coming on, Sexual-Probleme, April, 1908, p. 217.) It is significant that this condition of things in Jamaica, as elsewhere, is associated with the superiority of women.  “The women of the peasant class,” remarks Livingstone (p. 212), “are still practically independent of the men, and are frequently their superiors, both in physical and mental capacity.”  They refuse to bind themselves to a man who may turn out to be good for nothing, a burden instead of a help and protection.  So long as the unions are free they are likely to be permanent.  If made legal, the risk is that they will become intolerable, and cease by one of the parties leaving the other.  “The necessity for mutual kindness and forbearance establishes a condition that is the best guarantee of permanency” (p. 214).  It is said, however, that under the influence of religious and social pressure the people are becoming more anxious to adopt “respectable” ideas of sexual relationships, though it seems evident, in view of Livingstone’s statement, that such respectability is likely to involve a decrease of real morality.  Livingstone points out, however, one serious defect in the present conditions which makes it easy for immoral men to escape paternal responsibilities, and this is the absence of legal provision for the registration of the father’s name on birth certificates (p. 256).  In every country where the majority of births are illegitimate it is an obvious social necessity that the names of both parents should be duly registered on all birth certificates.  It has been an unpardonable failure on the part of the Jamaican Government to neglect the simple measure needed to give “each child born in the country a legal father” (p. 258).

We thus see that we have to-day reached a position in which—­partly owing to economic causes and partly to causes which are more deeply rooted in the tendencies involved by civilization—­women are more often detached than of old from legal sexual relationship with men and both sexes are less inclined than in earlier stages of civilization to sacrifice their own independence even when they form such relationships.  “I never heard of a woman over sixteen years of age who, prior to the breakdown of aboriginal customs after the coming of the whites, had not a husband,” wrote Curr of the Australian Blacks.[271] Even as regards some parts of Europe, it is still possible to-day to make almost the same statement.  But in all the richer, more energetic, and progressive countries very different conditions prevail.  Marriage is late and a certain proportion of men, and a still larger proportion of women (who exceed the men in the general population) never marry at all.[272]

Before we consider the fateful significance of this fact of the growing proportion of adult unmarried women whose sexual relationships are unrecognized by the state and largely unrecognized altogether, it may be well to glance summarily at the two historical streams of tendency, both still in action among us, which affect the status of women, the one favoring the social equality of the sexes, the other favoring the social subjection of women.  It is not difficult to trace these two streams both in conduct and opinion, in practical morality and in theoretical morality.