ion it has become an end, it has created itself
a title, a royal title. Our gardens cultivate flowers that are
all the more charming because they are sterile; why is the double
corolla of love held more infamous than the sterilized flowers of
our gardens?" Tarde replies that the reason is that our
politicians are merely ambitious persons thirsting for power and
wealth, and even when they are lovers they are Don Juans rather
than Virgils. "The future," he continues, "is to the Virgilians,
because if the ambition of power, the regal wealth of American or
European millionarism, once seemed nobler, love now more and more
attracts to itself the best and highest parts of the soul, where
lies the hidden ferment of all that is greatest in science and
art, and more and more those studious and artist souls multiply
who, intent on their peaceful activities, hold in horror the
business men and the politicians, and will one day succeed in
driving them back. That assuredly will be the great and capital
revolution of humanity, an active psychological revolution: the
recognized preponderance of the meditative and contemplative, the
lover's side of the human soul, over the feverish, expansive,
rapacious, and ambitious side. And then it will be understood
that one of the greatest of social problems, perhaps the most
arduous of all, has been the problem of love."

FOOTNOTES:

[375] _Quaestionum Convivalium_, lib. iii, quaestio 6.

[376] E.D. Cope, "The Marriage Problem," _Open Court_, Nov. 1888.

[377] Columbus meeting of the American Medical Association, 1900.

[378] Ellen Key, _Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 24.

[379] In an admirable article on Friedrich Schlegel's _Lucinde_
(_Mutterschutz_, 1906, Heft 5), Heinrich Meyer-Benfey, in pointing out
that the Catholic sacramental conception of marriage licensed love, but
failed to elevate it, regards _Lucinde_, with all its defects, as the
first expression of the unity of the senses and the soul, and, as such,
the basis of the new ethics of love. It must, however, be said that four
hundred years earlier Pontano had expressed this same erotic unity far
more robustly and wholesomely than Schlegel, though the Latin verse in
which he wrote, fresh and vital as it is, remained without influence.
Pontano's _Carmina_, including the "De Amore Conjugali," have at length
been reprinted in a scholarly edition by Soldat