ch
investment of time and money, and service of one kind or another,
actuates the female also although the rights of the woman in the male
are not so generally defended and she seldom resorts to such violent
methods of defense or of revenge for loss of her property. Perhaps she
has a keener sense of values. Necessity has substituted "support" for
"outraged honor," and modern woman avenges the loss of her possessions
through the safer channels of the law-courts.

The feeling of possession, so ingrained in human nature, and so much a
part of our modern marriage relation, is not grounded upon a moral
code, which has for its basic principle fidelity to one's partner.
This is proven by the fact that men have for some time abrogated to
themselves the right of promiscuity, the main clause of their defense
being that their conduct does not deprive their wife and family of
satisfactory maintenance. Many a woman today, irreproachably
respectable and church-going, will admit to herself if not to her
neighbors, that she closes her eyes to her husband's laxity in sexual
matters, "as long as he provides well for me."

When we come, as we will later, to a consideration of what constitutes
morality, we will see that, like all our evolving ideals, it is
governed by immediate conditions, both individual and social.

It is easy to see why polygamy has been practiced, as a necessary
expedient, and why women have been held so cheaply, when we realize
the centuries of devastating wars, both of conquest and of defense,
which besmirch the path of Evolution.

Thus the tendency to aesthetic selection, always more pronounced in
the female than in the male, has been swallowed up in the false
valuation put upon the male, because of his relative scarcity.

In America, in the early sixties, fear of the epithet "old maid" drove
many a woman to marriage with a man whom, personally, she did not
like, but as he represented a more or less "rara avis" and as her
claim to attractiveness rested upon her success in trapping this rare
bird, she permitted herself to become a victim of conditions; and we
may safely conclude that no higher motive actuated the average woman
of the last century than that of submission to conditions, for the
"virtues of fidelity and devotion to the home and fireside" which
critics of present-day morals are fond of reminding us characterized
our grandmothers.

Briefly, then, we may review the history of marriage and of mating,