Then marriage, to resume my main discussion, does not necessarily mean cohabitation.  All women who desire children do not want to be entrusted with their upbringing.  Some women are sexual and philoprogenitive without being sedulously maternal, and some are maternal without much or any sexual passion.  There are men and women in the world now, great allies, fond and passionate lovers who do not live nor want to live constantly together.  It is at least conceivable that there are women who, while desiring offspring, do not want to abandon great careers for the work of maternity, women again who would be happiest managing and rearing children in manless households that they might even share with other women friends, and men to correspond with these who do not wish to live in a household with wife and children.  I submit, these temperaments exist and have a right to exist in their own way.  But one must recognize that the possibility of these departures from the normal type of household opens up other possibilities.  The polygamy that is degrading or absurd under one roof assumes a different appearance when one considers it from the point of view of people whose habits of life do not centre upon an isolated home.

All the relations I have glanced at above do as a matter of fact exist to-day, but shamefully and shabbily, tainted with what seems to me an unmerited and unnecessary ignominy.  The punishment for bigamy seems to me insane in its severity, contrasted as it is with our leniency to the common seducer.  Better ruin a score of women, says the law, than marry two.  I do not see why in these matters there should not be much ampler freedom than there is, and this being so I can hardly be expected to condemn with any moral fervour or exclude from my society those who have seen fit to behave by what I believe may be the standards of A.D. 2000 instead of by the standards of 1850.  These are offences, so far as they are offences, on an altogether different footing from murder, or exacting usury, or the sweating of children, or cruelty, or transmitting diseases, or unveracity, or commercial or intellectual or physical prostitution, or any such essentially grave anti-social deeds.  We must distinguish between sins on the one hand and mere errors of judgment and differences of taste from ourselves.  To draw up harsh laws, to practise exclusions against everyone who does not see fit to duplicate one’s own blameless home life, is to waste a number of courageous and exceptional persons in every generation, to drive many of them into a forced alliance with real crime and embittered rebellion against custom and the law.

3.30.  Conduct in relation to the thing that is.