With the growing desire for a many-sided enhancement of life, parentage will also become an ever more important condition of this enhancement. Young people will be no more willing to depreciate by a premature sexual life the value of those years which ought to be devoted to furthering their individual growth, than they will be to diminish their joy of parentage by putting a weak and unwelcome child into the world. For they will wish to possess all happiness fully and frankly. The expected child ought to give them beautiful dreams, not tormenting uneasiness; it must be carried in rejoicing, not in unwilling, arms, and must have received life from the fulness of happiness—not from a mischance. Here as everywhere, what is the most genuine and lasting happiness for the individual is also for the moral enhancement the race. When two lovers have this desire and have reached that maturity, when the will has a right to realisation, and is in full agreement with the health and beauty of themselves, of the new generation, and of society, it is right that they should come together, even though it may not be possible for their pure desire of common life and common work to take the form of marriage. For him who has ears to hear, these figures will speak: they show that the average age of unlawful unions is the right age appointed by nature for marriage. Thus the statistics of Sweden for 1900 show that 6340 “illegitimate” children were born of mothers between 20 and 25 years old, while those born of mothers under 20 were 2028, and of mothers between 25 and 30, 3857. Another eloquent fact is that, even before the extension of compulsory military service, the highest figures of emigration, for men as well as women, occur among the unmarried within a year or two on either side of twenty. By unlawful unions, the race is often defrauded of the children’s fitness for life, which is ruined by the unfavourable conditions in which the children are brought up; and by emigration the best blood of the country is drained away. And even if the latter is occasioned by a variety of causes, no thoughtful person could omit to reckon among them the difficulty of marrying at the right time. Another equally eloquent circumstance fully supported by statistical evidence is this: that prostitution increases in direct proportion as the general social conditions and the economical situation are unfavourable to marriage, and that it decreases as marriage is facilitated. And the majority of prostitutes—as of unmarried mothers—are of the right age for marriage.