And this same minority is aware that love may cease, independently of a person’s will; that therefore no one can be held to the terms of a promise, the performance of which lies outside his powers. Nothing is more natural than that love’s longing for eternity should prompt lovers to vows of eternal fidelity; nothing is more true than that it is a satanic device of society to seize upon this promise and base thereon a legal institution (Carpenter). Nothing is more necessary than to abolish the legal claims that people have on one another, supported by promises of love and vows of fidelity. The more people understand the laws of their own being, the more will the conscientious begin to hesitate about making promises which perhaps some day they will be forced by inner necessity to break. An increasing number of people find it impossible to contract marriage, or to ask it of the other party—or to continue in marriage or ask its continuance of the other—when their love has died or has awakened for another. A generation ago, an engaged person could refuse his or her betrothed’s petition for liberation with the answer that he or she had love enough for both. In corresponding circles at the present day, such a speech is unthinkable. But then a public engagement was still regarded as a binding tie and the marriage took place. After a long engagement it was a “point of honour” for the man not to let a woman run the risk of being unmarried, and she was satisfied if he only paid his debt of honour. Such coarseness of feeling is fortunately becoming more and more rare, although it is far from disappearing. People see more and more that they have no more right to marry simply to fulfil a duty of fidelity than they have to steal in order to fulfil a duty of maintenance; that there is no more obligation to abide by a marriage which one feels to be one’s ruin than there is a duty to commit suicide for the sake of another. The love of older times was above all afraid that the other party should not feel sufficiently bound. The finest erotic feeling of the present day shudders at the idea of becoming a bond; trembles at pity and recoils from the possibility of becoming a hindrance. This state of the soul knows of no other right than that of perfect candour. To place legal limits to each other’s liberty, so that neither shall cause pain to the other, is under these conditions meaningless; for each suffers just as much through a union maintained without full reciprocity. Thus the question of divorce presents itself to modern souls, in cases where there are no children. And when there are children—as is of course the rule—they think that the mistakes of parents do not absolve them from the duty of co-operating in the rearing of the children to whom they have given life.