based on the needs of women as the mothers of the race, has, in a somewhat similar spirit, denounced alike prostitution and rigid marriage, declaring (in her Essays on Love and Marriage) that “the development of erotic personal consciousness is as much hindered by socially regulated ‘morality’ as by socially regulated ‘immorality,’” and that “the two lowest and socially sanctioned expressions of sexual dualism, rigid marriage and prostitution, will gradually become impossible, because with the conquest of the idea of erotic unity they will no longer correspond to human needs.”

We may sum up the present situation as regards prostitution by saying that on the one hand there is a tendency for its elevation, in association with the growing humanity and refinement of civilization, characteristics which must inevitably tend to mark more and more both those women who become prostitutes and those men who seek them; on the other hand, but perhaps through the same dynamic force, there is a tendency towards the slow elimination of prostitution by the successful competition of higher and purer methods of sexual relationship freed from pecuniary considerations.  This refinement and humanization, this competition by better forms of sexual love, are indeed an essential part of progress as civilization becomes more truly sound, wholesome, and sincere.

This moral change cannot, it seems probable, fail to be accompanied by the realization that the facts of human life are more important than the forms.  For all changes from lower to higher social forms, from savagery to civilization, are accompanied—­in so far as they are vital changes—­by a slow and painful groping towards the truth that it is only in natural relations that sanity and sanctity can be found, for, as Nietzsche said, the “return” to Nature should rather be called the “ascent.”  Only so can we achieve the final elimination from our hearts of that clinging tradition that there is any impurity or dishonor in acts of love for which the reasonable, and not merely the conventional, conditions have been fulfilled.  For it is vain to attempt to cleanse our laws, or even our by-laws, until we have first cleansed our hearts.

It would be out of place here to push further the statement of the moral question as it is to-day beginning to shape itself in the sphere of sex.  In a psychological discussion we are only concerned to set down the actual attitude of the moralist, and of civilization.  The practical outcome of that attitude must be left to moralists and sociologists and the community generally to work out.