“The master once believed that no wrong could be done to a slave; that the slave had no rights which the master was bound to respect. The inquisitor believed that no wrong could be done to a heretic. The warrior thought the same of his captive. The witch-finder thought that no amount of torture he inflicted on the supposed witch was wrong or cruel. Just so do the vast majority--yes, nearly all of your men and women--believe that there can be no sexual abuse _within your bonds of matrimony_. But _you_ are as wrong in that as your ancestors were to the chattel slave, heretic, captive, and supposed witch. Is it not a fact that nearly every family home under your marriage system is a more or less legalized house of sexual impurity (house of prostitution as you term it) upheld by church and state? Is it not true that the sexual function, under your system of matrimony, is, as a whole, exercised vastly in excess--perhaps from ten to a hundred times? Very likely this truth seems painful to you at this age of your earth, but it is a truth, nevertheless, which you are bound to face some time, if you do not desire to keep forever the pallor of disease on the sunken cheeks, pale lips, and feeble frame of nearly all your mothers, especially you American mothers. We must bear in mind that a _chaste_ life, whether _in_ marriage or _out_ of it, is one in which the sexual functions of the male and of the female are mutually exercised only in accordance with the most vigorous health and highest well-being of the parties as they are then constituted. Sexual activity, then, whether married or not, is licentious and dissolute, just in proportion as it is excessive. “Those acts which detract from the fullness of life are wrong, because they cannot, as a whole, be productive of the greatest happiness, and therefore an excessive exercise of any function implies a waste, which, as a whole, is productive of _pain_ and is therefore wrong. The church or state can no more change or suspend the laws of life, waste, and reproduction, by a marriage ceremony, than the acquired abnormal passions of an individual can change or suspend them. “An organism, whether man or beast, is sexually perfect only whenever its sexual instinct is so organized and developed that the agreeable exercise of this function does not detract from the fullness of life and happiness, on the one hand, and is sufficiently active for the normal propagation of the species on the other. The sexual organization of the Marsites is, of course, not entirely perfect, but yours is about as vicious and faulty as it can well be. “When the sexual function, like that of your human family, has once become greatly in excess from the evil effects of a vicious, social and sexual relation, no system, however perfect, can at once remove this excess. It was gradually acquired by a vicious arrangement, and must also be gradually eliminated by the institution of a more perfect arrangement.