ideal.

Therefore, instead of proposing to abolish monogamy or that great
principle of common parental care of children, the support of motherhood
by fatherhood, which is perfectly expressed in monogamy alone, let us
seek rather, in the interests of the future--which will mean proximately
in the interests of woman, the great organ of the future--to make the
conditions of marriage such that it best serves the highest interests.
We need not cavil at those who look upon marriage as a symbol of the
union between Christ and His Church, but we must look upon it also as a
human institution which exists to serve mankind and must be treated
accordingly. We are quite prepared to accept in its place any other
institution which will serve mankind better, and we adhere to monogamy
only because such an alternative cannot be named.

We are to regard any disproportion in the number of the sexes as
inimical to monogamy. We know that in the past, when there has been a
great excess of women, as owing to chronic militarism, polygamy has been
the natural consequence; and we must recognize that such an excess of
women at the present day is a predisposing cause, if not of polygamy, of
something immeasurably worse. The causes of that excess of women have
therefore been examined in some degree, and our duty of opposing them is
laid down as a fundamental political proposition.

We then discussed and criticized a second argument for polygamy, based
upon the assumption that a man requires more from women than one woman
can afford him. The answer to that argument is that many women exist who
meet all their husbands' needs and satisfy all their instincts, and that
for this end the intensive education of woman's intellect is not a
necessary condition. It may be added that if the race is to rise, the
highest type of women as well as the highest type of men must be its
parents, the mothers being exactly as important as the fathers on the
score of heredity. Any attempt, therefore, to split up womanhood, so
that the lower types shall become the mothers, and the higher the
companions of men, is a directly dysgenic proposal, opposing the great
eugenic principle that the best of both sexes must be the parents of the
future.

When we find, therefore, that marriage under present conditions does
not satisfy many of the highest kinds of women, we must ask whether
their dissatisfaction is warranted, and if, as we do, we find it based
upon the fact that the