only reform away prostitution by reforming marriage, regarded as a compulsory institution resting on an antiquated economic basis.  Gross-Hoffinger was a pioneering precursor of Ellen Key.

More than a century and a half earlier a man of very different type scathingly analyzed the morality of his time, with a brutal frankness, indeed, that seemed to his contemporaries a revoltingly cynical attitude towards their sacred institutions, and they felt that nothing was left to them save to burn his books.  Describing modern marriage in his Fable of the Bees (1714, p. 64), and what that marriage might legally cover, Mandeville wrote:  “The fine gentleman I spoke of need not practice any greater self-denial than the savage, and the latter acted more according to the laws of nature and sincerity than the first.  The man that gratifies his appetite after the manner the custom of the country allows of, has no censure to fear.  If he is hotter than goats or bulls, as soon as the ceremony is over, let him sate and fatigue himself with joy and ecstasies of pleasure, raise and indulge his appetite by turns, as extravagantly as his strength and manhood will give him leave.  He may, with safety, laugh at the wise men that should reprove him:  all the women and above nine in ten of the men are of his side; nay, he has the liberty of valuing himself upon the fury of his unbridled passions, and the more he wallows in lust and strains every faculty to be abandonedly voluptuous, the sooner he shall have the good-will and gain the affection of the women, not the young, vain, and lascivious only, but the prudent, grave, and most sober matrons.”

Thus the charge brought against our marriage system from the point of view of morality is that it subordinates the sexual relationship to considerations of money and of lust.  That is precisely the essence of prostitution.

The only legitimately moral end of marriage—­whether we regard it from the wider biological standpoint or from the narrower standpoint of human society—­is as a sexual selection, effected in accordance with the laws of sexual selection, and having as its direct object a united life of complete mutual love and as its indirect object the procreation of the race.  Unless procreation forms part of the object of marriage, society has nothing whatever to do with it and has no right to make its voice heard.  But if procreation is one of the ends of marriage, then it is imperative from the biological and social points of view that no influences outside the proper natural influence of sexual selection should be permitted to affect the choice of conjugal partners, for in so far as wholesome sexual selection is interfered with the offspring is likely to be injured and the interests of the race affected.