female chastity was guarded by the club; a faithless wife, an unmarried mother, was summarily put to death.  Christianity has abolished club-law, and purely moral restraints, or the terror of the penalties of the next world, do not, to the limited imagination of the Fijian, quite take its place.  So the standard of Fijian chastity is distressingly low.”

It must always be remembered that when the highly organized primitive system of mixed spiritual and physical restraints is removed, chastity becomes more delicately and unstably poised.  The controlling power of personal responsibility, valuable and essential as it is, cannot permanently and unremittingly restrain the volcanic forces of the passion of love even in high civilizations.  “No perfection of moral constitution in a woman,” Hinlon has well said, “no power of will, no wish and resolution to be ‘good,’ no force of religion or control of custom, can secure what is called the virtue of woman.  The emotion of absolute devotion with which some man may inspire her will sweep them all away.  Society, in choosing to erect itself on that basis, chooses inevitable disorder, and so long as it continues to choose it will continue to have that result.”

It is necessary to insist for a while on this personal responsibility in matters of sexual morality, in the form in which it is making itself felt among us, and to search out its implications.  The most important of these is undoubtedly economic independence.  That is indeed so important that moral responsibility in any fine sense can scarcely be said to have any existence in its absence.  Moral responsibility and economic independence are indeed really identical; they are but two sides of the same social fact.  The responsible person is the person who is able to answer for his actions and, if need be, to pay for them.  The economically dependent person can accept a criminal responsibility; he can, with an empty purse, go to prison or to death.  But in the ordinary sphere of everyday morality that large penalty is not required of him; if he goes against the wishes of his family or his friends or his parish, they may turn their backs on him but they cannot usually demand against him the last penalties of the law.  He can exert his own personal responsibility, he can freely choose to go his own way and to maintain himself in it before his fellowmen on one condition, that he is able to pay for it.  His personal responsibility has little or no meaning except in so far as it is also economic independence.

In civilized societies as they attain maturity, the women tend to acquire a greater and greater degree alike of moral responsibility and economic independence.  Any freedom and seeming equality of women, even when it actually assumes the air of superiority, which is not so based, is unreal.  It is only on sufferance; it is the freedom accorded to the child, because it asks for it so prettily or may scream if it is refused.