Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/286

272 vices spread and increase, but while indecency is holding its orgies in secret, an especially sensitive prudishness is displayed in public. The proverb which says that in the hangman's house no one speaks of the rope, is exemplified by a people whose conscience is guilty in regard to the sexes, and is fully conscious of its sins of omission and commission in this respect; it avoids any reference to the sexual life with the scrupulous anxiety of a criminal caught in the act. This is a description of the relation between the sexes in a decaying race whose vitality has become exhausted by the natural decline which is a consequence of age or by unfavorable conditions of existence, or else by the operation of injudicious and injurious laws.

If my assertion is conceded to be true that the form of the relations existing between the sexes in a given people is a measure of its vital energies, and if we apply this measure to the civilized peoples of Europe, we are obliged to draw the most alarming conclusions from what we see. The falseness of the economic, social and political conditions of our civilization has also poisoned the intercourse between the sexes all the natural instincts which should ensure the perpetuation and perfection of the race, are distorted and diverted into wrong channels, and the future generations of that part of humanity which is intellectually most highly developed, are sacrificed without hesitation to the prevailing selfishness and hypocrisy. Mankind at all times, has appreciated the fact, instinctively at first, then with its reasoning faculties, that there was nothing more important to it than its own perpetuation. All sentiments and actions which had any bearing whatever upon this most prominent interest of the species, have from the very first occupied the most extensive domain in its world of thought. Love is almost the exclusive theme of the