Besides the unfavorable environment, certain radical doctrines, widely spread among the laboring classes, also prevent true love from taking root. In the literature, often read by these classes, excuses are readily made for the supremacy of the passions. Dithyrambs are sung upon the crudest emotions. The rational ethics of these radical moralists teach that “love worketh no evil.” True love may really do no evil, but gross passion, which these teachers of the new sex-morality call love, is capable to do all the harm in the world. Temporary sexual attraction, which is sensuality pure and simple, is called by the name of love and is made the basis of the new morality. The name of the sublimest emotion which appeals to the grandest impulses, to the noblest sentiments of men and women, which makes chivalrous, gentle, refined and helpful all who are touched by its magic wand, which informs its disciples with the spirit of honor (Walker), the name of this noble emotion is conferred upon the coarse emotion of sensuality, as if sensuality ever possessed all these ennobling qualities. The greater part of humanity is declared to be polygamous in nature. According to these radical doctrines only few men and women possess the instinct of exclusiveness, all other are naturally varietists. Consequently promiscuity is the ordained order of nature, and the monogamic marriage is decried as forced upon humanity by priest and tyrant.[AM] Among the cultured and exclusive classes there is another danger lurking to the development of true sentimental love. It is the literary fiction of our time which is thoroughly imbued with the most unwholesome forms of love. The first knowledge of the world and of life is usually derived by the children of these classes from novels, and these novels deal from the first line to the last with nothing but love. The heroes and heroines in these novels are usually the creations of pathological brains, in different stages of degeneration, and are represented as worthy of emulation. These heroes change with every novel, and the children admire every day another ideal, imposed upon them from without, before their imaginations had the time for the conception of an ideal from the mysterious depths of the cells of the growing centre of generation. Besides, the authors of these novels are, as a rule, dealing with a perverted kind of love, which they call holy, beneficent, infallible, and which they consider above all laws. Their teachings are to obey the impulse of love with a fanaticism that disregards all bounds and barriers, codes and warnings of the sages. All obstacles, such as duty, modesty, honor, respect for the family and the rights of fellow men, that weave around everyone of us a firm and massy weft, all of them are treated like cobwebs that love tears away and treads upon to gain its end.