ard
and upward. It will by its courage and its honesty give to the world a
truer and a nobler moral standard than the world has ever accepted yet.

II

A SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF THE UNMARRIED

Jesus said, "the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air
have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head."
(St. Luke ix. 58.)

In the last chapter I tried to deal with the actual problem created in
this country by the disproportion of the sexes--the fact that there are,
roughly, one and three-quarters to two million more women than men in this
country; and I was obliged to confine myself simply to stating the problem,
which, to my mind, is very greatly intensified by the fact, generally
ignored, that the sex needs of a woman are just as imperative, their
suppression just as hard to bear, as a man's; that woman is fully as human
as man, and that parenthood and loverhood and all that the satisfaction of
the sex instinct means to him, it means also to her. I do not affirm that
the difficulty of self-control or the suffering of abstinence presents
itself to men and women in just the same way; I am sure it does not. I do
not under-estimate the difference. But I do emphasize the fact that, as far
as I am able to judge, the suffering is _equal_, although it is different
in character. Therefore, the denial of marriage to a very large number
of women means that, although some women, like some men, are naturally
celibate, when so great a number of women are denied the possibility of
marriage, we must take it for granted that among them the average will not
be natural celibates, but women who suffer a very great loss if they do not
marry.

Now I want to add that this disproportion of the sexes is quite artificial,
and, therefore, should be temporary. From some of the letters I have
received I gather that people imagine that there has always been a very
much larger number of women than men, and not only in this country, but
throughout the world; and that, therefore, we ought to shape our customs
and our moral standards with this disproportion in mind as a permanent
fact. I want to point out that this is not the case. The causes of the
present excess of women over men in this country are quite artificial. As a
matter of fact, there are more boys born in this country than girls--about
107 to 100 is the ratio--but the boys die in very much larger numbers
during the first twelve months of their li