all attacks upon government and property, although it is not usually
resented as such; and it is one of the most serious signs of the times
that many intellectual people have indorsed such views. We must
reemphasize, therefore, the fact that the family is the central
institution of human society, that industry and the state must
subordinate themselves to its interest. Neither the state nor industry
has had much to do with the origin of the family, and neither the state
nor industry may safely determine its forms independent of the
biological requirements for human survival. Moreover, it is evident that
human society from the beginning has in more or less instinctive, and
also in more or less conscious, ways attempted to regulate the relations
between the sexes with a view to controlling the reproductive process.
While material civilization is mainly a control over the food process,
moral civilization involves a control over the reproductive process,
that is, over the birth and rearing of children; and such control over
the reproductive process, which has certainly been one of the aims of
all social organization in the past, whether of savage peoples or of
civilized peoples, evidently precludes anything like the toleration of
promiscuity or even of free love.


SELECT REFERENCES


_For brief reading:_

WESTERMARCK, _History of Human Marriage_, Chaps. I-VI.
HOWARD, _History of Matrimonial Institutions_, Vol. I, Chaps. I-III
HEINEMAN, _Physical Basis of Civilization_, Chaps. IV-VII.