Let us consider the effects of these two deviations of instinct.
Oriental polygamy renders human beings profoundly unequal, transforms women into cattle, mutilates thousands of men to guard the harems, depraves the possessor of women by despotism and cruelty, concentrates all his vitality upon a single instinct at the expense of intellect, reason and activity; whence it follows that he is lost to science, art, industry, society according to right: that he submits without repugnance to despotism, and passively extends his neck to the halter. There, no influence is wielded by woman, who is subjected to designed enervation, who is depraved in as hideous a manner as the eunuch, her keeper. Thus, inequality in love and in right, abandonment of art, science and industry, intellectual and physical enervation, debasement of the moral sense—such are vices inherent to the polygamy of the East. You see that this is far from the ideal of our destinies.
In our West, polygamy de facto produces the cattle of the brothel, legions of courtesans who ruin families. As many of these women are diseased, they infect those who associate with them with fearful maladies which undermine their constitutions, and thus pave the way for puny offspring, consequently, for weak minds and feeble intellects. I appeal for proof to the conscription; never were so many exemptions seen as now on account of under size, although the standard has been lowered, never were so many exemptions seen as now for constitutional imperfections and acquired disease.
To vitiate the generation in its germ is not the only crime of our polygamy; it enervates those who practice it, for nothing leads to excess, consequently to enervation, so much as the change of relations. On the other hand, our polygamists become transformed into machines of sensation; then intellect grows weak; they become stupid and selfish. Look at the pitiable young men of the present time, emaciated by their vices and by those of their sires; scoffers, faithless, jesting at the most sacred things, despising, not only the corrupt women, their worthy companions, but also the whole sex to which their mothers belong; look at them; so gross as to sicken the observer, nothing longer commands their respect; they thrust aside gray haired women from the sidewalk into the gutter; they are impertinent to old men; they put young girls to the blush with their cynical speeches; polygamy has rendered them ignoble, and has destroyed our native urbanity as well as all dignity.
They will tell you that women are but little better than they. But this result becomes inevitable in a country in which women are not kept in seclusion. Polyandria becomes the necessary companion of polygamy; for since men consider themselves at liberty to have more than one woman, why should women consider themselves forbidden to have more than one man?
Finally, my son, the results of irrepressible love, Polygamy and Polyandria in our Western country are:
The seduction and corruption of women;
Adultery, debasement of character; the moral and intellectual enfeebling of both sexes;
The enervation and degeneracy of the race;
Falsehood, deceit, cruelty, injustice of every kind, the use of woman by man for her beauty, that of man by woman for his money or position;