by three months’ imprisonment inflicted on both parties.  By the same Act the adultery of a wife (nothing is said of a husband) was made felony, both for her and her partner in guilt, and therefore punishable by death (Scobell, Acts and Ordinances, p. 121).

The action of a pseudo-morality, such as our sexual morality has been, is double-edged.  On the one side it induces a secret and shamefaced laxity, on the other it upholds a rigid and uninspiring theoretical code which so few can consistently follow that theoretical morality is thereby degraded into a more or less empty form.  “The human race would gain much,” said the wise Senancour, “if virtue were made less laborious.  The merit would not be so great, but what is the use of an elevation which can rarely be sustained?"[268] At present, as a more recent moralist, Ellen Key, puts it, we only have an immorality which favors vice and makes virtue irrealizable, and, as she exclaims with pardonable extravagance, to preach a sounder morality to the young, without at the same time condemning the society which encourages the prevailing immorality, is “worse than folly, it is crime.”

It is on the lines along which Senancour a century ago and Ellen Key to-day are great pioneers that the new forms of anterior or ideal theoretical morality are now moving, in advance, according to the general tendency in morals, of traditional morality and even of practice.

There is one great modern movement of a definite kind which will serve to show how clearly sexual morality is to-day moving towards a new standpoint.  This is the changing attitude of the bulk of the community towards both State marriage and religious marriage, and the growing tendency to disallow State interference with sexual relationships, apart from the production of children.

There has no doubt always been a tendency among the masses of the population in Europe to dispense with the official sanction of sexual relationships until such relationships have been well established and the hope of offspring has become justifiable.  This tendency has been crystallized into recognized customs among numberless rural communities little touched either by the disturbing influences of the outside world or the controlling influences of theological Christian conceptions.  But at the present day this tendency is not confined to the more primitive and isolated communities of Europe among whom, on the contrary, it has tended to die out.  It is an unquestionable fact, says Professor Bruno Meyer, that far more than the half of sexual intercourse now takes place outside legal marriage.[269] It is among the intelligent classes and in prosperous and progressive communities that this movement is chiefly marked.  We see throughout the world the practical common sense of the people shaping itself in the direction which has been pioneered by the ideal moralists who invariably precede the new growth of practical morality.