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JALNISM AND WORLD PROBLEMS
regarded as less unsatisfactory to absorb the floating surplus of unmarried girls by allowing men to marry more than one woman. This will certainly give them an honourable position, and spare all the shame and hypocrisy and crime. Often the first step towards laxity is the one towards prostitution. The number of the unfortunate ones who have been forced into depravity and degradation is very large. But all this can be avoided--at least much of it. The opposition to the suggested remedy can only be a inatter of sentiment. The practice has the sanction of time; even the Jewish Patriarchs inarried more than one woman. The good woman who thinks that it would be intolerable to her to share her husband with another woman little knows how often and with how many women she has already shared the gentleman, though she may be ignorant of the sharing. Ahimsa aims at the greatest good of the greatest numbers, not at narrow-ininded selfish legislation.
The remedy suggested will also solve the problem of maintaining racial efficiency. Men of science and learning are to-day disturbed over the law that civilizations begin to die at the top, and are trying to devise means to encourage increased child-bearing by the top-most classes of men. Of course, very few men can afford the luxury of having two wives at a time; but there is little doubt that a sufficient number of such marriages will be contracted in every community to ensure the requisite standard of birth-rate amongst the most efficient peoples.
But I must not omit to say that the most important part of the saina Doctrine is its insistence on sacrifice, or selfdenial. Our relations are all amiable and affectionate where they rest on the basis of sacrifice; but they simply go awry when sought to be founded on “rights.' Sacrifice comes naturally easy to those jwho are imbued with the doctrine of ahimsa ; to others it is a tedious and unwholesome thing. "I am not going to give up my right:" is the view of him
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