I emphasize this point here, because it is involved in the present state of affairs.  I have reminded you that there are nearly 2,000,000 women whose lives are to be considered.  If the number were quite small, it might comfortably be assumed that the women who remained unmarried were those who, in any case, had no vocation for marriage.  For it is, of course, true that there are such women, as there are such men.  The normal man and woman desire marriage and parenthood, and are fitted for it; but there are always exceptions who either do not desire it, or, desiring it, feel bound to put it aside at the call of some other vocation, which they feel to be supremely theirs, and which is not compatible with marriage.  They sacrifice; but they do so joyfully, not for repression, but for a different life, another vocation.  And where the number of the unmarried is small, it may without essential injustice be supposed that these are the natural celibates.

But you cannot suppose that of 2,000,000!  Among the number how many are young widows, girls engaged to marry men now dead, and how many whose natural vocation was marriage, motherhood, home-making, and all that is meant by such things as these?  If this be the normal vocation of the normal woman how many of these have been deprived of all that seemed to them to make life worth living?  Is it astonishing if they rebel?  If they determine to snatch at anything that yet lies in their grasp?  If they affirm “the right to motherhood” when they want children, or the satisfaction of the sex-instinct when that need becomes imperious?

If we are to say to such women—­“The normal life is denied to you, not by your fault, or because you do not need it, but because we have unfortunately been obliged to sacrifice in war the men who should have been your mates:  and we now invite you in the interests of morality to accept as your lot perpetual virginity”—­it is not difficult to imagine their reply:  “What is this morality in whose interests you ask so huge a sacrifice?  Is it worth such a price?  Is the whole community willing to pay it, or is it exacted from us alone?  And on what, in the end, is it based?”

The answer to this question is often given to the young, even before the question arises; and it is given in the lives of men and women.  The lives of those who are nobly celibate, or nobly married, are in themselves so moving a plea, that few who have been closely in contact with them are left untouched.  It is the ideal realized that is the best defence of the ideal.  But let us admit that, too often, the actual marriage is a very pitiful comment on our morality, and celibacy either a mere pretence or a very mean and pinched reality.  What answer then shall we give to the rising generation which questions us—­“On what do you base your moral standards?”