If these principles were strictly carried out in practical life, without doubt, and as a matter of absolute certainty, the number of divorces would not increase, but would diminish, and we should sooner witness the realization of the ideal of true marriage, as the lifelong union of two free personalities, fully conscious of their duties and their rights. The high ethical and social significance of family life will ever continue, even under the freest love, by which, as I must again and again insist, I do not understand unrestricted and continually changing extra-conjugal sexual intercourse. Against this the gravest considerations must be urged. What “free love” is, is already apparent from the preceding exposition, but in the next chapter the subject will be more thoroughly discussed. APPENDIX ONE HUNDRED TYPICAL MARRIAGES AND SOME CHARACTERISTIC PICTURES OF THE MARRIED STATE, AFTER GROSS-HOFFINGER In a long-forgotten, but very interesting, book by Dr. Anton J. Gross-Hoffinger, entitled “The Fate of Women, and Prostitution in Relation to the Principle of the Indissolubility of Catholic Marriage, and especially in Relation to the Laws of Austria and the Philosophy of our Time,”[185] we find a collection, equally interesting to psychologists and to students of human character, to the physician, the jurist, and the sociologist, of a hundred typical marriages, and also a more detailed description of the course of a few marriages. These sketches deserve to be preserved from oblivion, because they will serve equally well as an example of marriages of our time. In the first place, the author discusses the principal difficulties of marriage. He then asks whether, in view of the smallness of the number of those comparatively happy persons who have found it possible to live a legal and at the same time a natural family life, the existing marriage laws, religious ideas, and social customs have attained their aim, whether they give rise, as a general rule, to happy and fruitful, honourable and blessed unions. The author hesitated long before presenting for the first time “to the Catholic world the picture of the actual state of marriages in that world, a picture based upon numerous experiences and observations.” He investigated one hundred marriages of persons belonging to the most diverse classes, without selection, as they came under his observation by chance; then, again, another hundred, and once again a third hundred. Always the results were equally sad; always the ratio between happy and unhappy marriages was the same. The result of his investigations was, he states: “Although I have earnestly sought for happy marriages, my search has to this extent been vain, that I have never been able to satisfy myself that =happy= marriages are anything but =extremely isolated exceptions to the general rule=.”