In the last chapter I tried to deal with the actual problem created in this country by the disproportion of the sexes—­the fact that there are, roughly, one and three-quarters to two million more women than men in this country; and I was obliged to confine myself simply to stating the problem, which, to my mind, is very greatly intensified by the fact, generally ignored, that the sex needs of a woman are just as imperative, their suppression just as hard to bear, as a man’s; that woman is fully as human as man, and that parenthood and loverhood and all that the satisfaction of the sex instinct means to him, it means also to her.  I do not affirm that the difficulty of self-control or the suffering of abstinence presents itself to men and women in just the same way; I am sure it does not.  I do not under-estimate the difference.  But I do emphasize the fact that, as far as I am able to judge, the suffering is equal, although it is different in character.  Therefore, the denial of marriage to a very large number of women means that, although some women, like some men, are naturally celibate, when so great a number of women are denied the possibility of marriage, we must take it for granted that among them the average will not be natural celibates, but women who suffer a very great loss if they do not marry.

Now I want to add that this disproportion of the sexes is quite artificial, and, therefore, should be temporary.  From some of the letters I have received I gather that people imagine that there has always been a very much larger number of women than men, and not only in this country, but throughout the world; and that, therefore, we ought to shape our customs and our moral standards with this disproportion in mind as a permanent fact.  I want to point out that this is not the case.  The causes of the present excess of women over men in this country are quite artificial.  As a matter of fact, there are more boys born in this country than girls—­about 107 to 100 is the ratio—­but the boys die in very much larger numbers during the first twelve months of their life, because they are more difficult to rear in bad conditions.  But bad conditions are not inevitable!  These babies die from preventable causes.  It is not within the Providence of God that these children must die, nor is it a necessity of human nature.  It is due to preventable causes, and is, therefore, as I say, artificial.  Again, we have a very large empire, stretching out to the remoter parts of the world, and to that empire men go out in very much larger numbers than women, so that the disproportion here is, in part, the reverse side of the disproportion in the great Overseas Dominions, where there are more men than women.  But that, too, is a purely artificial and temporary state of things, which has nothing to do with the fundamental conditions of human society.  Finally, of course, there is the war, which again creates an artificial state of affairs, by killing enormous numbers of young men, just at the age—­between twenty and forty or forty-five—­when they should be growing into manhood, and becoming husbands and fathers.  That again is artificial.