Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/99

Rh and the animal. To want to destroy the family is either a great error or a great vulgarity. It is founded in nature, and when viewed in the light of its ethical import it lays the foundation of the most beautiful, the truest, and the surest human happiness. The animal has no family because it has no reason; reason cannot desire to destroy the family, because it would thereby only re-establish crude nature, that is, destroy morality and, with morality, itself.

But the more the importance of the family is appreciated by society and by the individual, the higher and nobler the conception of it is, the more must its fundamental condition be recognized as that liberty which alone admits of complete harmony, of true attachment, of sincere union between man and woman. Nothing must be allowed to influence the choice except spontaneous affection; nothing must stand in the way of a separation where this affection, and with it the desire of a union, is wanting. The family is inconceivable without real marriage, marriage is inconceivable without love, and love can no longer be distinguished from prostitution when the free bond of the union is vitiated by compulsion. If propagation, to return to this point, is to have an ethical significance and ethical consequences, it must not proceed on the plane of bestial association, but just as little in false or forced relationships Every child that springs