e most passionate love is often the most likely
to end in disaster. Nor do I think that the evil is much lessened when
no legal bond is entered into. Those few people who have made a
success of Free-love would probably have made an equal success of
marriage. I know personally several cases in which the same woman, and
many in which the same man, has tried in succession legal marriage and
free unions and has been equally unhappy in both.

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.

After all it is the people of any race who make marriage, not marriage
the people. The form of union is but a symbol of the people's
character, their desires, and capacities. If we have evolved the wrong
women and men, then any reform of marriage is vain. Have we in our
weakened civilisation drifted so far from life that the inherent
attributes of loyalty and discipline to the future are no longer with
us in suffi