Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/116

tions, the opponent is but too ready to take existing conditions as a foundation for his suppositions. In the first place, a "moral" solicitude will be expressed that the liberty of forming or dissolving a marriage relation at pleasure will involve people in the danger of using marriage merely as a means for variety in the satisfaction of their desires. Unions will be made to-day and unmade to-morrow, etc. Granted that such a supposition could come true, we need only ask ourselves the question whether the moral condition of society could thus become worse than it now is. As if the present society could run any sort of risk thereby! Could men be brought to a higher and more disgusting degree of moral corruption than the present secret prostitution has reached, even if freedom of lust should be publicly proclaimed? Certainly not. But let us take another point of view. Let us picture to ourselves a society consisting throughout of cultured, normally constituted people who have been educated for liberty, and who feel themselves secure in their chief interests, and let us ask ourselves whether in such a society a man would value less the joys of a sincere relation with a beloved woman, and the happiness of seeing the continuance of his existence secured, as it were, in his children, than the Turkish satisfaction of sleeping with a different concubine every night. And let us, moreover, keep in mind that the women of the future are not