological causes.
64
I have discussed this point in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," chap. xii.
65
It is remarkable that in early times in Spain the laws recognized concubinage (barragania) as almost equal to marriage, and as conferring equal rights on the child, even on the sons of the clergy, who could thus inherit from their fathers by right of the privileges accorded to the concubine or barragana. Barragania, however, was not real marriage, and in many regions it could be contracted by married men (R. Altamira, Historia de España y de
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