Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/113

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How, then, secure marriage and morality? How remove the objection of male desire, which under present conditions is always striving to overstep the boundaries of morality?

The attainment of this end cannot be hoped ee after all that has hitherto been considered, without fulfilling the following requirements:

1) Guarding youth from secret vices by careful education, adequate occupation, and close attention, so that the lustful instinct may not be cultivated abnormally early, and undermine, the capacity for sexual love.

2) Early marriage of youths and maidens, in order that the want of opportunity to satisfy the awakened sexual needs may not drive them into wrong ways. It is here to be observed that the premature development of sexual desire is nothing but the consequence of our bad education hitherto, and that the young man has no sexual needs to satisfy previous to his marriage. Thus he is, on entering marriage, not yet addicted to licentiousness, his first sexual gratification coincides with his first love, and thus he is led back to the plane of morality on which that portion of the feminine sex which has not fallen a prey to prostitution has remained. The gratification of the sexual instinct ts thus wholly placed within the