h degree of
sagacity but also a touch of the daring and the devilish. A man is often
almost as much pleased and flattered by his own marriage as he would be
by the achievement of what is currently called a seduction. In the one
case, as in the other, his emotion is one of triumph. The substitution
of pure chance would take away that soothing unction.

The present system, to be sure, also involves chance. Every man realizes
it, and even the most bombastic bachelor has moments in which he humbly
whispers: "There, but for the grace of God, go I." But that chance has
a sugarcoating; it is swathed in egoistic illusion; it shows less stark
and intolerable chanciness, so to speak, than the bald hazard of the
die. Thus men prefer it, and shrink from the other. In the same way, I
have no doubt, the majority of foxes would object to choosing lots to
determine the victim of a projected fox-hunt. They prefer to take their
chances with the dogs.

23. Extra-Legal Devices

It is, of course, a rhetorical exaggeration to say that all first-class
men escape marriage, and even more of an exaggeration to say that their
high qualities go wholly untransmitted to posterity. On the one hand it
must be obvious that an appreciable number of them, perhaps by reason
of their very detachment and preoccupation, are intrigued into the holy
estate, and that not a few of them enter it deliberately, convinced that
it is the safest form of liaison possible under Christianity. And on
the other hand one must not forget the biological fact that it is quite
feasible to achieve offspring without the imprimatur of Church and
State. The thing, indeed, is so commonplace that I need not risk a
scandal by uncovering it in detail. What I allude to, I need not add,
is not that form of irregularity which curses innocent children with the
stigma of illegitimacy, but that more refined and thoughtful form
which safeguards their social dignity while protecting them against
inheritance from their legal fathers. English philosophy, as I have
shown, suffers by the fact that Herbert Spencer was too busy to permit
himself any such romantic altruism--just as American literature gains
enormously by the fact that Walt Whitman adventured, leaving seven sons
behind him, three of whom are now well-known American poets and in the
forefront of the New Poetry movement.

The extent of this correction of a salient evil of monogamy is very
considerable; its operations e