The desire of the young to abolish prostitution by means of love’s freedom has already been adduced as one of the proofs of the higher development of sexual morality. Another such proof is the desire of the present day to abolish adultery by means of free divorce. The preachers of monogamy are afraid that this desire will prepare the way for an open polygamy, instead of that which at present is at least secret. In the press and in the pulpit, in schoolrooms and lecture-rooms, modern literature is blamed for this “new immorality.” And yet we all know that long before our time, married men and their sons in country houses were too often ready to seduce the wives and daughters of their dependents as well as the servants of the house. The wives and mothers of these gentlemen were frequently not ignorant of this—but they were praised for their wisdom when they pretended to suspect nothing. It was a matter of common knowledge that not a few married men and married women had mistresses and lovers within their own social circle; and every one knew that in the towns many men, during or before marriage, had illegitimate families. Serious preachers of morality doubtless reply that they no more condone this secret adultery than they would an open one; that they see in one and the other a manifestation of that power of sin which only religion can vanquish. We have the right then to ask, whether within their own ranks—among clergymen, missionaries, readers—no similar transgressions occur. The honest ones answer Yes, but point out that this causes shame among their fellow-Christians, and that these believers themselves acknowledge that they have sinned. Such men of the world, who play the hypocrite to retain their respectability, do the same thing. But the great danger to society first comes in when free-thinkers with no qualms of conscience commit, and authors without moral indignation describe, the sin. This it is that degrades the ideal of morality. Here we are at the very cross-roads of the old and the new morality. The champions of the latter go on to ask whether all adulterers—children of this world as well as children of God—in their innermost consciousness really feel themselves to be sinners. The need which impelled them was perhaps so imperious that it justified them before their own conscience in choosing a lesser evil in preference to a greater, when—from one cause or another—they could not or ought not to satisfy the need in their marriage.