the demand of society for a rigid marriage-order and the demand of the individual for sexual satisfaction, but it has become the problem of harmonizing the ennoblement of the race with heightened requirements of erotic happiness.  She also points out that the existence of a partner who requires the other partner’s care as a nurse or as an intellectual companion by no means deprives that other partner of the right to fatherhood or motherhood, and that such rights must be safeguarded (Ellen Key, Ueber Liebe und Ehe, pp. 166-168).

A prominent and extreme advocate of polygyny, not as a simple rare variation, but as a marriage order superior to monogamy, is to be found at the present day in Professor Christian von Ehrenfels of Prague (see, e.g., his Sexualethik, 1908; “Die Postulate des Lebens,” Sexual-Probleme, Oct., 1908; and letter to Ellen Key in her Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 466).  Ehrenfels believes that the number of men inapt for satisfactory reproduction is much larger than that of women, and that therefore when these are left out of account, a polygynic marriage order becomes necessary.  He calls this “reproduction-marriage” (Zeugungsehe), and considers that it will entirely replace the present marriage order, to which it is morally superior.  It would be based on private contracts.  Ehrenfels holds that women would offer no objection, as a woman, he believes, attaches less importance to a man as a wooer than as the father of her child.  Ehrenfels’s doctrine has been seriously attacked from many sides, and his proposals are not in the line of our progress.  Any radical modification of the existing monogamic order is not to be expected, even if it were generally recognized, which cannot be said to be the case, that it is desirable.  The question of sexual variations, it must be remembered, is not a question of introducing an entirely new form of marriage, but only of recognizing the rights of individuals, in exceptional cases, to adopt such aberrant forms, and of recognizing the corresponding duties of such individuals to accept the responsibilities of any aberrant marriage forms they may find it best to adopt.  So far as the question of sexual variations is more than this, it is, as Hinton argued, a dynamical method of working towards the abolition of the perilous and dangerous promiscuity of prostitution.  A rigid marriage order involves prostitution; a flexible marriage order largely—­though not, it may be, entirely—­renders prostitution unnecessary.  The democratic morality of the present day, so far as the indications at present go, is opposed to the encouragement of a quasi-slave class, with diminished social rights, such as prostitutes always constitute in a more or less marked degree.  It is fairly evident, also, that the rapidly growing influence of medical hygiene is on the same side.  We may, therefore, reasonably expect in the future a slow though steady increase in the recognition,