Note 21 — Chapter V · THE QUESTION CONSIDERED IN ITS SOCIAL BEARINGS.

I should like to hear these gentlemen explain, according to what principle they imagine the chastity of their wives to grow out of a fear of offspring; so that, if released from such fear, prostitution would follow. I can readily comprehend that the unmarried may be supposed careful to avoid that situation to which no legal cause can be assigned; but a wife must be especially dull, if she cannot assign, in all cases, a legal cause; and a husband must be especially sagacious, if he can tell whether the true cause be assigned or not. This safeguard to married chastity, therefore, to which the gentlemen of the Typographical Committee seem to look with so implicit a confidence, is a mere broken reed; and has been so, ever since the days of Bethsheba.

Yet conjugal chastity is that which is especially valued. The inconstancy of a wife commonly cuts much deeper than the dishonor of a sister. In that case, then, which the world usually considers of the highest importance, the fear of offspring imposes no check whatever. It cannot make one iota of difference whether a married woman be knowing in physiology or not; except perhaps, indeed, to the husband’s advantage; in cases where the wife’s conscience induces her at least to guard against the possibility of burthening her legal lord with the care and support of children that are not his. Constancy, where it actually exists, is the offspring of something more efficacious than ignorance. And if in the wife’s case, men must and do trust to something else, why not in all other cases, where restraint may be considered desirable? Shall men trust in the greater, and fear to trust in the less? Whatever any one may choose to assert regarding his relatives’ secret inclinations to profligacy, these arguments may convince him that if he has any safeguard at present, a perusal of Moral Physiology will not destroy it.

’Tis strange that men, by way of suborning an argument, should be willing thus to vilify their relatives’ character and motives, without first carefully examining whether any thing was gained to their cause, after all, by the vilification.