For this there is only one remedy conceivable. We have banned cannibalism and slavery and piracy and duelling, and we must ban one more ancient and cruel form of human oppression, the effort to hold people in the bonds of sex by any other power save that of love. I am aware that the reactionaries who read this book will take this sentence out of its context and quote it to prove that I am a "free lover." I shall be sorry to have that done, but even so, I was not willing to live in slavery myself, and I am not willing to advocate it for others. I am aware that there are degenerate and defective individuals, and that we have to make special provision for them, as I shall presently set forth; but the average, normal human being must be free to decide what is love for him, and what is happiness for him. Every person in the world will have to deny himself the right to demand love where love is not freely given, and all lovers in the world will have to hold themselves ready to let the loved one go if and when the loved one demands it. I am aware that this is a hard saying, and a hard duty, but it is one that life lays upon us, and one that there is no escaping. CHAPTER XLVI THE PROBLEM OF DIVORCE (Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and one of the means of preventing infidelity and prostitution.) You will hear sermons and read newspaper editorials about the "divorce evil," and you will find that to the preacher or editor this "evil" consists of the fact that more and more people are refusing to stay unhappily married. It does not interest these moralizers if the statistics show that it is women who are getting most of the divorces, and that the meaning of the phenomenon is that women are refusing to continue living with drunken and dissolute men. To the clergy, the breaking of a marriage is an evil _per se_, and regardless of circumstances. They know this because God has told them so, and in the name of God they seek to keep people tied in sex unions which have come to mean loathing instead of love. Now, I will assert it as a mathematical certainty that a considerable percentage of marriages must fail. It is essential to progress that human beings should grow, both mentally and spiritually, and manifestly they cannot all grow in the same way. If they grow differently, must they not sometimes lose the power to make each other happy in the marital bonds? Who does not know the man who masters life and becomes a vital force, while his wife remains dull and empty? If such a man changes wives, the world in general denounces him as a selfish beast; but the world does not know nor does it care about those thousands of men who, not caring to be branded as selfish beasts, fulfill the needs of their lives by keeping mistresses in secret.