The effort to suppress free choice by the use of terror has been tried terribly enough and long enough. It has always proved an utter failure, viewed on any large scale. Has the awful penalty affixed to any deviation from the prescribed legal method of sexual relations wholly prevented such deviation? It has often led to concealment and duplicity,—two lives carried on at once, a life of demure conformity in public, a life of passionate fulfilment in secret. The well-understood sacrifice of truth to appearance has ever served to inflame the mistrust and swell the vengeance of the jealous. The only real remedy will be found in perfect truth, frankness, and justice. In regard to the personal autonomy of the affections, woman should be raised to the same status and be tried by the same code as man. That code should not be as now the legacy of the brutish and despotic past, but the achievement of a scientific morality, those laws of universal order which express the will of the Creator, the collective harmony of Nature. Since the unions of the sexes are of all grades and qualities, all degrees of impurity and beastliness or of purity and sacredness, the parties to them cannot be justly judged by a single rigid rule of external technicality, and ought not to be sealed with one unvarying approval of respectable or branded with one monotonous stigma of illicit. They should be judged by the varying facts in the case as they are in the sight of God; and when those facts are not known in their true merits there is no competency or right to judge the man or the woman at all. The present judgments of society unquestionably ought in many cases to be reversed. For example, it is to be said that the women who consort with men they loathe, and against their will breed children infected with ferocious passions and diseased tendencies, no matter how regularly they are married or how proud their social position, should be condemned or rescued. Also it is to be said that persons filled with a true and divine love, whether sanctioned or unsanctioned by conventional usages, claim to be left to the inherent moral reactions of their acts, and to the unprejudiced judgments of the competent. This central truth, compromise whom it may, and encompassed with delicacies and with difficulties as it may be, is to be firmly maintained, although Pecksniff and Grundy shriek at it until the whole continent quivers.