ce will be required at our hands. Many
women, and some men, do not realise at all the immense complications
of sex and the claims passion makes on many natures. I am sure that
this is the explanation of much of the foolish talk that one hears. I
tried to make clear in the first chapters of this book the
irresistible elemental power of the uncurbed sexual instincts. And
this force is at least as strong now as it was in the beginning of
life. For in sex we have, as yet, learnt very little. We who are
living among the sophistication of aeroplanes, the inheritors of the
knowledge of all the ages, have still to pass in wonder along the
paths of love, entering into it blindly and making all the old
mistakes.

Am I, then, afraid that I plead thus for caution? No, I am not. I rest
my faith in the development of the racial element in love side by side
with its personal ends of physical and spiritual joy. For the sex
impulses, which have ruled women and men, will assuredly come to be
ruled by them. Just as in the past life has been moulded and carried
on by love's selection, acting unconsciously and ignorant of the ends
it followed, so in the future the race will be developed and carried
onwards by deliberate selection, and the creative energy of love will
become the servant of women and men. The mighty dynamic force will
then be capable of further and, as yet, unrealised development. This
is no vain hope. It has its proof in the past history of the selective
power of love. The problems of our individual loves are linked on to
the racial life. The hope for improvement rests thus in a growing
understanding of the individual's relation to the race, and in an
expansion of our knowledge and practice of the high duties love
enforces.

Let us look now at the practical direction of the present. We have
reached these conclusions as a starting-point--

(1) We have inherited marriage as a social, nay more, a racial
institution.

(2) The practical moral end of marriage, whether we regard it from
the wider biological standpoint or from the narrower standpoint of
society, is a selection of the sexes by means of love, having as its
social object the carrying on of the race, and as its personal object
a mutual life of complete physical, mental, and psychical union.

(3) The first of these, the racial object, is the concern of the
State; the second, the personal need of love, is the concern of the
individual woman and man.

(4) It is th