It is my hope to point the way to a higher system. I should like to call it marriage; but perhaps it would be more precise to call it marriage-minus-prostitution. In working it out, we shall have to think for ourselves, and discard all formulas. It is obvious that our present-day religious creeds, ethical ideals, legal codes, and social rewards and punishments have been powerless to protect marriage, or to make it the rule in sex relationships. So we shall have to begin at the beginning and find new reasons for monogamous love, a new basis of marriage other than the protection of private property. We shall have to inform ourselves as to the fundamental purposes of sex; we shall have to ask ourselves: What are the factors which determine rightness and wrongness in the sex relationship? What is love, and what ought it to be? These questions we shall try to approach without any fixed ideas whatever. We shall decide them by the same tests that we have used in our thinking about God and immortality, health and disease. We shall ask, not what our ancestors believed, not what God teaches us, not what the law ordains, not what is "respectable," nor yet what is "advanced," according to the claim of modern sex revolutionists and "free lovers." We shall ask ourselves, what are the facts. We shall ask, what can be made to work in practice, what can justify itself by the tests of reason and common sense. CHAPTER XXIX THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARRIAGE (Deals with the sex-relationship, its meaning and its history, the stages of its development in human society.) What, in the most elemental form, is sex? It is a difference of function which makes it necessary for two organisms to take part in the reproduction of the species. The purpose, or at any rate the effect, of this sex difference is the mixing of characteristics and qualities. If the sex relationship were unnecessary to reproduction, variations might begin, and be propagated and carried to extremes in one line of inheritance, without ever affecting the rest of the species. Very soon there would be no species, or rather an infinity of them; each line of descent would fly apart, and become a group all by itself. You have perhaps heard people comment on the fact that blondes so frequently prefer brunettes, and that tall men are apt to marry short women, and vice versa. This is perhaps nature's way of keeping the type uniform, of spreading qualities widely and testing them thoroughly. Nature is continually trying out the powers of every individual in every species, and by the process of sexual selection she chooses, for the reproduction of the species, the individuals which are best fitted for survival. This, of course, refers to nature, considered apart from man. In human society, as I shall presently show, sexual selection has been distorted, and partly suppressed.