To reach this sublime goal, to hope at least to attain it, we must above all scrape off from modern love the hundred coats of hypocrisy; we must not have our children learn love as a crime in the house of vice; but immediately, at the first dawn of youth, they should be taught that it is a sublime delight conceded to the good and the noble and is to be conquered in the same manner as glory and wealth. Not the chambermaid or the prostitute, but a modest and pure girl should be the first teacher of love; a woman who should teach us love before voluptuousness, to be chaste in our desires in order to possess her some day. We conceal and believe that we are able with silence to suppress the passions and suffocate the desires; but we have concealed too much and have been silent too long. In the most puritanical country in the world, England, one of the most honest and wisest physicians of London published a book--that has already reached the ninth edition--in which he frankly dared assert that free love, without fecundation, is the only remedy against the proteiform corruption that invades modern society, because of the impossibility for most of the people of morally satisfying one of the most powerful needs. This book was a distressing surprise to me. When they can write such a book as this in England and devour nine editions, when an honest physician can calmly discuss _preventive intercourse_, when Malthus finds such an eloquent and daring commentator who brings his theory from the field of economy into that of morality, of hygiene and even of religion, I believe it my duty to affirm that society is thoroughly diseased and (I say it loudly) should be cured. Yes; modern society, infected with so much prostitution and adultery, and incessantly proclaiming itself monogamous while it is largely polygamous, demands a physician to cure its sores, to cleanse it from so much degradation, to concede loves virtuous and more free, or at least less soiled with filth and lies. And this physician must be a less hypercritical and less exacting morality, but at the same time more exalted, because more human; a morality that should teach us never to separate voluptuousness from love, and that chastity is the most beautiful and holiest of joys and the most watchful guardian of love. The elect never prostitute themselves, not even in these times, because they love, and because, having once entered the paradise of love, they feel too great repugnance to descend to the mire of the simony of voluptuousness. They should exert all their faculties with all their strength in order that the masses, too, may elevate themselves to the high spheres in which they dwell, and where they breathe a purer air and cull the most delicate and beautiful flowers. CHAPTER XIX FAULTS AND CRIMES OF LOVE