er. It is a
mixture of science, sociology, and mysticism; it has a wider range than
an orderly book could possibly have; it touches more points, includes
more facts, and is more convincing, in its queer way, than any other.

"Love and Marriage" is the Talmud of sexual morality. It contains
history, wisdom, poetry, psychological analysis, shrewd judgments,
generous sympathies, ... and it all bears upon the creation of that new
sexual morality for which in a thousand ways--economic, artistic, and
spiritual--we are so astonishing a mixture of readiness and unreadiness.

Ellen Key is fundamentally a conservator. But she is careful about what
she conservates. It is the right to love which she would have us
cherish, rather than the right to own another person--the beauty of
singleness of devotion rather than the cruel habit of trying to force
people to carry out rash promises made in moments of exaltation. She
conserves the greatest things and lets the others go: motherhood, as
against the exclusive right of married women to bear children; and that
personal passion which is at once physical and spiritual rather than any
of the legally standardized relations. Nor does she hesitate to speak
out for the conservation of that old custom which persists among peasant
and primitive peoples all over the world and which has been reintroduced
to the public by a recent sociologist under the term of "trial
marriage"; it must be held, she says, as the bulwark against the
corruption of prostitution and made a part of the new morality.

It is perhaps in this very matter that her attitude is capable of
being most bitterly resented. For we have lost our sense of what is old
and good, and we give the sanction of ages to parvenu virtues that are
as degraded as the rococo ornaments which were born in the same year. We
have (or the Puritans among us have) lost all moral sense in the true
meaning of the word, in that we are unable to tell good from bad if it
be not among the things that were socially respectable in the year 1860.
Ellen Key writes: "The most delicate test of a person's sense of
morality is his power in interpreting ambiguous signs in the ethical
sphere; for only the profoundly moral can discover the dividing line,
sharp as the edge of a sword, between new morality and old immorality.
In our time, ethical obtuseness betrays itself first and foremost by the
condemnation of those young couples who freely unite their destinies.
The ma