The preservation of the race can be left to look after itself. Race-suicide only becomes a peril when the relations of men and women become perverted and unnatural as they commonly do in our present social order. When at one end of society, the bringing up of families entails an economic burden too heavy to be borne, and at the other, the hedonism which accompanies excessive wealth tends to a sensuality which refuses to accept the natural risks and to pay the natural price of the sex-relation, a poisonous arrest is unavoidably laid upon the normal operation of the sex-instincts. The most easily perverted endowment of human nature is sex, and it cannot retain a balanced and healthy functioning under disordered conditions of life. The incessant discussion of marriage and divorce misses the point largely because it ignores the background of the problem. While we regard the physical distinction of sex as the primary fact to be considered in relation to woman, and still cling to the obsession so dear to bourgeois respectability that her business is motherhood and “her place is the home,” so long, that is, as we regard her life and its purpose as dependent upon man, so long will judgment be deflected from its true pole at its very source. Wholesome and free men and women will continue to fall in love with one another and will want to have children of each other, where to-day because their relations are unwholesome and unequal, they tend only to seek possession of one another, without any disposition (not to speak of eagerness) to welcome the fruit of their union; and too often with the deliberate intention of preventing the fruitage. For the disorder which leads to this confusion of the sex-relation, the first remedy is to establish the independence of the woman.