Solitary love is not only a sin against hygiene, and one which kills health and vigor, but it is also an offense against morals, a poison of happiness. He who repeatedly falls into the crime and is frequently obliged to blush, tarnishes more every day the limpid purity of his own dignity, weakens the strong spring of virile resolutions and becomes a greater coward in all the battles of life. While he blushes for himself and curses himself and the love that condemns him to a continuous debasement, he blushes more than ever in the presence of the woman of whom he does not feel worthy and of whom he becomes less worthy at each fall. He poisons the wave of love at its very first source and, even when he later succeeds in loving, has spoiled the purity of his tastes and his aspirations and in the arms of a woman who loves him complains of the solitary twinges of a morbid voluptuousness, like one who, having burned his mouth with the pungent tastes of pipe and brandy, can no longer relish the flavors of pineapple and strawberry. Love is the greatest of conquests, the sweetest of delights, the joy of joys; to renounce it in order to replace it with degradation is worse than a crime, it is an infamy. Better a hundred times chastity with its sublime tortures, prostitution with its filth. True and complete love is a splendid banquet under the fragrant trees of a garden, amidst the glittering of the chalices, the harmonies of music and the witty jests of friends; solitary love is a furtive meal with a bone picked up in the fetidness of a dunghill and gnawed in the dark. Prostitution is, after solitary abuse, the greatest degradation of love, and, what is worse,--it should be said at once,--a necessary one in modern society. Tibullus hurls at it a splendid malediction: "Jam tua qui Venerem docuisti vendere primus Quisquis es, infelix urgeat ossa lapis!" ("Whoever thou art who first hast taught to sell the pleasures of love, may an ill-boding stone crush thy bones!") This imprecation, repeated by all moralists of every succeeding age, could not prevent for one day the sale of love, and universal experience demonstrates that St. Augustine was a sounder philosopher when he wrote: "Aufer meretrices de rebus humanis, turbaveris omnia libidinibus; constitue matronarum loco, labe ac dedecore dehonestaveris." ("Take the prostitutes out of human things, and you will disturb the whole world with lust; put them in the place of wives, and you will defile home with disease and dishonor.") If St. Augustine had written but this sentence, I would proclaim him a great psychologist; in a few words he has shown all the sides of the tremendous problem, given a lesson of toleration to the intolerant, of social science to economists, and today, after so many centuries, his words are as true, profound, inexorable as when he addressed them to a world so different from ours.