Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/142

126. If Héloïse wishes to escape her fate, she must change her love for Abélard into an article of contract, and get the attestation of a priest that she is no vagabond. Abélard, forthwith under police control, is now forced to care for "wife and: child," and alarmed society can once more sleep' quietly beside its strong-box.

This legal interference with the natural, purely personal relationship of marriage is a very simple consequence of the pernicious state of society, which suppresses its women and casts out their children, instead of making the former independent and educating the latter at the general expense.

I can very easily conceive of a state of society — indeed, I cannot conceive of a better future without a state of society in which the increase of humanity through the birth of a healthy child, sprung from free marriage, is considered not only as no misfortune and no disgrace, but as a piece of good fortune and an honor; in which a free sexual union controlled by no law and no police will have crowded out all hypocrisy and all prostitution; in which conduct is regulated bya sense of beauty cultivated from childhood and by the bond of true love, but not by an unnatural morality and forced relations; in which the institutions of the State are in duty bound to receive every mother with her child if she stands alone or if she, in union with a man, has not sufficient means for