issue, it is unfit and soon dies out. Ordinary fatherhood has as little do do with morality as motherhood. It is non-moral, as I shall show in chap. xiv.; and it is illogical, because it deals with illusions. No man ever knows to what extent he is the father of his own child. And its duration is short and fleeting; every generation and every race of human beings soon disappears.
The wide-spread and exclusive honouring of the motherly woman, the type most upheld as the one and only possible one for women, is accordingly quite unjustified. Although most men are certain that every woman can have her consummation only in motherhood, I must confess that the prostitute—not as a person, but as a phenomenon—is much more estimable in my opinion.
There are various causes of this universal reverence for the mother.
One of the chief reasons appears to be that the mother seems to the man nearer his ideal of chastity; but the woman who desires children is no more chaste than the man-coveting prostitute.
The man rewards the appearance of higher morality in the maternal type by raising her morally (although with no reason) and socially over the prostitute type. The latter does not submit to any valuations of the man nor to the ideal of chastity which he seeks for in the woman; secretly, as the woman of the world, lightly as the demi-mondaine, or flagrantly as the woman of the streets, she sets herself in opposition to them. This is the explanation of the social ostracisms, the practical outlawry which is the present almost universal fate of the prostitute. The mother readily submits to the moral impositions of man, simply because she is interested only in the child and the preservation of the race.
It is quite different with the prostitute. She lives her own life exactly as she pleases, even although it may bring with it the punishment of exclusion from society. She is not so brave as the mother, it is true, being thoroughly cowardly; but she has the correlative of cowardice, impu-
