Page:Tyranny of Shams (1916).djvu/181

 thousand years has not commended the Church’s practice of denouncing vice when it ought to have appealed to a man’s sense of honour or justice. It put the accent on the wrong syllable. Many a man will shrink from an act which is unjust, or may involve cruelty, if he is accustomed to regard it as such. He is not so effectively intimidated by terms like virtue and vice, which require a whole moral philosophy or theology to invalidate them.

But I am not for a moment contending that this removal of the accent from one syllable to another leaves the law as it was. It is, on the contrary, the very essence of my contention that the law must, in the real interest of men and women, be altered and that a large amount of ethical tyranny, which has no justification, must be abandoned. Let me first put, with entire candour, what seems to me to be the only rational reconstruction of sex-morality on a social basis, and then we may regard the reasons for advocating it.

It is, as I said, clear that if a man or woman marries on a strict monogamous contract, and holds his or her partner to that contract, there is a plain obligation of justice to adhere to it. If, on the other hand, a man and woman choose to marry on any other understanding, or choose to grant each other (as is now frequently done) a greater liberty than the contract implies, their behaviour is entirely their own concern, and no moralist who takes his stand on purely social grounds has anything to say to it. In regard to unmarried intercourse, it is further