For the sake of clearness, it has been necessary to sum up here the main ideas of the following exposition. In some measure it will therefore be also necessary to return to them during the following treatment of the movements which have the deepest influence on sexual morality: _the evolution of love_, its _freedom_ and its _selection_; the claims of a _right to_ and an _exemption from motherhood_; of _collective motherhood_, of _free divorce_, and of a _new marriage law_. CHAPTER II THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE Just as the Swedes, in comparison with some other of the Germanic peoples, are behindhand in their view of _l’amour passion_, so are the Germanic races as a whole behindhand as compared with the foremost Latin peoples. The Gallic counterpart of the Lutheran doctrine of marriage is to be found in another monk, Luther’s contemporary, Rabelais, with his joyous project of a new kind of convent, where every monk should have his nun, with the power of separating after a year of probation; a plan which perhaps would not have been a much more roundabout way of educating mankind to love than was the Lutheran doctrine of marriage. Nothing is farther from the truth than that the Reformation increased respect for love and woman. It raised the esteem for the married state as compared with the unmarried, but it enhanced neither the position of woman in matrimony nor the importance of love in regard to marriage. Even in the Middle Ages, the Latin nations render a homage to woman which to-day is still almost incomprehensible to the man of a Germanic race. And if, on the one hand, this homage took the form of the cult of Venus, which is born in the Latin blood, on the other, it expressed through the cult of Mary its reverence for what is deepest in woman, motherhood. Even to-day, the Frenchwoman is esteemed not according to her age but according to her qualities. It is not only the mothers who worship their sons, but also the latter their mothers; and not only the mother, but besides her every admirable elderly woman receives attention in social life as in the family from men of all ages. The middle-class wife—though indeed at the cost of the children—co-operates in her husband’s calling with a seriousness unknown in the Germanic middle-class. In France as in Italy, family life has a kind of warm intimacy which the German does not understand; since the Latin temperament lacks that geniality which sheds its light over the frequently rough lines and harsh colours of the landscape of the Germanic soul. It is rather the coldness of his disposition than the strength of his soul that makes the German so much less erotic than the Southerner; it is more indifference to woman than respect for her that expresses itself in the distinction between the erotic customs of North and South. But when all this has been admitted for the sake of justice, we may fairly lay stress upon the influence of the Germanic