WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
clearly forbid such plural intimacies, it is well known that society condones the men who engage in them, while the woman is generally condemned.
It is true that all men—if the testimony of the subjects themselves is to be accepted—are not naturally inclined to plurality in sex partnerships. There is no reason to question the admissions of a large number of men that their instincts are wholly monogamous. These are the natural, the typical, monogamic lovers. I have interrogated very many of my sex on this subject. The bulk have replied that the impulse for variety in sexual relations has assailed them from time to time, and even after marriage of esteem and affection; but the dictates of conscience, the counsels of discretion, the inconveniences of clandestine intrigues, or other considerations have restrained them.
A fairly large proportion of men confess freely that, from the ethical and the social points of view, lifelong fidelity to one woman is a lofty ideal. But nature, they add, has not shaped them for the restraints of monogamic wedlock. They admit that they can love more than one woman at the same time, and that they give way to their polygynous obsessions.
Statistics in such social phenomena are, of course, quite impossible. Western polygyny is mostly secret. But any man who has observed life in his own country and abroad knows how extremely prevalent is the prac-
288
