The adulteration of type which may thus repulsively mar the offspring of women twice-mated is seen, at first hand, in that adulteration of personality which results from sex-promiscuity. Not only is the individuality both of mind and character obliterated, but the individuality both of form and feature is obliterated too. The features of persons of irregular life become blurred and more or less mongrel; character and expression so degenerating as to produce eventually that which has been styled a "composite face"—the face resulting when a number of portraits of different persons are printed one over another on the same photographic plate.
The degree to which in the sex-union—howsoever lightly entered on—they twain become intrinsically and remain irrevocably one, in the vital records of individualism and character, is wholly unsuspected. But in this—which is a complex phenomenon of Hypnosis—indelible undying images, such as are impressed upon the Subconscious mind in every other form of Hypnosis, remain impressed thereon; to inspire and fructify, or to weaken and vitiate nature and faculty.
That vigilant supervision of her young daughters for which the early Victorian mother is now decried, secured a purity of racial type, in fine physique and constitution, in notable talent and enterprise, in rare womanly beauty and virile handsomeness, which proves the unique potentialities inherent in our Anglo-Saxon stock. No merely material service a woman can render to the State approaches in value the all-potent one of safeguarding the virtue of its young daughters.
Each sex has its own morale to sustain. And personal virtue is woman's. The desire for equal liberty in this respect is added proof of the ascendancy, in modern women, of Male over their own natural Woman-traits. It springs not from an intensification of passion, but, on the contrary, from a waning of that power to love which holds a woman true to one mate.
Last and most cogent of reasons: In view of those long centuries of suffering and aspiration, by way of which the evolution of the Woman-traits of love and purity has been achieved in blood and tears—albeit the monogamous ideal is far yet from attainment—beyond all else, the sex should strive toward this, both personally and socially.
It is the soul of Love and Life, the impulse of Human advance. With decline of this ideal, the emotions cease to centre in the Home and Family, and civilisation relapses to barbarism.
IV
Ellen Key, in Love and Marriage, observes: "Few propositions are so lacking in proof as that monogamy is the form of sexual life which is indispensable to the vitality and culture of nations." And further: "all the progress that is ascribed to Christian civilisation has taken place while monogamy was indeed the law, but polygamy the custom."