While permanency is eminently valuable in sexual relations, can we venture to say the same as regards exclusiveness? This distinctive quality of exclusiveness is not an extension of love, but a narrowing of it down—a restraint upon personal feeling. When woman wins her freedom and is no longer under any circumstances man’s dependent and slave, but his friend and comrade in the battle of life, will she restrain the physical expression of sex-love, yet fearlessly respond to all the tender ties certain to unite her with the opposite sex? To give at present a dogmatic reply is impossible. Personally, my instincts—so far as I know them—accord with Herbert Spencer’s dictum: the ultimate form of sexual relation will be monogamic; but I recognize my own limitations. Since the women of my generation are children of bond-slaves, hampered within and without by survivals from an epoch of sex subjection wherein man’s dominancy superimposed upon woman a chastity he repudiated for himself, the standpoint from which the freed being of the future will decide her sex-morality is not in the grasp of my apprehension. Nevertheless, the immediate path of progress is distinctly marked out. I agree with the author who holds the opinion that: “Better indeed were a Saturnalia of _free_ men and women than the spectacle which, as it is, our great cities present at night.” (Edward Carpenter.) But set women free “from the mere cash-nexus to a husband, from the money slavery of the streets, from the nameless terrors of social opinion, and from the threats of the choice of perpetual virginity or perpetual bondage,” and we need not fear for sex-morality. “Sex in man is an organized passion, an individual need or impetus; but in woman it may more properly be termed a constructive instinct, with the larger signification that that involves.... Nor does she often experience that divorce between the sentiment of love and the physical passion which is so common with men. Sex with her is a deep and sacred instinct, carrying with it a sense of natural purity.” (_Woman_, Edward Carpenter, p. 9.) And from woman herself let me quote a passage occurring in a women’s journal: “Love is an emotion separate from sex-impulse, it may or may not exist in co-relation to it. The testimony easily taken from the lives of many women is to the effect that love enters not into the impulse which, active and unrestrained on the part of those to whom they are yoked for life, has created for them a life which can be called by no name save slavery.” (_Shafts_, October, 1895.) Again, turning to the opposite sex, Havelock Ellis states (in his study of _Man and Woman_, Contemporary Science Series) that: “In women men find beings who have not wandered so far as men from the typical life of earth’s creatures; women are for men the human embodiments of the restful responsiveness of Nature.”