Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/121

Rh There can no more be a breach of marriage by adultery than there can be a breach of night, a breach of day, etc. When day dawns it is no longer night; and when night comes it is no longer day. If one of the parties feels an inclination to commit what is called adultery, then the marriage is already broken, even without the completed act. At that very moment marriage ceases to exist, because love has ceased to exist; because the love that is required for marriage either never existed or has been replaced by another.

Pious moralists will say that this is equivalent to giving free rein to adultery under the pretext of the dying out of the old and the awakening of anew love. But then these pious people do not know what love is. Love is no arbitrary thing. He who loves will and can as little abandon his love for any purpose as he who does not love can enforce a love for any purpose.

This is the very "moral" perversion of our moral ideas that has until now made it possible to bring in vogue and to maintain a style of marriage without the one requisite of marriage, love. True morality demands that a marriage which has ceased to be a marriage intrinsically, and which is, therefore, nothing more than a relation of compulsion, hypocrisy, and prostitution, should also cease to be one extrinsically. The hypocrisy of the pious moralists, however, still clings with all its might to the external relation, even after the purpose,