Love is so often proclaimed as a social panacea that I have thought it well to subject it to a careful criticism and indicate its defects when regarded as a complete embodiment of altruism. Some of those defects are incidental. Since it is an affair of human beings it cannot fail to show the imperfections characteristic of such wayward creatures. Seldom does even marriage, love’s best opportunity, attain that full mutuality which I have eulogized. Self-assertion intrudes early. The interests of one or the other party become predominant, and mutuality gradually declines. When the simple-minded man was told that in marriage two persons become one, he naturally enough asked: “Which one?” Yet if the completely conjunct life is rare, it is precious as an ideal for directing conduct. We often speak of love as something we fall into. Rather it is something to be made, developed, steadily approximated. The best marriages are accomplished works of art, yielding large rewards through all their progressive stages. But love is ever unstable. Unwatched, it slips down among the lower forms of altruism. These defects of love are, however, but incidental and such as are common in all man’s undertakings. There is nothing in love which can render it immune from human infirmity. But there are also in it certain fundamental defects which prevent it from becoming an organizing world-principle. At least before it can weld individuals into societies and states it must undergo large transformation and appear rather as justice than domestic affection. For love is naturally selective and individual, picking out one and rejecting another. It does not offer its bounty alike to all. Private altruism, it might be called, so that it always seems indelicate to speak of it in public. It concerns only those immediately involved and only their most intimate experiences. From such limitations it needs to be freed before it can become formative over society. All that is conjunctive in it must be retained and only its exclusions removed. In this way general justice will supplement individual love. All the varieties of mutuality are alike in joining self-regard with extra-regard. They differ only in the extent of that extra-regard.