d in law the embryo possesses no rights which can be
injured. From the moral standpoint, also, it is argued, its destruction
often becomes justifiable in the interests of the community.

This debatable question, while instructive as an example of the radical
manner in which German women are now beginning to face moral questions,
deals only with an isolated point which has hardly yet reached the
sphere of practical politics.[64] It is more interesting to consider the
general conceptions which underlie this movement, and we can hardly do
this better than by studying the writings of Ellen Key, who is not only
one of its recognized leaders, but may be said to present its aims and
ideals in a broader and more convinced manner than any other writer.

Ellen Key's views are mainly contained in three books, _Love and
Marriage_, _The Century of the Child_, and _The Women's Movement_, in
which form they enjoy a large circulation, and are now becoming well
known, through translations, in England and America. She carefully
distinguishes her aims from what she regards as the American conception
of progress in woman's movements, that is to say the tendency for women
to seek to capture the activities which may be much more adequately
fulfilled by the other sex, while at the same time neglecting the far
weightier matters that concern their own sex. Man and woman are not
natural enemies who need to waste their energies in fighting over their
respective rights and privileges; in spiritual as in physical life they
are only fruitful together. Women, indeed, need free scope for their
activities--and the earlier aspirations of feminism are thus
justified--but they need it, not to wrest away any tasks that men may be
better fitted to perform, but to play their part in that field of
creative life which is peculiarly their own. Ellen Key would say that
the highest human unit is triune: father, mother, and child. Marriage,
therefore, instead of being, as it is to-day, the last thing to be
thought of in education, becomes the central point of life. In Ellen
Key's conception, "those who love each other are man and wife," and by
love she means not a temporary inclination, but "a synthesis of desire
and friendship," just as the air is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. It
must be this for both sexes alike, and Ellen Key sees a real progress in
what seems to her the modern tendency for men to realize that the soul
has its erotic side, and for women to