All the facts seem to me to point in another direction for reform. I do not think that life's great central purpose of carrying on the race (not alone giving birth to fit children, but the equally necessary work of both parents uniting in caring for and bringing them up) can be left safely to be confused and wasted by its dependence on the gratification of personal desires. I wish that I thought otherwise. It would make it all so much easier. It is useless to point back here to the action of love's selection in the past history of life. As civilisation progresses, and as individual needs become elaborated and wealth increases, we tend to get further and further away from the realities of love. We choose our partners without understanding, and think very little of the needs of the future. What I want is to free marriage from those bonds that can be proved to act against practical morality. I do not wish at all to lessen its binding, only to defend it against the conventions of a false and narrow traditional morality. In love, as in every human relationship, it is character that avails and prevails--nothing else. Marriage is, or ought to be, the most practically moral institution that any civilisation is able to produce. Women and men are likely to get out of any form of the sexual association results in proportion to that which they put into it. A great many people put nothing into marriage, and they are disappointed when they get out of it--nothing. We shall put more into marriage, and not less, in proportion as we come to understand it and to value its enduring importance.