But despite the facts you bring to bear on your argument, that polygamy leads to more morality in the homes of the land than our present conditions illustrate, I must disagree with you.
I am opposed to polygamy. Any social arrangement which licenses men to possess several women, to give full rein to their desires, is a block to the wheels of progress.
Not until man learns the lesson of self-control, as woman has learned it, will humanity reach its highest development.
Not until man ceases to place himself on a par with the unreasoning male animal, when he argues on the subject of the sexual relations, will he become the master of circumstance he is meant to be.
One man and one woman living sexually true to each other is the ideal domestic life. Better strive toward that ideal, and fail and strive again, than to lower it and accept license and self-indulgence as the standard, under some religious name.
Polyandry and polygamy are both evidences of a crude and half-evolved humanity.
They belong to a society which has not learned the law of self-control as a part of its religious creed and the march of progress. The light of science makes havoc of all such primitive conditions.
You tell me that your father was the husband of three wives, and that all lived under one roof in sisterly love, and that you never heard an unkind word spoken in your home, and that all three wives loved you as a son. You tell me your father held high ideals of womankind, and that the existence of a fallen woman was impossible in your community.
Now I contend that any woman who accepts less than the full loyalty of the man to whom she gives herself for life has fallen from woman's highest estate. She lowers not only herself, but the whole sex.
To take a third of a man's love, and to share his physical and mental and spiritual comradeship with two other wives, is far more immoral, to my thinking, than to take the whole of a man without legal authority.