often forget that our failure to recognize such variations merely means that we accord in such cases an illegitimate permission to perpetrate injustice.  In those parts of the world in which polygyny is recognized as a permissible variation a man is legally held to his natural obligations towards all his sexual mates and towards the children he has by those mates.  In no part of the world is polygyny so prevalent as in Christendom; in no part of the world is it so easy for a man to escape the obligations incurred by polygyny.  We imagine that if we refuse to recognize the fact of polygyny, we may refuse to recognize any obligations incurred by polygyny.  By enabling a man to escape so easily from the obligations of his polygamous relationships we encourage him, if he is unscrupulous, to enter into them; we place a premium on the immorality we loftily condemn.[373] Our polygyny has no legal existence, and therefore its obligations can have no legal existence.  The ostrich, it was once imagined, hides its head in the sand and attempts to annihilate facts by refusing to look at them; but there is only one known animal which adopts this course of action, and it is called Man.

Monogamy, in the fundamental biological sense, represents the natural order into which the majority of sexual facts will always naturally fall because it is the relationship which most adequately corresponds to all the physical and spiritual facts involved.  But if we realize that sexual relationships primarily concern only the persons who enter into those relationships, and if we further realize that the interest of society in such relationships is confined to the children which they produce, we shall also realize that to fix by law the number of women with whom a man shall have sexual relationships, and the number of men with whom a woman shall unite herself, is more unreasonable than it would be to fix by law the number of children they shall produce.  The State has a right to declare whether it needs few citizens or many; but in attempting to regulate the sexual relationships of its members the State attempts an impossible task and is at the same time guilty of an impertinence.

There is always a tendency, at certain stages of civilization, to insist on a merely formal and external uniformity, and a corresponding failure to see not only that such uniformity is unreal, but also that it has an injurious effect, in so far as it checks beneficial variations.  The tendency is by no means confined to the sexual sphere.  In England there is, for instance, a tendency to make building laws which enjoin, in regard to places of human habitation, all sorts of provisions that on the whole are fairly beneficial, but which in practice act injuriously, because they render many simple and excellent human habitations absolutely illegal, merely because such habitations fail to conform to regulations which, under some circumstances, are not only unnecessary, but mischievous.