or disposing of, for monetary considerations, a sexual commodity.  Marriage is, indeed, not merely a more fashionable form of prostitution, it is a form sanctified by law and religion, and the question of morality is not allowed to intrude.  Morality may be outraged with impunity provided that law and religion have been invoked.  The essential principle of prostitution is thus legalized and sanctified among us.  That is why it is so difficult to arouse any serious indignation, or to maintain any reasoned objections, against our prostitution considered by itself.  The most plausible ground is that of those[257] who, bringing marriage down to the level of prostitution, maintain that the prostitute is a “blackleg” who is accepting less than the “market rate of wages,” i.e., marriage, for the sexual services she renders.  But even this low ground is quite unsafe.  The prostitute is really paid extremely well considering how little she gives in return; the wife is really paid extremely badly considering how much she often gives, and how much she necessarily gives up.  For the sake of the advantage of economic dependence on her husband, she must give up, as Ellen Key observes, those rights over her children, her property, her work, and her own person which she enjoys as an unmarried woman, even, it may be added, as a prostitute.  The prostitute never signs away the right over her own person, as the wife is compelled to do; the prostitute, unlike the wife, retains her freedom and her personal rights, although these may not often be of much worth.  It is the wife rather than the prostitute who is the “blackleg.”

It is by no means only during recent years that our marriage system has been arraigned before the bar of morals.  Forty years ago James Hinton exhausted the vocabulary of denunciation in describing the immorality and selfish licentiousness which our marriage system covers with the cloak of legality and sanctity.  “There is an unsoundness in our marriage relations,” Hinton wrote.  “Not only practically are they dreadful, but they do not answer to feelings and convictions far too widespread to be wisely ignored.  Take the case of women of marked eminence consenting to be a married man’s mistress; of pure and simple girls saying they cannot see why they should have a marriage by law; of a lady saying that if she were in love she would not have any legal tie; of its being necessary—­or thought so by good and wise men—­to keep one sex in bitter and often fatal ignorance.  These things (and how many more) show some deep unsoundness in the marriage relations.  This must be probed and searched to the bottom.”

At an earlier date, in 1847, Gross-Hoffinger, in his Die Schicksale der Frauen und die Prostitution—­a remarkable book which Bloch, with little exaggeration, describes as possessing an epoch-marking significance—­vigorously showed that the problem of prostitution is in reality the problem of marriage, and that we can