the loathsome disease which in the fifteenth century began to
sweep away millions of licentious men, and led to the survival of the
fittest from the moral point of view. The masculine standard is still
low, but immense progress has been made during the last hundred years.
The number of prostitutes in Europe is still estimated at seven
hundred thousand, yet that makes only seven to every thousand females,
and though there are many other unchaste women, it is safe to say that
in England and America, at any rate, more than nine hundred out of
every thousand females are chaste, whereas among savages, as a rule,
nearly all females are prostitutes (in the moral sense of the word),
before they marry. In view of this astounding progress there is no
reason to despair regarding man's future. It would be a great triumph
of civilization if the average man could be made as pure as the
average woman. At the same time, since the consequences of sin are
infinitely more serious in women, it is eminently proper that they
should be in the van of moral progress.

Chastity, modesty, polygamy, murder, religion, and nature have now
furnished us an abundance of illustrations showing the changeableness
and former non-existence of sentiments which in us are so strong that
we are inclined to fancy they must have been the same always and
everywhere. Before proceeding to prove that romantic love is another
sentiment of which the same may be said, let us pause a moment to
discuss a sentiment which presents one of the most difficult problems
in the psychology of love, the Horror of Incest.

HORROR OF INCEST

A young man does not fall in love with his sister though she be the
most attractive girl he knows. Nor does her father fall in love with
her, nor the mother with the son, or the son with the mother. Not only
is there no sexual love between them, but the very idea of marriage
fills their mind with unutterable horror, and in the occasional cases
where such a marriage is made through ignorance of the relationship,
both parties usually commit suicide, though they are guiltless of
deliberate crime. Here we have the most striking and absolute proof
that circumstances, habits, ideas, laws, customs, can and do utterly
annihilate sexual love in millions of individuals. Why then should it
be so unlikely that the laws and customs of the ancient Greeks, for
instance, with their ideas about women and marriage, should have
prevented the growth of sentimen