More especially among the upper classes of modern European and American society is there apparent an increasing disinclination to marriage, or, to employ a phrase of the moral statistician Drobisch, there is a decline in the intensity of the marriage impulse. Although the often burning money question no doubt plays its part, that part is, on the whole, much smaller than the part played by the ever-increasing difficulties of individual spiritual harmony, difficulties dependent on differences in age, character, education, views of life, and individual development during marriage. This disinclination to marry is nourished by certain tendencies of the time to be subsequently described, and by certain changes in the relations between the sexes. To many also the idea of “=conjugal rights=,” as established by law, appears a horrible compulsion, an assignment to physical and spiritual prostitution. The modern consciousness of free personality, in fact, no longer harmonizes with that stoical conception of duty in marriage such as, for example, is described by B. Chateaubriand in his memoirs, although, of course, every one who enters on marriage ought to be aware that by doing so he assigns to the other party certain rights, the non-fulfilment of which actually destroys the character and the idea of marriage. Thus, the conduct of a schoolmistress of Berlin, who persistently refused physical surrender to her husband, on the ground that she had wished merely to contract an “ideal” marriage (of the same kind as the mystical “reformed marriage” of the American woman Alice Stockham), demands emphatic condemnation. But an abominable =misuse= of “conjugal rights” is unquestionably made by inconsiderate husbands, who demand from their wives unlimited, excessively frequent, gratification of their sexual desire, without any regard to the wife’s physical and spiritual condition at the time. That in this respect the idea of “conjugal rights” is greatly in need of revision has been convincingly proved by Dorothee Goebeler in an essay entitled “Conjugal Rights,” published in the _Welt am Montag_ of August 6, 1906. Too frequently, also, it happens that the husband simply transfers into his married life previous customs of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, and makes use in marriage of the experience he has gained in intercourse with prostitutes or with priestesses of the love of the moment; he treats his wife as an object of sensual lust, without paying any regard to her individuality and to her more delicate erotic needs.