The most revolutionary invention of the XIX century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.
Any marriage system which condemns a majority of the population to celibacy will be violently wrecked on the pretext that it outrages morality.
Polygamy, when tried under modern democratic conditions, as by the Mormons, is wrecked by the revolt of the mass of inferior men who are condemned to celibacy by it; for the maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first rate man to the exclusive possession of a third rate one. Polyandry has not been tried under these conditions.
The minimum of national celibacy (ascertained by dividing the number of males in the community by the number of females, and taking the quotient as the number of wives or husbands permitted to each person) is secured in England (where the quotient is 1) by the institution of monogamy.
The modern sentimental term for the national minimum of celibacy is
Purity.
Marriage, or any other form of promiscuous amoristic monogamy, is fatal to large States because it puts its ban on the deliberate breeding of man as a political animal.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
All scoundrelism is summed up in the phrase "Que Messieurs les Assassins commencent!"
The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.
Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.