members of the community. It could not indeed have subsisted for a single 

year without degenerating into license and disorder. Freedom in sexual 

relations involves mutual trust and that can only rest on a basis of 

personal responsibility. Where there can be no reliance on personal 

responsibility there can be no freedom. In most fields of moral action 

this sense of personal responsibility is acquired at a fairly early stage 

of social progress. Sexual morality is the last field of morality to be 

brought within the sphere of personal responsibility. The community 

imposes the most varied, complicated, and artificial codes of sexual 

morality on its members, especially its feminine members, and, naturally 

enough, it is always very suspicious of their ability to observe these 

codes, and is careful to allow them, so far as possible, no personal 

responsibility in the matter. But a training in restraint, when carried 

through a long series of generations, is the best preparation for freedom. 

The law laid on the earlier generations, as old theology stated the 

matter, has been the schoolmaster to bring the later generations to 

Christ; or, as new science expresses exactly the same idea, the later 

generations have become immunized and have finally acquired a certain 

degree of protection against the virus which would have destroyed the 

earlier generations. 

The process by which a people acquires the sense of personal 

responsibility is slow, and perhaps it cannot be adequately 

acquired at all by races lacking a high grade of nervous 

organization. This is especially the case as regards sexual 

morality, and has often been illustrated on the contact of a 

higher with a lower civilization. It has constantly happened that 

missionaries--entirely against their own wishes, it need not be 

said--by overthrowing the strict moral system they have found 

established, and by substituting the freedom of European customs 

among people entirely unprepared for such freedom, have exerted 

the most disastrous effects on morality. This has been the case 

among the formerly well-organized and highly moral Baganda of 

Central Africa, as recorded in an official report by Colonel 

Lambkin (_British Medical Journal_, Oct. 3, 1908). 

As regards Polynesia, also, R.L. Stevenson, in his interesting 

book, _In the South Seas_ (Ch. V), pointed out that, while before 

the coming of the whites the Polynesians were, on the whole, 

chaste, and the young carefully watched, now it is far otherwise. 

Even in Fiji, where, according to Lord Stanmore--who was High 

Commissioner of the Pacific, and an independent 

critic--missionary effort has been "wonderfully successful," 

where all own at least nominal allegiance to Christianity, which 

has much modified life and character, yet chastity has suffered. 

This was shown by a Royal Commission on the condition of the 

native races in Fiji. Mr. Fitchett, commenting on this report 

(Australasian _Review of Reviews_, Oct., 1897) remarks: "Not a 

few witnesses examined by the commission declare that the moral 

advance in Fiji is of a curiously patchy type. The abolition of 

polygamy, for example, they say, has not told at every point in 

favor of women. The woman is the toiler in Fiji; and when the 

support of the husband was distributed over four wives, the 

burden on each wife was less than it is now, when it has to be 

carried by one. In heathen times female chastity was guarded by 

the club; a faithless wife, an unmarried mother, was summarily