“Just think, the husband with his glass of wine often feels himself insulted if he finds some man talking to his wife, and if he would find some other man nursing the baby and still another man dancing with his wife he often goes into a rage. _He_ does not keep his wife’s company nor does he want other men to do it. If things do not just suit him, he puts on his jealous pout, which sometimes lasts for a whole week and sometimes even much longer. “The wife is nearly always just as much of a jealous pout as the husband and often much more so; but the woman is nearly always more of a slave, because she is more confined with little children. Your matrimony very often produces cold husbands, and no other man, even if he would like to assist in caring for her child, is, as a rule, allowed to do so. These are largely the conditions of your man and wife in your marriage system. It is generally slavery all around. Of course, I am well aware that some married men and women enjoy quite a degree of individual freedom, but they are rather the exceptions than the rule. “Again, let us suppose that two married couple would go on a pleasure trip. They are riding on the cars. The husband and wife have perhaps been together for years; they have told each other all the news they know of. They have nothing new to talk about. But if any friend would sit in the seat with my wife, and I would sit with his wife, we would all have something new to talk about and pass the time pleasantly. But, as a rule, men and women on earth are too jealous for that. Hence it is that we often find a man and a woman sitting together in the same seat in a car or elsewhere, the husband looking one direction and the wife the opposite direction, not speaking to each other for hours at a time. If you are an observer, you can see this in nearly every car in which you may happen to be riding.” “Does not the population of the human race, under sexual freedom increase more rapidly than it does under our system of marriage?” asked Viola, who seemed to have mentally stored away every word of Mr. Midith’s narrative concerning their sexual relations. “No; it is just the opposite, as Mr. Herbert Spencer in his biology has so forcibly foreshadowed when he says: ‘The excess of fertility has itself rendered the process of civilization inevitable; and the process of civilization must inevitably diminish fertility and at last destroy its excess.’ As a whole, the higher and the more complex the being, the fewer the offspring. You see this is one point, but there are others besides this one. “Under your marriage system, in which the man largely runs the sexual affairs, a wife often is the mother of from six to twelve children, and not infrequently a number of them are unwelcome and would not have been born if the mother had been free and independent in all directions.