Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/28

 nothing better to do, have—and with marked success, so easy is it to do wrong—set up as philosophers, and deluded thousands into the horrible social quagmire, which they chose to call "passional attraction," or "free love." In England, "Brother Prince"—recently gathered to his fathers—startled the world with his "Agapemone" or "abode of love." In America, one John Noyes established a "free-love community." At Berlin Heights, Ohio, something similar was attempted, and "philosophical" bagnios were established at various points, culminating in Utah, and the erratic zealots called their system divine. Just think of promiscuity being divine! Divinity in a brothel!—following concubinage as a profession! It has been, by many fine minds, declared to be a sophism so senseless, yet so specious, as only to be accepted as truth by the insane. In a measure this is true, for look where you will you will never find a healthy man or woman a "free" lover! Such persons, by physical derangement, while sound on other subjects, are erratic,—passion-mad, and therefore pitiable monomaniacs; their cases suggesting hydropathic, douche, and sitz-bath treatment, with occasional ice-bags on the vertebral column. I once heard of a remarkable cure effected of a philosopher of that ilk, the prescription being, as himself expressed it: "I tried it and lost twenty-five years of life inside of twenty months. I am an old man at forty years of age and gray." The strongest argument against it is to be found in six little words: "It isn't Right; it is Wrong!" Physiologically it is so also, because the physical interest is altogether too usurious; by which I mean, that whosoever allows the amative passion to be excited by new parties generates vital magnetism in vast quantities—and loses it; for once excited, it must pass from the system in some way until the normal plane is again reached, yet the life thus lost can never be wholly regained. Where monogamy prevails there is never a continued blaze of passion, nor that excessive depletion consequent, invariably, upon indiscriminate promiscuity.

A life of perfect innocence, in that respect, is the only true life!—how many live it?—and the breath spent in defending such a monstrous system had far better be used in cooling bowls of porridge; and, by the way, a diet of gruel will do much toward cooling the ardor of all such "philosophers." It, in the next