more impossible; the insatiable one is continually forced to fly to grosser means in order to quench his desire in some degree, to indulge with increasing frequency, but with diminishing festival gladness. He who has sunk to this kind of intoxication becomes by degrees as weak-willed, as heartless, as devoid of character and conscience as the dipsomaniac, and equally incapable of selection and appreciation within the sphere of his appetites. The most sublime woman’s love will at last leave him as insusceptible as is the drunkard to the liquid topaz of Rhenish wine, its bouquet and dewy freshness. “Love’s freedom” will finally mean to him nothing but freedom from responsibility, from consideration, from danger, and from expense. In comparison with this kind of “free love,” prostitution is doubtless more dangerous to health, but far less injurious to personality. Prostitution detracts from personality by a cleaving which excludes the soul; but it does not consume the personality in the same way as the “love” with which a man buys women who are not venal. If they expect him to redeem his bonds in true coin, they will be disappointed. Love may possess, according to his belief, no sterling value: he regards it as always a forged note with which nature obtains the co-operation of human beings—especially of women—to her ends. This love knows no atmosphere but that of the alcoves where it has pursued its bought or stolen pleasure. It has never breathed the air of the wilds, the air which quivers with sunshine and shakes with storms; the air through which murmurs all life’s longing for renewal, all the wistful intuition of eternity born of a hunger for happiness, which raises generation above generation towards unknown goals; an air which immeasurably enhances and eternally absorbs vitality; the air of the wide expanses, where ferocity and madness are not yet extinct, where man and woman fight their eternal battles and suffer their eternal pains; pains whose source even Lucretius knew to be dualism. But that only unity is capable of sealing up this source—that was known to none before our own time. In literature it is sometimes from the alcoves, sometimes from these wilds that the complaint arises of the mastery of the sexual instinct. In the works of not a few of the writers on morality one fails to find even a suspicion of these wildernesses of human life. These teachers betray their ignorance in a boundless narrow-mindedness, a narrow-mindedness which includes the most far-reaching questions of humanity among—gymnastic and bath apparatus! To their short-sighted view, immorality has revealed itself not only as venal but in the shape of “free love.” They do not suspect that free love as well as marriage includes many degrees of morality and immorality, rising above or sinking below the ethical zero, at which both the free love and the marriage of the majority are to be found.