es in her
femininely clever and frank discussion of present-day conditions, _Die
Sexuelle Krise_, will be full, strong, elementary natures, devoid alike
of the impulse to destroy or the aptitude to be destroyed. She
considers, moreover, that so far from romantic love being a thing of the
past, "love as a form of worship is reserved for the future."[88] In the
past it has only been found among a few rare souls; in the future world,
fostered by the finer selection of a conscious eugenics, and a new
reverence and care for motherhood, we may reasonably hope for a truly
efficient humanity, the bearers and conservers of the highest human
emotions. It is in this sense, indeed, that the voices of the greatest
and most typical leaders of the woman's movement of emancipation to-day
are heard. Ellen Key, in her _Love and Marriage_, seeks to conciliate
the cultivation of a free and sacred sexual relationship with the
worship of the child, as the embodiment of the future race, while Olive
Schreiner proclaims in her _Woman and Labour_ that the woman of the
future will walk side by side with man in a higher and deeper
relationship than has ever been possible before because it will involve
a new community in activity and insight.

Nor is it alone from the feminine side that these forecasts are made.
Certainly for the most part love has been cultivated more by women than
by men. Primacy in the genius of intellect belongs incontestably to men,
but in the genius of love it has doubtless oftener been achieved by
women. They have usually understood better than men that in this matter,
as Goethe insisted, it is the lover and not the beloved who reaps the
chief fruits of love. "It is better to love, even violently," wrote the
forsaken Portuguese nun, in her immortal _Letters_, "than merely to be
loved." He who loses his life here saves it, for it is only in so far as
he becomes a crucified god that Love wins the sacrifice of human hearts.
Of late years, by an inevitable reaction, women have sometimes forgotten
this eternal verity. The women of the twentieth century in their anxiety
for self-possession and their rightful eagerness to gain positions they
feel they have been too long excluded from, have perhaps yet failed to
realize that the women of the eighteenth century, who exerted a sway
over life that the women of no age before or since have possessed, were,
above all women, great and heroic lovers, and that those two fundamental
facts can