But neither is it a question of spreading a gospel of "free love," in the perverse sense in which the clergy conceive such a gospel. The considerations I have given above should make this plain enough. It is a question of securing freedom and love for the hundreds of thousands of mature women who cannot marry, or who do not choose to enter upon the very precarious experiment of surrendering their privacy and independence: a question of breaking the tyranny of an old superstition which, by means of public opinion, forbids so many women to have the child they desire to have, or the share of happiness from which they are excluded: a question of putting an end to a vast amount of needless suffering and privation and hypocrisy. The State would gain rather than lose by this freedom: it is the Church only that would suffer. Thousands of women already hold these views, as the open circulation of the _Freewoman_ (a few years ago) and of our bolder novelists shows. The feeling gains ground yearly, and the time is approaching when that seal of ignominy which our priest-made law puts on the "illegitimate" child will be removed, and men and women will cease to speak of "lust." Sex-pleasure has no more taint than any other, and the notion that it is justified only as an accompaniment to the begetting of children, or to lessen the risk of adultery, is childishly irrational and generally insincere. Laws there must be: but the laws must be made for men, not men for the laws. It is time that Europe shook off the conceptions of conduct which were imposed on it by impotent monks like Gregory VII., and framed its own rules in accordance with the new and healthier attitude toward life. Asceticism is a commercial speculation--the sacrifice of earth for a double share of heaven--which we have no longer reason to appreciate. The progress of this view will be assisted by two contemporary reforms of received opinion. One regards the economic dependence of woman on man, which I will discuss later. I need only recall here that some of the worst evils of our marriage-system--the scheming and bartering and linking for life--are due to this dependence. The other reform is the widespread and increasing rejection of the old idea that a woman must bear as many children as nature will permit her to have.