TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: In the printed version of this text, allapostrophes for contractions such as "can't", "wouldn't" and "he'd"were omitted, to read as "cant", "wouldnt" and "hed". This etextrestores the omitted apostrophes.
This piece is not an argument for or against polygamy. It is a clinicalstudy of how the thing actually occurs among quite ordinary people,innocent of all unconventional views concerning it. The enormousmajority of cases in real life are those of people in that position.Those who deliberately and conscientiously profess what are oddlycalled advanced views by those others who believe them to beretrograde, are often, and indeed mostly, the last people in the worldto engage in unconventional adventures of any kind, not only becausethey have neither time nor disposition for them, but because thefriction set up between the individual and the community by theexpression of unusual views of any sort is quite enough hindrance tothe heretic without being complicated by personal scandals. Thus thetheoretic libertine is usually a person of blameless family life,whilst the practical libertine is mercilessly severe on all otherlibertines, and excessively conventional in professions of socialprinciple.
What is more, these professions are not hypocritical: they are for themost part quite sincere. The common libertine, like the drunkard,succumbs to a temptation which he does not defend, and against which hewarns others with an earnestness proportionate to the intensity of hisown remorse. He (or she) may be a liar and a humbug, pretending to bebetter than the detected libertines, and clamoring for their condignpunishment; but this is mere self-defence. No reasonable person expectsthe burglar to confess his pursuits, or to refrain from joining in thecry of Stop Thief when the police get on the track of another burglar.If society chooses to penalize candor, it has itself to thank if itsattack is countered by falsehood. The clamorous virtue of the libertineis therefore no more hypocritical than the plea of Not Guilty which isallowed to every criminal. But one result is that the theorists whowrite most sincerely and favorably about polygamy know least about it;and the practitioners who know most about it keep their knowledge veryjealously to themselves. Which is hardly fair to the practice.
Also it is impossible to estimate its prevalence. A practice to whichnobody confesses may be both universal and unsuspected, just as avirtue which everybody is expected, under heavy penalties, to claim,may have no existence. It is often assumed—indeed it is the officialassumption of the Churches and the divorce courts that a gentleman anda lady cannot be alone together innocently. And that is manifestblazing nonsense, though many women have been stoned to death in theeast, and divorced in the west, on the strength of it. On the otherhand, the innocent and conventional people who regard the gallantadventures as crimes of so horrible a nature that only the mostdepraved and desperate characters engage in them or would listen toadvances in that direction without raising an alarm with the noisiestindignation, are clearly examples of the fact that most sections ofsociety do not know how the other sections live. Industry is the mosteffective check on gallantry.