are some cases of hardship,” he said, “which such permission would remedy.  Such, for instance, would be the case where the man or woman had become the victim of a chronic disease; or, when either party should be childless, and in other contingencies that could be imagined.”  There would be no compulsion in any direction, and full responsibility as at present.  Such cases could only arise exceptionally, and would not call for social antagonism.  For the most part, Cope remarks, “the best way to deal with polygamy is to let it alone” (E.D.  Cope, “The Marriage Problem,” Open Court, Nov. 15 and 22, 1888).  In England, Dr. John Chapman, the editor of the Westminster Review, and a close associate of the leaders of the Radical movement in the Victorian period, was opposed to State dictation as regards the form of marriage, and believed that a certain amount of sexual variation would be socially beneficial.  Thus he wrote in 1884 (in a private letter):  “I think that as human beings become less selfish polygamy [i.e., polygyny], and even polyandry, in an ennobled form, will become increasingly frequent.”

James Hinton, who, a few years earlier, had devoted much thought and attention to the sexual question, and regarded it as indeed the greatest of moral problems, was strongly in favor of a more vital flexibility of marriage regulations, an adaptation to human needs such as the early Christian Church admitted.  Marriage, he declared, must be “subordinated to service,” since marriage, like the Sabbath, is made for man and not man for marriage.  Thus in case of one partner becoming insane he would permit the other partner to marry again, the claim of the insane partner, in case of recovery, still remaining valid.  That would be a form of polygamy, but Hinton was careful to point out that by “polygamy” he meant “less a particular marriage-order than such an order as best serves good, and which therefore must be essentially variable.  Monogamy may be good, even the only good order, if of free choice; but a law for it is another thing.  The sexual relationship must be a natural thing.  The true social life will not be any fixed and definite relationship, as of monogamy, polygamy, or anything else, but a perfect subordination of every sexual relationship whatever to reason and human good.”

Ellen Key, who is an enthusiastic advocate of monogamy, and who believes that the civilized development of personal love removes all danger of the growth of polygamy, still admits the existence of variations.  She has in mind such solutions of difficult problems as Goethe had before him when he proposed at first in his Stella to represent the force of affection and tender memories as too strong to admit of the rupture of an old bond in the presence of a new bond.  The problem of sexual variation, she remarks, however (Liebe und Ethik, p. 12), has changed its form under modern conditions; it is no longer a struggle between