This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI It is difficult in these days for a man to give utterance to a platitude without incurring the suspicion that he is indulging in paradox. We have become so accustomed to subordinating our own judgment to the authority of a sophisticated literary minority, who confound the exceptional with ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI It is difficult in these days for a man to give utterance to a platitude without incurring the suspicion that he is indulging in paradox. We have become so accustomed to subordinating our own judgment to the authority of a sophisticated literary minority, who confound the exceptional with the general, that even the restatement of an obvious fact sounds startling and incredible. Nevertheless, the rule remains the rule, and is more worthy of attention than any or all exceptions to it which may be cited; and so, at the risk of seeming paradoxical, one must turn first to it. The startling platitude, then, which I would begin by formulating is simply this: that of all human institutions the most widely and permanently successful is that of lifelong monogamous marriage. A basis of experience incomparably great and long justifies the assertion that this method of providing for the physical and psychic needs of individuals, and for the continuance of the human species, is the one best adapted to these ends. If it were not so, no amount of coercion by authority, whether ecclesiastical or civil, could have induced mankind permanently to endure it. Moreover, there is in modern communities very little left of this authoritative buttressing of monogamy. The chains have been broken, the whip wrested from the driver's hands; yet the slaves oddly persist for the most part in treading freely the accustomed path. 1 Love and Marriage, translated from a Swedish work entitled Lifslinjer, by Ellen Key. The translation by Arthur G. Chater. With an Introduction by Havelock Ellis. (New York: Putnam, 1912.) We hear much, to be sure, of the multiplication of divorces in countries like America, where legalized divorce is very easily obtainable. What we...
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