The relationship affording “protection” has also brought with it the idea that a woman could not show her love as openly as a man, except when he was proud and poor and she was rich. Only when the duty of support on the part of the man ceases, will woman be able to demand the same chastity and fidelity from him as he demands from her; she will then be able, quite as proudly and naturally as he, to show the flowering of her being—her love—instead of as now increasing her demand in the marriage market by artful dissimulation. As long as maintenance, within or outside of marriage, is the price for “possession” of the woman, the man will consider the woman as “his,” and the more submissive she is the more fully she satisfies his feeling of ownership. Now marriage has become only an affair of custom, a common death or comatose condition, because neither party needs trouble himself to keep the love of the other. Only when woman, through her work, can lead an existence worthy of a human being, when no woman will sell her love but every woman can freely give it, will man experience what perfect womanly devotion is. And when no man can “possess” love but must remain worthy of love in order to be loved then only will women, on their side, experience what tenderness and fine feeling masculine devotion can attain. This, the purest and warmest erotic idealism, is the morality of the future. But the way to its realisation is not, as many women believe to-day, that mothers, even, should continue their work of earning a livelihood, but that way whose direction I have elsewhere pointed out.[4] Here we have to do, however, only with the spiritual conditions which arise in the marriage of to-day, whether the wife has retained her work or has given it up. * * * * *