Max Marcus and other physicians have recently discussed the question whether the medical man is justified in recommending extra-conjugal sexual intercourse. I myself, as a physician, and as an ardent supporter of the efforts for the suppression of venereal diseases, in view of the enormous increase of professional prostitution (both public and private), and in view also of the extraordinarily wide diffusion of venereal diseases, feel compelled to answer this question, generally speaking, =in the negative=. Yet I look to the introduction of free love, and in association with free love of a new sexual morality, in accordance with which man and woman are regarded as two free personalities, with equal rights and also equal responsibilities, as the only possible rescue from the misery of prostitution and of venereal disease. Place the free woman beside the free man, inspire both with the profound sense of =responsibility= which will result from the activity of the love of two free personalities, and you will see that to them and to their children such love will bring true happiness. Before going further into this problem of free love, I will give a brief account of the history of the question during the nineteenth century. We shall see that quite a number of leading spirits, morally lofty natures, were occupied with the question, because they were deeply impressed with the intolerable character of existing conditions in the sexual sphere, and were convinced that help was only to be found in a relaxation of those conditions in the sense of a =freer= conception of sexual relationships. In addition to the romanticists (_vide supra_, pp. 169 and 175) in the beginning of the nineteenth century in England, William Godwin, the lover and husband of Mary Wollstonecraft (the celebrated advocate of woman’s rights), in his “Political Justice,” declared the conventional coercive marriage to be an obsolete institution, by which the freedom of the individual was seriously curtailed. Marriage is a question of property, and one person ought not to become the property of another. Godwin maintained that the abolition of marriage would have no evil consequences. The free love and subsequent marriage of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft deserves a short description. Godwin was of opinion that the members of a family should not see too much of one another. He also believed that they would interfere with one another’s work if they lived in the same house. For this reason he furnished some rooms for himself at a little distance from Mary Wollstonecraft’s dwelling, and often first appeared at her house at a late lunch; the intervening hours were spent by both in literary work. They exchanged letters also during the day.[189] Doubtless under the influence of the views of Godwin, Shelley, in the notes to “Queen Mab,” writes a violent polemic against coercive marriage. He says: