changed some old virtues into vices. Industriousness became more vital
than bravery, regularity and thrift more profitable than violence, peace
more victorious than war. Children were economic assets; birth control was
made immoral. On the farm the family was the unit of production under the
discipline of the father and the seasons, and paternal authority had a firm
economic base. Each normal son matured soon in mind and self-support; at
fifteen he understood the physical tasks of life as well as he would
understand them at forty; all that he needed was land, a plow, and a willing
arm. So he married early, almost as soon as nature wished; he did not fret
long under the restraints placed upon premarital relations by the new order
of permanent settlements and homes. As for young women, chastity was
indispensable, for its loss might bring unprotected motherhood. Monogamy
was demanded by the approximate numerical equality of the sexes. For
fifteen hundred years this agricultural moral code of continence, early
marriage, divorceless monogamy, and multiple maternity maintained itself
in Christian Europe and its white colonies. It was a stern code, which
produced some of the strongest characters in history.
Gradually, then rapidly and ever more widely, the Industrial Revolution
changed the economic form and moral superstructure of European and
American life. Men, women, and children left home and family, authority
and unity, to work as individuals, individually paid, in factories built to
house not men but machines. Every decade the machines multiplied and
became more complex; economic maturity (the capacity to support a
family) came later; children no longer were economic assets; marriage was
delayed; premarital continence became more difficult to maintain. The city
offered every discouragement to marriage, but it provided every stimulus
and facility for sex. Women were “emancipated”–i.e., industrialized; and
contraceptives enabled them to separate intercourse from pregnancy. The
authority of father and mother lost its economic base through the growing
individualism of industry. The rebellious youth was no longer constrained
by the surveillance of the village; he could hide his sins in the protective
