In fear we try to keep the blinds down so that love may be decently obscured. Yet how can we ever begin to understand and deal with these problems of sex unless we will admit all the instincts and tendencies which ever lead us backwards to the more elemental phases of life? The deepest of the emotions is sex, and its action, like all the emotions that are fundamental, may be traced into a thousand bye-paths of the ordinary experience of each of us; it exercises its influence on every period of our development, and works subconsciously to control our actions in endless ways that we refuse to acknowledge. Hence the conflicts which manifest themselves so strangely and so fiercely in our lives. The emotional self refuses at times to be controlled by the reason self. Restraint cannot do much, and indeed, often brings deeper evil. For our unconscious selves are stronger than all the pretences we have set up by our conscious wills, either as individuals to encourage our own deceit or collectively as a nation in the hope of controlling conduct. This is why so much that is said to-day about sexual conduct is so foolish. The real question is not what people _ought to do_, but what they _actually do_ and want to do, and, therefore, are likely _to go on doing_. It is these facts that the reformers of marriage almost always fail to face. Having said this much, you will readily understand why I regard as necessary for the morality of marriage some public recognition of the relationship, and some accepted standard of conduct in it. We cannot, remembering the inherent defectiveness of our wills, safely hesitate and experiment in the liberties we can allow and the limits we must set to a force so strong as sexual love. Still less can we allow to be done in secret and in shameful darkness things that we will not face in the light. The unregulated union in any form does not seem to me to be practicable. Our sexual relationships are, or ought to be, so hedged about by duties, obligations, and consequences, that sexual conduct can never be considered as a personal question, and any society that permits such a view, whether openly acknowledged or secretly accepted, opens the way to real immorality and great unhappiness. Not all who cry “It is useless,” can do without the limiting safeguards of legal marriage. We still feel the serpent’s sting of jealousy, and the old questions, “Where do you come from?” “What have you been doing to-night?” “Who handled your body till daytime, while I watched and wept?” “In what bed did you lie and whom did you gladden with your smile?” are still felt in the heart, even if not uttered by the lips, of the most advanced and emancipated husbands and wives. For often we are forced into acts over which reason has no control. And our sex judgments are not merely moral, not just questions of understanding and forgiving, but also physical questions of the nerves, of the blood, of the fiercest instinct.