al worth of women, taking society as a whole, to be in proportion
to the self-control of their male companions. Nobody doubts that man is
instinctively polygamous. But the dignity and self-respect, and
consequently the whole moral cultivation of women, depends on the
suppression of this vagrant instinct. And there is no more important
chapter in the history of civilisation than the record of the steps by
which its violence has been gradually reduced.

[7] See Nordhoff's _Communistic Societies of the United States_
(London: Murray, 1875), pp. 259-293. This grave and most instructive
book shows how modifiable are some of those facts of existing human
character which are vulgarly deemed to be ultimate and ineradicable.

There is another side, we admit. The home, of which sentimental
philosophers love to talk, is too often a ghastly failure. The conjugal
union, so tender and elevating in its ideal, is in more cases than we
usually care to recognise, the cruellest of bonds to the woman, the most
harassing, deadening, spirit-breaking of all possible influences to the
man. The purity of the family, so lovely and dear as it is, has still
only been secured hitherto by retaining a vast and dolorous host of
female outcasts. When Catholicism is praised for the additions which it
has made to the dignity of womanhood and the family, we have to set
against that gain the frightful growth of this caste of poor creatures,
upon whose heads, as upon the scapegoat of the Hebrew ordinance, we put
all the iniquities of the children of the house, and all their
transgressions in all their sins, and then banish them with maledictions
into the foul outer wilderness and the land not inhabited.

On this side there is much wholesome truth to be told, in the midst of
the complacent social cant with which we are flooded. But Diderot does
not help us. Nothing can possibly be gained by reducing the attraction
of the sexes to its purely physical elements, and stripping it of all
the moral associations which have gradually clustered round it, and
acquired such force as in many cases among the highest types of mankind
to reduce the physical factor to a secondary place. Such a return to the
nakedness of the brute must be retrograde. And Diderot, as it happened,
was the writer who, before all others, habitually exalted the delightful
and consolatory sentiment of the family. Nobody felt more strongly the
worth of domestic ties, when faithfull