The advantage for women of free sexual unions over compulsory marriage is well recognized in the case of the working classes of London, among whom sexual relationships before marriage are not unusual, and are indulgently regarded.  It is, for instance, clearly asserted in the monumental work of C. Booth, Life and Labour of the People.  “It is even said of rough laborers,” we read, for instance, in the final volume of this work (p. 41), “that they behave best if not married to the woman with whom they live.”  The evidence on this point is often the more impressive because brought forward by people who are very far indeed from being anxious to base any general conclusions on it.  Thus in the same volume a clergyman is quoted as saying:  “These people manage to live together fairly peaceably so long as they are not married, but if they marry it always seems to lead to blows and rows.”

It may be said that in such a case we witness not so much the operation of a natural law as the influences of a great centre of civilization exerting its moralizing effects even on those who stand outside the legally recognized institution of marriage.  That contention may, however, be thrust aside.  We find exactly the same tendency in Jamaica where the population is largely colored, and the stress of a high civilization can scarcely be said to exist.  Legal marriage is here discarded to an even greater extent than in London, for little care is taken to legitimate children by marriage.  It was found by a committee appointed to inquire into the marriage laws of Jamaica, that three out of every five births are illegitimate, that is to say that legal illegitimacy has ceased to be immoral, having become the recognized custom of the majority of the inhabitants.  There is no social feeling against illegitimacy.  The men approve of the decay of legal marriage, because they say the women work better in the house when they are not married; the women approve of it, because they say that men are more faithful when not bound by legal marriage.  This has been well brought out by W.P.  Livingstone in his interesting book, Black Jamaica (1899).  The people recognize, he tells us (p. 210), that “faithful living together constitutes marriage;” they say that they are “married but not parsoned.”  One reason against legal marriage is that they are disinclined to incur the expense of the official sanction.  (In Venezuela, it may be added, where also the majority of births take place outside official marriage, the chief reason is stated to be, not moral laxity, but the same disinclination to pay the expenses of legal weddings.) Frequently in later life, sometimes when they have grown up sons and daughters, couples go through the official ceremony. (In Abyssinia, also, it is stated by Hugues Le Roux, where the people are Christian and marriage is indissoluble and the ceremony expensive, it is not usual for married couples to make their unions legal until old age is