er looks and actions express the outflowing of some or
all of the human virtues. To know her is to love her. She became thus
perfect, not in a day or a year, but by a long series of appropriate
efforts. Then by what? Chiefly in and by love, which is specifically
adapted thus to develope this maturity." But all this occurs only when
there is a normal exercise of the sexual propensities. Excessive
indulgence in marital pleasures deadens all the higher faculties, love
included, and results in an utter prostration of the bodily powers. The
Creator has endowed man and woman with passions, the suppression of
which leads to pain, their gratification to pleasure, their satiety to
disgust. Excessive marital indulgence produces abnormal conditions of
the generative organs and not unfrequently leads to incurable disease.
Many cases of uterine disease are traceable to this cause.
MORALLY AND INTELLECTUALLY. In no country where the polygamous system
prevails do we find a code of political and social ethics which
recognizes the rights and claims of the individual. The condition of
woman is that of the basest slave, a slave to the caprice and tyranny of
her master. Communism raises her from the slough of slavery, but
subjects her to the level of prostitution. An inevitable sequence of
polygamy is a decline of literature and science. The natural tendency of
each system is to _sensualism._, The blood is diverted from its normal
channels and the result is a condition which may be appropriately termed
_mental starvation_. Sensualism is in its very nature directly opposed
to literary attainments or advancement. Happily there is a golden mean,
an equalization of those elements which constitutes the acme of
individual enjoyment.
THE WELFARE OF SOCIETY.
The general law of ethics, that "whatever is beneficial to the
individual, contributed to the highest good of society and _vice
versa_," applies with equal force to the hygienic conditions of
marriage. Each family, like the ancient Roman household, is the
prototype of the natural government under which it lives. Wherever the
marriage relation is regarded as sacred, there you will find men of pure
hearts and noble lives. Of all foreign nations the Germans are
celebrated for their sacred regard of woman, and the duties of marriage,
and all scholars from the age of Tacitus to the present day, have
concurred in attributing the elevation of woman to the pure-minded
Teutons. In America, th
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