“Free love,” on the other hand, gives them an enhancement of life which they consider that they gain without injuring anyone. It answers to their idea of love’s chastity, an idea which is justly offended by the incompleteness of the period of engagement with all its losses in the freshness and frankness of emotion. When their soul has found another soul, when the senses of both have met in a common longing, then they consider that they have a right to the full unity of love, although compelled to secrecy, since the conditions of society render early marriage impossible. They are thus freed from a wasteful struggle, which would neither give them peace nor inner purity and which would be doubly hard for them, since they have attained the end—love—for the sake of which self-control would have been imposed. When in this connection we speak of youth, we can mean only the young men and girls of the upper classes. For among the rest of society the free union of love has long been the custom. Our working classes—as those of many European countries—simply use the same freedom which the custom of society allows to many extra-European peoples. Ethnographical research shows that this is no new degraded habit, but, on the contrary, a relic of primitive customs. Among certain extra-European peoples—for example, one in north Burmah—this custom was accompanied by definite guarantees for the possible children. Young people may without hindrance unite freely, and separate if they do not find their feeling deep enough for continued life together. In the contrary case, they marry, and after marriage infidelity is as good as unknown. If the girl becomes a mother, without a marriage following, the man is obliged to secure the child through a sum paid to the girl’s father, who is then answerable for it. It is from similar sexual customs that the majority of our Swedish people derive theirs—that people which in royal and academic speeches has gained the character of being “the most law-abiding and loyal” in the world. Failing a deeper love or a sense of responsibility, these customs involve the abandonment of the woman, infanticide, and sometimes the prostitution of the woman, when she has passed from one man to another; finally the encumbrance of society with the children of different fathers to whom she has given life, besides the neglect of the children. And the custom leads—even in those cases where both love and responsibility are present, but where the lovers are too young—to the enfeebling of themselves and of the children, and to the great mortality of the latter. Not only hard labour and scanty food, but also a premature sexual life, contribute to hinder the full bodily development of the lower classes and to hasten their growing old.