in enforced abstinence from marriage -- The “maintenance question” a crying scandal of our time -- A characteristic letter -- The radical evil of conventional morality -- Insurance of motherhood -- Homes for pregnant women and for infants -- The rights of the “illegitimate” child -- Suggestions regarding a statistical inquiry relating to free love and illegitimate offspring in the upper classes -- Examples of celebrated personalities. CHAPTER XI The problem of “free love” is the burning question of our time. Upon its proper solution depends the future of civilization, and our ultimate liberation from the ignominious conditions of the amatory life of the present day, dependent as these are upon coercive marriage. This is our firm conviction, our profound belief, one which we share with many, and those not the worst minds of our day. Free love is neither, as malevolent opponents maintain, the abolition of marriage, nor is it the organization of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse. Free love and extra-conjugal sexual intercourse have nothing whatever to do one with the other. Indeed, I go so far as to maintain that true free love, as it must and will prevail, will limit casual and unregulated extra-conjugal sexual intercourse =to a far greater extent= than coercive marriage has ever succeeded in doing. Above all, free love will ennoble sexual intercourse. For the longer, in existing economic conditions, we cling to the antiquated “coercive marriage,” which has so long been in need of reform, the smaller is the number of those who desire to marry, the more advanced becomes the age of marriage, the greater becomes the general sexual wretchedness, the deeper shall we sink into the mephitic slough of prostitution, towards which the increasing promiscuity of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse inevitably leads us. For this is the peculiar, hypocritical, and absurd mode of argument of those who uphold conventional marriage; they despise and brand with infamy every sexual relationship of two adult independent persons based upon free love, and sanction quite openly casual transitory extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, devoid of all personal relationships, not only with prostitutes, but also with respectable women. “Bachelorhood,” says Max Nordau, “is very far from being equivalent to sexual continence. The bachelor receives from society the tacit permission to indulge in the convenience of intercourse with woman, when and where he can; it calls his self-seeking pleasures ‘successes,’ and surrounds them with a kind of poetic glory; and the amiable vice of Don Juan arouses in society a feeling composed of envy, sympathy, and secret admiration.”[186] On the other hand, =this same= conventional coercive marriage morality demands from the girl complete sexual continence and intactness until the time of her marriage!