vigorous, and moral manhood. He recollected the similar though less
hideous taboos he had met with elsewhere: the castes of India, and
the horrible pollution that would result from disregarding them;
the vile Egyptian rule, by which the divine king, in order to keep
up the so-called purity of his royal and god-descended blood, must
marry his own sister, and so foully pollute with monstrous
abortions the very stock he believed himself to be preserving
intact from common or unclean influences. His mind ran back to
the strange and complicated forbidden degrees of the Australian
Blackfellows, who are divided into cross-classes, each of which
must necessarily marry into a certain other, and into that other
only, regardless of individual tastes or preferences. He remembered
the profound belief of all these people that if they were to act in
any other way than the one prescribed, some nameless misfortune or
terrible evil would surely overtake them. Yet, nowhere, he thought
to himself, had he seen any system which entailed in the end so
much misery on both sexes, though more particularly on the women,
as that system of closely tabooed marriage, founded upon a broad
basis of prostitution and infanticide, which has reached its most
appalling height of development in hypocritical and puritan
England. The ghastly levity with which all Englishmen treated this
most serious subject, and the fatal readiness with which even Frida
herself seemed to acquiesce in the most inhuman slavery ever
devised for women on the face of this earth, shocked and saddened
Bertram's profoundly moral and sympathetic nature. He could sit
there no longer to listen to their talk. He bethought him at once
of the sickening sights he had seen the evening before in a London
music-hall; of the corrupting mass of filth underneath, by which
alone this abomination of iniquity could be kept externally decent,
and this vile system of false celibacy whitened outwardly to the