The believers in Life, on the other hand, know that vital needs were the productive soil of the feelings that gave the pith to those laws, whereof now only the straw remains. But the earth has not exhausted its powers of fertility, any more than the feelings have lost their creative force. The believers in Life, therefore, attach small importance to the old straw, but consider the increasing of the earth’s productiveness of supreme significance. A great and healthy will to live is what our time needs in the matter of the erotic emotions and claims. It is here that there is a menace of real dangers from the woman’s side; and it is, amongst other things, to avert these dangers that new forms of marriage must be created. A human material increasing in value and in capacity for development—this is what the earth will produce. The chances of obtaining this may be decreased under fixed, but favoured under freer, forms of sexual life. It is not only because the present day demands more freedom that these claims are full of promise. They are so because the claims are coming nearer and nearer to the kernel of the question—the certainty that love is the most perfect condition for the life-enhancement of the race and of the individual—and because the present time acknowledges the necessity of temporarily limiting freedom, though only by means of laws which will form an education in love. Such a law must, for the sake of woman’s liberty, deprive man of certain of his present rights; for the sake of the children, limit the present liberty both of man and woman. But these limitations will all be to the final profit of love. Those who believe in the perfectibility of mankind for and through love must, however, learn to reckon not in hundreds of years, and still less in tens, but in thousands. FOOTNOTES: [1] Many of the facts in the foregoing pages are taken from a detailed biographical pamphlet on Ellen Key by J. F. D. Mossel in the series of _Mannen en Vrouwen von Beteekenis in Onze Dagen_. The reader may be referred to an interesting account of Ellen Key, from personal knowledge, by Miss Helen Zimmern, in _Putnam’s Magazine_, Jan., 1908. [2] In England, Tennyson, in _The Princess_, was the first to give to “the new woman” her name and to speak of her objects, and many others began in the middle of the last century indirectly to develop the idea of love, especially Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the sisters Brontë, and Miss Muloch among women writers. Robert Browning, George Meredith, and other great poets among the men have also furthered it indirectly. In later days, George Egerton in _Rosa Amorosa_ and Edward Carpenter in _Love’s Coming of Age_ have, in their different ways, given a remarkable treatment of the evolution of love. _Woman Free_ by Ellis Ethelmer, _A Noviciate for Marriage_ by Edith M. Ellis, _The Woman Who Did_ by Grant Allen, belong to the same group of writings. [3] Walt Whitman.