ly impossible standard of ethics.
Theoretically, it is the ideal union between the sexes, but it will only
become practical when men and women have morally advanced out of all
recognition. When people are all faithful, constant, pure-minded, and
utterly unselfish, free marriage may be worth considering. Even then,
there would be no chance for the ill-favoured and unattractive.

Under present conditions no couple living _openly_ in free love is known
to have made a success of it--a solid, permanent success, that is.
I believe there are couples who live happily together without any more
durable bond than their mutual affection, but they wisely assume the
respectable shelter of the wedding ring, and call themselves Mr and Mrs.
Thus their little fledgling of free love is not required to battle
against the overwhelming force of social ostracism. And moreover one has
no means of knowing how long these unions stand the supreme test of
time. The two notable modern instances of free love that naturally rise
to the mind are George Eliot and Mary Godwin. But both the men with whom
they mated were already married. As soon as Harriet was dead, Mary
Godwin married Shelley, and when George Lewes had passed away, George
Eliot married another man--an act which most people consider far less
pardonable in the circumstances than her irregular union with Lewes.
Even the famous Perfectionists of Oneida relapsed into ordinary marriage
on the death of their leader, Noyes, and by his own wish.

As an institution, free love seems widely practised in the East End of
London, but judging by the evidence of the police courts its results are
certainly not encouraging. I am told that the practice is common among
the cotton operatives of Lancashire. The _collage_ system is also very
prevalent in France among the working classes, and seems to answer well
enough. But only when women have the ability and the opportunity to
support themselves is free marriage at all feasible from the economic
standpoint, and even then there remains the serious question of
illegitimacy. All right-minded persons must acknowledge that the
attitude of society towards the illegitimate is unjust and cruel in the
extreme, resulting as it does in punishing the perfectly innocent. But
every grown man and woman is aware of this attitude, and those who act
in defiance of it, to please themselves or to satisfy some whim of
experiment, do so in the full knowledge that on their child wi