You may say that I am using words arbitrarily, in endeavoring thus to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable jealousy, and calling the former by some other name. It does not make much difference about words, provided I make clear my meaning. I could point out a whole string of words which have good meanings and bad meanings, and cannot be discussed without preliminary explanations and distinctions; religion, for example, and morality, and aristocracy, and justice, to name only a few. Most people's thinking about marriage and love has been made like soup in a cheap restaurant, by dumping in all kinds of scraps and notions from such opposite poles of human thought as Christian monkery and Renaissance license, absurdly called "romance." So before you can do any thinking about a problem like jealousy, you have to agree to use the word to mean something definite, whether good or bad. We shall take jealousy as a "bad" word, and use it to mean the setting up, by a man or woman, of some claim to the love of another person, which claim cannot be justified in the court of reason and fair play. This includes, in the first place, all claims based upon a courtship, not ratified by marriage. It is to the interest of society and the race that men and women should be free to investigate persons of the other sex, and to experiment with the affections before pledges of marriage are made. If sensible customs of love and just laws of marriage were made, there would be no excuse for a woman's giving herself to a man before marriage; she should be taught not to do it, and then if she does it, the risk is her own, and the disgusting perversion of venality and greed known as the "breach of promise suit" should be unknown in our law. The young should be taught that it is the other person's right to change his mind and withdraw at any time before marriage; whatever pains and pangs this may cause must be borne in silence. The second kind of jealousy is that which seeks to keep in the marriage bond a person who is not happy in it and has asked to be released. The law sanctions this kind of cowardly selfishness, which manifests itself every day on the front pages of our newspapers--a spectacle of monstrous and loathsome passions unleashed and even glorified. Husbands set the bloodhounds of the law after wives who have fled with some other man, and send the man to a cell, and drag the woman back to a loveless home. Wives engage private detectives, and trail their husbands to some "love nest," and then ensue long public wrangles, with washing of filthy linen, and the matter is settled by a "separation." The virtuous wife, who may have driven the man away by neglect or vanity or stupidity, is granted a share of his earnings for the balance of her life; and two more people are added to the millions who are denied sexual happiness under the law, and are thereby impelled to live as law violators.