For this end to be attained, however, the male—the husband—must be a creature of overwhelming masculinity, against whom no masculine elements belonging to any female could possibly measure themselves without the certainty of absolute rout.[64]
In the same way it might be pointed out that the womanly man finds his happiest and best adaptation with the female—the wife—of overwhelming femininity; for then his female elements finding it impossible to measure themselves against those of his spouse, quickly become recessive and cease to give any further trouble.
But what actually happens to-day?
Our great past as a virile race has certainly left us an inheritance of thousands of virile women, some of whom excel anything that any other European country can produce; but alas! owing to the degeneracy of man, caused by his bad health, his Puritanism, his bemeaning occupations, and his absurd obsessions about chivalry, there are not the males to hand with whom to mate these women.
When one of these women marries nowadays she must perforce unite with a man who is utterly incapable of making her male elements recessive; who, on the contrary, is himself so exiguously endowed with masculinity that his wife not only has every temptation, but also every opportunity, to express, assert, and impose her masculine elements upon the family and himself.
But the continuous expression and assertion of male elements in a woman, and of female elements in a man, at the cost of those elements proper to their primary sexual organs, far from leading to happiness, result in nothing but misery both mental and physical, while the ultimate effect on the nerves is always disastrous.
If, however, there is nothing in her immediate environment to make her despise her male elements, or to convince her that they can safely lie quiescent, a woman’s very self-preservative instinct will not allow her to abandon them to the process of recession, and the consequence is that in thousands of marriages at the present day the wives are utterly and deeply miserable on this account alone. Masculine men are lacking. The great past of the race has produced generation after generation of fine, stout-hearted women with a large percentage of virile elements. But the mates for these remaining memorials of our whilom greatness are no more, and thus these unfortunate women either wander the world unmated, or if mated, suffer an ill-adaptation that is sometimes even more cruel than spinsterhood itself.
To point to these wretched, unadapted virile women—whether married or unmarried—as the legitimate butts for our scorn or our contempt, however, is the acme of ignorance and stupidity. It is the degeneration of man, the low ebb of his former greatness, that has left them standing high and dry in conspicuous isolation; and if England’s “trousered women” now strike the foreigner as one of the regrettable features of our civilization, it is regrettable only in the sense that it proves positively that this country once enjoyed a racial greatness of which she can no longer boast, and of which these women are the belated reminder.
(H) But the chief and most serious objection to the monogamic marriage, apart from all the pain that it brings to individuals, male and female, consists in the injury which, particularly at the present day, it does to the offspring of each generation. From the standpoint of posterity, indeed, the gravity of this charge can hardly be exaggerated.
It may seem a far cry to speak of the increase of indigestion and of bad or defective teeth in connexion with the monogamic marriage, but in practice this connexion is not so remote as it would appear.