Cupid’s Yokes – E.H. Heywood, 1876
This article was deemed legally obscene & censored
Love in its dual manifestations implies agreement. He who loves and she who reciprocates the inspiration therein
are quickened, neither to hurt the other, nor evade any moral or pecuniary obligation which the incarnate fruits
of their passion may present. When a man says of a woman, “She suits me”—that is, she would be to him a
serviceable mate—he does not often as seriously ask if he is likely to suit her; still less, if this proposed union
may not become an ugly domestic knot which the best interests of both will require to be untied. Whether the
number outside of marriage who would like to get in be greater or less than the number inside who want to get
out, this mingled sense of esteem, benevolence, and passional attraction called Love, is so generally diffused
that most people know life to be incomplete until the calls of affection are met in a healthful, happy and prosperous
association of persons of opposite sex. That this blending of personalities may not be compulsive, hurtful, or
irrevocable; but, rather, the result of mutual discretion—a free compact, dissolvable at will—there is needed, not
only a purpose in lovers to hold their bodies subject to reason; but also radical change of the opinions, laws,
customs, and institutions which now repress and inebriate natural expressions of Love. Since ill-directed animal
heat promotes distortion rather than growth; as persons who meet in convulsive embraces may separate
in deadly feuds—sexual desire here carrying invigorating peace, there desolating havoc, into domestic life
—intelligent students of sociology will not think the marriage institution a finality, but, rather, a device to be
amended, or abolished, as enlightened moral sense may require. When the number of opinions for and against
a given measure are equal, it is called “a tie vote,” and is without force and void, unless the speaker of the
assembly throws his “casting vote,” thereby giving to his side a majority of one, and enabling the measure to
become a “law,” binding, not only on those who favored, but also on those who opposed it!
Not to note the manifest injustice and absurdity of such “an act,” in the popular connubial assembly of bride and
groom both vote one way—that is, to “have” each other—while the binding, or casting, vote is given by a “speaker,”
called priest or magistrate, who is supposed to represent society so far as it is a civil act, and God so far as it
is a sacrament or religious matter. But, since neither society nor deity has ever “materialized” at weddings in a
manner definite enough to become responsible for what lovers may do or suffer in their untried future, we have no
further use for a “speaker” in our nuptial congress, and must search elsewhere for the moral obligations which
lovers, by their tie vote to be “one,” incur. In its desire to “confirm this amity by nuptial knot,” society forgets that
lovers are lovers by mutual attraction which does not ask leave to be, or to cease to be, of any third party; that its
effort to “confirm” Love by visible bonds tends to destroy magnetic forces which induce unity; and that lovers are
responsible only for what they, themselves, do, and the fruits thereof. Since the words “right” and “duty” derive their
ethical qualities from our relations to what is essentially reasonable and just—to the nature of things—legislative
“acts” neither create nor annul moral ties. As “alone we are born, alone we die, and alone we go up to judgment,”
so no one can escape from himself; but each must administer the personal and collective interests which he or
she embodies. Being the authors and umpires of their rights and duties, the sexes weave moral ties by free and
conscientious intimacy, and constantly give bonds for their mutual good behaviour. Cause and effect are as
inseparable in human actions as in the general movements of Nature; choose as you please, the results of
the choice you are the responsible author of.
Relieving one from outer restraint does not lessen, but increases this personal accountability: for, by making him free,
we devolve on him the necessity of self-government; and he must respect the rights of others, or suffer the consequences
of being an invader. In claiming freedom for myself, I thereby am forbidden to encroach. When man seeks to enjoy
woman’s person at her cost, not a lover, he is a libertine, and she a martyr. How dare woman say she loves man,
when seeking her own good at his expense? Perfect Love “casts out fear,” and also sin; if derived from the Greek
sinein, to injure, the word sin implies invasion, injury; thus gratification of sexual desire in a way that injures another
is not Love, but sin. Though they have a right to enjoy themselves at their own cost, yet, if their passion is hurtful, a
sense of duty to themselves and others should teach lovers continence. Having its root in the Latin vir, a man, the
radical import of the word virtue is manly strength: usage invests it with intelligence to know and power to resist wrong.
One cannot choose without comparing the objects of choice; without judging for himself what is right, and personally
placing himself at the disposal of Reason; hence Virtue consists in ability to reason correctly, and force of will to obey
Thought. But, since one cannot choose or act, when mental and physical movement is suppressed, Liberty, occasion,
is the primary and indispensable condition of Virtue; while vice originates in stagnant ignorance, which the policy
of repression enforces. The conscience, feeling, or impressions which precede and inspire thought announce the
presence of ethical intelligence, and indicate how largely human actions are influenced by spiritual impulse. While,
therefore, Liberty is the father, Conscience is the mother of Virtue. Chastity is power to choose between æsthetic
health and disease, a power born of the same mental scope and activity which promote Virtue. Sexual passion is
not so much in fault as reason; flesh is willing, but spirit is weak; the mind is unable to tell the body what to do.
When the true relation of the sexes is known, ideas rule and bodies obey brain; purity of motive—just and ennobling
action—follow the lead of free inquiry. The popular idea of sexual purity (freedom from fornication or adultery, abstinence
from sexual intercourse before marriage, and fidelity to its exclusive vows afterwards), rests on intrusive laws, made
and sustained by men, either ignorant of what is essentially virtuous, or whose better judgment bows to Custom that
stifles the cries of affection and ignores the reeking licentiousness of marriage beds. Is coition pure only when sanctioned
by priest or magistrate? Are scandal-begetting clergymen and bribe-taking statesmen the sources of virtue? The
lascivious deliriums prevalent among men, the destructive courses imposed on women, and the frightful inroads of
secret vice on the vitality of youth of both sexes, all show the sexual nature to be, comparatively, in a savage state;
and that even public teachers have not begun to reason originally on questions of Love, virtue, continence or reproduction.
While Passion impels movement in one person towards another, and tends to overleap unnatural barriers, its proposals
are, nevertheless subject to rejection; created and nourished by the object of attraction, it is toned by Love which
generates, but never annuls moral obligations. If intrusive, passion is hurtful; but, the person assailed, has a natural
right of resistance; and, if a woman or girl, her effort in self-defence will be reinforced by disinterested strength around
her. If men do not rally to protect a woman thus imperiled, it is because their sense of right is distorted by an idea that
women belong to men, and that the person of this particular woman is, somehow, the property of the man who can
overpower her. Our applause of an example of Love measures the contempt which right-minded people feel for a man
who imposes himself, or the unwelcome fruit of his passions, on woman. She is “safe” among men, not through laws
which deny Liberty, but by prevailing knowledge of the fact that Nature vests in herself the right to control and dispose
of her own person. If lovers err, it is due not to Liberty, but to ignorance, and the demoralizing effect of the marriage
system. If free to go wrong, disciplined by ideas, they will work out their own salvation in the school of experience.
The Free Love faith proclaims the fact that persons recognized in law as capable of making a sexual contract are, when
wiser by experience, morally able to dissolve that contract; and that Passion is not so depraved as to be incapable of
redemption and self-government. The essential principle of Nature, Love, is a law unto itself; but, resisted by custom,
its natural intent and scope are not generally understood. We were all trained in the school of repression or inebriacy;
and taught that, to express ourselves otherwise than by established rules, is sinful. To get out of one’s body to think, to
destroy all his old opinions, is almost necessary, to enable him to approach and investigate a new subject impartially.
The grave tendencies of the Love question, its imperative force in human destiny, its momentous relations to government,
religion, life, and property, demand revolution in social doctrines, and institutes, more beneficently severe than is yet
fully conceived of. But, since nothing is fixed but natural right, the most radical method of treatment is the most truly
conservative. Evils like libertinism and prostitution, which have baffled the wisest human endeavor, will yield only to
increasing intelligence, and the irresistible forces of Conscience. I beg my readers, therefore, to bring to this subject
honest intent to know truth and obey it. That the grand Principle of Love is potent with greater good than is realized in
human affairs, is certain; that this noblest element of human being does not logically lead to the marital and social ills
around us, is equally evident. The way out of domestic infelicity, then, must lie through larger knowledge of the nature
of Love and of the rights and duties involved in its evolution. Since the sexual union (for life or until legally divorced),
of one woman with several men—Polyandry; or that of one man with several women—Polygamy; or that of one man
with one woman—Monogamy, is a conventional agreement between two or more individual contractors and a collective
third, society, marriage, in either of its three historical forms, is a human device to tame, utilize, and control the sexual
passion, which is supposed to be naturally ferocious and ungovernable.
What Nature “hath joined,” man need not attempt to “put asunder;” but, since the legalized marital relation is so chaotic
and mischievous (clergymen and legislators themselves often being the first to violate what they profanely assume
to be a divine ordinance); and since Deity has never yet come forward to own that he is “the author and finisher” of
marriage laws, it is better to attribute them to the erring men who enacted them, than to accuse Divine Wisdom of so
much folly. Marriage, then, being the creature of men’s laws, we have the same right to alter or abolish it that we have
respecting any other human institution. The principles of Nature derived from a careful study of essential liberty and
equity, are a safer guide than crude social codes which come to us from the ignorant and despotic past. Woman, who,
being in the morning hours of history, played a winning hand in this marriage game, is again coming to the front; and,
in the parliament of Reason, where the thought, impulse, attraction, and conscience of both sexes have free play, better
methods of social intercourse and reproduction will be matured than exclusive male wisdom has yet invented. It is for
the Free Love School to develope an order of sexual unity worthy to be called a sacrament, and which sensible people
need not blush to share. “Will you have me?” is the prayer by which man seeks partnership in the being of woman; and
she also has persuasive ways and means to pray to, and “capture,” him. This would be well, were it not a compulsory
choice of evils, and were they able to determine, in advance, the grave interests of offspring, industry, business, health,
temperaments, and attractions, which mutually concern them, and on the adjustment of which depends their future weal
or woe. Girls become pubescent at about 12, and boys at 14, though girls, then, are much older, sexually, than boys:
from these ages young people are capable of all the pleasures and miseries of passional experience.
But, since sexual union for life is extremely hazardous for both parties—it being impossible to correct the fatal mistake
of marriage without the commission of crime by one or the other—they are usually left to illicit intercourse, or to exhaust
their vitality in secret vices. Even when married—coming into this new relation without knowledge of its uses or of self
-control—they prey on each other, and a few years of wedded life and child-bearing may leave the wife an emaciated
wreck of her former self, and the husband very much less, a man, than Nature designed him to be. Though bewildered
moralists advise early marriage, they well know how often puny offspring rebuke the alliance, teaching indiscreet parents
that coition should have stopped short of reproduction. Those who think the evil is not in the essential immorality of the
marriage system, but in its abuses, denounce with just severity the legalized slavery of women therein. The absurdity
to which Mr. Greene refers consists in an effort to make the wife legally “equal” to the husband inside of nuptial bonds;
it is an effort to make her an equal victim and an equal oppressor with him. Since marriage involves the loss of liberty,
many of our best people, especially women, never marry, preferring to endure the ills of celibacy rather than fly to what
may prove irretrievable ruin. Slavery is voluntary or involuntary; voluntary when one sells or yields his or her own person
to the irresponsible will of another; involuntary when placed under the absolute power of another without one’s own
consent. The compulsive features of marital law are incidental and secondary to the marriage relation itself, which is
unnatural and forced. Pen cannot record, nor lips express, the enervating, debauching effect of celibate life upon young
men and women. Who supposes that, if allowed to freely consult their natural wits and good sense, they would tie
themselves up in the social snarl of matrimony? Yet they are now compelled to choose between suicidal evils of
abstinence and the legalized prostitution of marriage.
Some, by clandestine intimacies, live below marriage; others, by personal defiance, and at the expense of social
ostracism, attempt to live above it; but both are on the “ragged edge” of peril, as were “free negroes” who tried
to live above or below the old slave system. The fierce blood-hounds put upon the track of fugitive slaves, were
forerunners of the “dogs of war” which marriage now trains to hunt down its victims. A system so prolific of hypocrites
and martyrs is compulsive in the most mischievous sense of that word, and will be abolished when free and
virtuous people resolutely confront it. Since marriage does not provide for the education of sexual desire or of
its expression, but gives legal “right” and power to sin, every priest or magistrate, who “solemnizes” the rite,
sells indulgences of a far more disastrous nature than those which scandalized the Romish Church. On account
of her political, social, and pecuniary vassalage, woman is the chief martyr to the relentless license granted man;
but cases are on record where the husband was effectually subdued by the tigress, with whom he went into the
nuptial “paradise.” Founded on the supposition that man’s love is naturally ferocious, marriage attempts, by legal
means, to furnish food for his savage nature; and we have but to lift the roofs of “respectable” houses to find the
skeletons of its feminine victims. It is because the marriage theory is unnatural and barbarous that it works out
such shocking results. In the phrase “tyranny of lust,” I have brought a good word into bad company, and must
apologize for its misuse; for lust properly means desire, prayer, exuberant strength. So, likewise, the popular
view of Love gives a devilish intent and drift to the divinest of words. Advocates of marriage cling to the exploded
doctrine of natural depravity, and Freethinkers, Spiritualists and Atheists, who scout theological perdition, think
social hells of permanent necessity in human life. Nowhere does the human intellect so disgrace itself as in its
cowardly half-ashamed, and hypocritical attitude in the presence of Free Love.
When woman’s thought comes forward in the discussion, we hope for better things. In the early struggle of history
which led to the establishment of polyandry (as in later domestic conflicts), the ruling impulse of the women was
not sexual desire, but, rather, spiritual superiority, intuitional strategy, by virtue of which they were masters of men
in the realm of religious mysticism. On the contrary, the repulsive evidence of sexual depravity, in men, indicate
the savage use, now made of animal force, which is capable of beneficent expenditure. When man loves woman
intelligently, what is now consuming passional heat, will make him a genial, civil, and serviceable being. The
unreserved devotion, with which a lover gives himself and his fortune to his bride, discloses the possible divine
life on earth. But when impulsive, self-forgetting love, overflowing the narrow limits of family enclosures, gives
one’s heart and purse to deserving girls and women, the now, seemingly, savage suitor becomes Providence
incarnate. Though man may “propose,” and woman “accept,” a notion inhabits the average male head that the
irresistibly attractive force of woman’s nature makes her responsible for any mutual wrong-doing. Thinking woman
at the bottom of all mischief; when a male culprit is brought into court, the French ask “Who is she?” If he said that
Mrs. Elizabeth R. Tilton “thrust her love on him unsought,” the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher thereby indicated how
much there is in him of the “old Adam,” who remarked to the “Lord God,” interviewing him after he had indulged
in the “forbidden fruit,” “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”
The insanity plea put forward in courts of law by aggrieved “husbands” who murder men that are attracted to
their “wives,” also affirms, in a round-about way, the supposed inability of a man to control himself when under
the spell of woman’s enchantment. Contrary to the old law which regarded the husband and wife as one, and
the husband that one, when the twain sin, she is held responsible, and he is excused on the ground that he
was over-persuaded, and too weak to withstand her wishes. From the Garden of Eden to Plymouth Church,
skulking has been the pet method of man to escape from the consequences of sexual indiscretion. The tragic
anarchy which now distracts social life originates first in the “legal” denial of the right of people to manage their
own sexual affairs; and secondly in the supposed exemption from moral responsibility of either man or woman
in Love. The facts of married and single life, one would suppose, are sufficiently startling to convince all serious-
minded people of the imperative need of investigation; especially of the duty of young men and women to give
religiously serious attention to the momentous issues of Sexual Science. But, on the threshold of good intent,
they are met by established ignorance forbidding them to inquire.
It is even thought dangerous to discuss the subject at all. In families, schools, sermons, lectures, and newspapers its
candid consideration is so studiously suppressed that children and adults know nothing of it, except what they learn
from their own diseased lives and imaginations, and in the filthy by-ways of society. Many noble girls and boys, whom
a little knowledge from their natural guardians, parents and teachers, would have saved, are now, physically and
morally, utter wrecks. Where saving truth should have been planted, error has found an unoccupied field, which
it has busily sown, and gathers therefrom a prolific harvest. The alleged increase of “obscene” prints and pictures
caused both Houses of the U.S. Congress, March 1, 1873, to pass a bill (or, rather an amendment of the Post Office
Act of June, 1872), which was immediately signed by the President, said to be “For the suppression of Obscene
Literature,” and from which the following extract is made: That no obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet,
picture, paper, print, or other publication of an indecent character, nor any article or thing designed or intended for
the prevention or conception or procuring of abortion, nor any article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent
or immoral use or nature, nor any written or printed card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any
kind giving information, directly, or indirectly, where, or how, or of whom, or by what means either of the things
before mentioned, may be obtained or made, nor any letter upon the envelope of which, or postal card upon which
indecent or scurrilous epithets may be written, or printed, shall be carried in the mail; and any person who shall
knowingly deposit, or cause to be deposited, for mailing or delivery, any of the hereinbefore-mentioned articles or
things, or any notice, or paper containing any advertisement relating to the aforesaid articles or things, and any
person who, in pursuance of any plan or scheme for disposing of any of the hereinbefore-mentioned articles or
things, shall take or cause to be taken, from the mail any such letter or package, shall be deemed guilty of a
misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof, shall, for every offence, be fined not less than one hundred dollars
nor more than five thousand dollars, or imprisonment at hard labor not less than one year nor more than ten
years, or both, in the discretion of the judge.
Beauty is a joy forever, and for all; the quality of beauty being to awaken admiration and esteem in observers to the
extent of their ability to appreciate it. To be susceptible of beauty in one thing does not unfit, but rather prepares us
to appreciate it in others. Love of the beautiful in person, or of character, is not less involuntary and non-exclusive
than in things. A man cannot love even one woman truly unless he is free to love what is lovable in all other women.
The fact that sexual love is passional, as well as æsthetic, does not make it exclusive. The philosophic Irishman who
liked to be alone, especially “when his swate-heart was with him,” expressed the natural privacy of Love, and also
indicated the scientific fact that the affectional union of two creates a collective third personality, superior, in some
respects, to either constituent factor. If from this mystical confluence of two beings there springs a child, even this
Evolution of Love does not make either one of the three persons less accountable to self and truth, or less permeable
by material and spiritual, human and divine influences which either may encounter. Monogamists hold that Love is
possible only between one man and one woman, the word monogamy meaning to marry to one only. Yet, so called
monogamists constantly violate that principle; for, if divorced by death, crime, or the courts, scarcely a man or woman
hesitates to marry the second, third, or fifth time. Are they any the less “pure” in doing so? Certainly not; second, third,
or subsequent marriages may be more healthful and harmonious than the first, for the good reason that at least one
of the parties has had the benefits of experience. It is admitted that, if the previous partners in her bed are divorced
by death or other cause, a woman may truly love and wisely marry the second or fifth man; but the purity of her love
for the fifth man is not determined by the previous four being dead or divorced; were they all living and her personal
friends, she can love the last man as truly as she loved the first. Consistent with the teachings of the Bible, which
sanctions polygamy, Christians support missionaries in foreign lands, who welcome to church membership and the
communion table, men who have a plurality of wives. The monogamic or one-love theory is both theoretically and
practically rejected by modern Christians, (as likewise by “Infidels”) and, if they will honestly follow Jesus—who,
while he did not directly condemn polygamy, was yet, theoretically, a woman’s emancipationist—he will take
them into his Free Love Kingdom of Heaven, where he says, “they neither marry nor are given in marriage.”
Though the Jehovah-God of the Bible, disliking irresponsible divorce, “hateth putting away,” he is a thorough polygamist;
its Jesus-God as plainly favors the entire abolition of marriage. Out of the modern Christian Church have come three
phases of sexual morality—Shakerism, or the utter proscription of sexual intercourse; Mormonism, or sanctified polygamy;
and Oneida-Perfection with its “free” love and omnigamy. While the question of marriage and property are to be settled
on the basis of Reason, the Bible and other records of the past thought being only incidental evidence, the Oneida
Community are nearer sound on these two points than any other Christian sect. The kingdom of heaven supplants
all human governments; in it the institution of marriage, which assigns the possession of one woman to one man,
does not exist, the intimate union of Love extending to the whole body of believers. The pentecostal spirit abolishes
exclusiveness in regard to women and children, as respecting property. The new commandment is that we love each
other fervently, not in pairs, but en masse; as religious excitements act on amativeness, this is an indication of the
natural tendency of religion to Love. The union of hearts expresses and ultimates itself in union of bodies. Love is
attraction; seeking unity, it is desire; in unity, happiness. In unobstructed Love, or the free play of the affinities, sexual
union is its natural expression. Experience teaches that sexual love is not restricted to pairs; second marriages annul
the one-love theory and are often the happiest. Love is not burnt out in one honeymoon, or satisfied by one lover; the
secret history of the human heart proves that it is capable of loving any number of times and persons, and that the
more it loves the more it can love. This is the law of Nature, thrust out of sight and condemned by common consent, yet
secretly known to all. Variety is as beautiful and useful in love as in eating and drinking. The one-love theory, based
on jealousy, comes not from loving hearts, but from the greedy claimant. The law of marriage “worketh wrath;” provokes
jealousy; unites unmatched natures and sunders matched ones; and making no provision for sexual appetite, causes
disease, masturbation, prostitution, and general licentiousness. Unless the sexes come together naturally, desire
dammed up breaks out irregularly and destructively. The irregularities and excesses of amativeness are explosions
incident to unnatural separations of male and female elements, as in the explosion of electric forces.
Mingling of the sexes favors purity; isolation, as in colleges, seminaries, monasteries, &c., breeds salacity and obscenity.
A system of complex marriage, supplying want, both as to time and variety, will open the prison doors both to the victims
of marriage and celibacy; to those in married life who are starved, and to those who are oppressed by lust; to those who
are tied to uncongenial natures, and to those who are separated from their natural mates; and to those in the unmarried
state who are withered by neglect, diseased by unnatural abstinence, or ploughed into prostitution and self-pollution by
desires which have no natural channel. Carrying religion into life, pledging the earnings of each for the support of the
whole, the Oneidans seek “not the union of two but the harmony of all souls.” Whether the Oneida scheme succeeds or
fails as an experiment it is doing great service to civilization; and New York State has the thanks of all intelligent reformers
for permitting Perfectionism to illustrate its ideas of sexuality in its own way. But their conceited and self-righteous
contempt for Socialists who “have no religion,” and their belief that Liberty tends to demoralization—“leads to hell,”
—show the Oneidans to be ignorant of the source of the spirit of toleration and progress, which presided at their birth
and has compelled marriage bigots to leave them unmolested. Making better use of religion than any other Christian
sect, the Oneidans yet fail to learn the deepest lesson which Jesus taught, are mistaken in supposing that Free Love
and Free Labor are possible only within their iron-clad scheme of Socialism, and that the first lesson of progress is to
have one’s Individuality broken on their religio-communistic wheel. Impelled with Paul to prove all things hold fast to
that which is good; inspired by the good old doctrine of Jesus, that each soul must judge for itself what is right, and be
saved or “lost” on its own individual responsibility; declining to join the “bread-and-butter brigades” of Communism,
Lovers will find their salvation in Liberty to choose—to live on their own merits. The persistent growth of the “social evil”
in defiance of all efforts to abate it, shows an irresistible tendency of people to associate even against law and custom;
when they obey the higher law of Liberty, which makes social choice sacred, and Individual Integrity a duty, domestic
life will gravitate towards unity, and Love become the potentially redeeming force which Nature intended it to be.
But since human nature is imperfect, and passional heats often precede cool reason, young people cannot too early
learn that they may choose wrongly; and that, if not guided by the rudder of thought, they must learn wisdom by
collision with the rocks of experience. It is better, however, to do wrong and suffer the consequences, than to be
“saved” by mediatorial agencies which act for us, thereby overriding our necessity and power to reason, and divorcing
us from an original relation to truth; better go to hell by choice than to heaven by compulsion. The crude propensity
of youth to unserviceable devotion to attractive maidens, when “life is half moonshine and half Mary Jane,” is matched
by the voluptuous freaks of Gray-Beard, who wants to be “better accommodated than with a wife.” The amorous
usurpation and delirious sentimentalism, which are the legitimate stock-in-trade of modern novelists, (in whose
books Lovers are chiefly heroic in fornication, and, when married, cease to be interesting until “soiled” with adultery),
are the main prop of the marriage system. The affinity-seekers whose insipidities mar even the best of poetry, and
who expect “perpetual honey-moons” when they find their mates, but who find “mates” only to soon loathe and
discard them, are at once logical exponents and ludicrous examples of “wedded bliss.” The philosophy which
supposes another imperfect, or reprehensible, because she, or he, does not, and cannot suit me or you, is an
insane philosophy. To waste under burdens of “inner life unshared,” or vainly expect happiness in the union of
blighted personalities, is our destiny, until we learn that the human heart can find its home only in social concord
which does not invade the sanctity of Individual Liberty. The sexes naturally “expect each other,” love to live and
work together, love to find rest, and be lost in each other. Bating all the antagonism and heart-break which marriage
causes, how much, even now, of rational joy, healthful association, and redeeming ecstacy there is in conjugal life!
Greater than justice, stronger than reason, wiser than philosophy, is this widely diffused, and to be all-controlling Sentiment
of Love. In Experiencing the Ecstacy of Love, we accept the sway of Reason, and the inevitable sequences of cause and
effect. What we sow, thereof we reap; Fate is unexplored fact. Wise heads have thought coition a mysterious lottery; but it
is mystified by ignorance and superstition. Whether it shall produce a child is a matter of choice; and the sex and character
of the child are predetermined by its makers, the parents. Queen bees lay female eggs first; afterwards, male eggs; so,
with hens, the first-laid eggs give female, the last, male products. Mares shown the stallion late in their periods, drop horse
-colts rather than fillies. If stock raisers wish to produce females, they should give the male at the first signs of heat; if
males, at the end of the heat. With the human female, conception in the first half of the time between menstrual periods
will probably produce girls; in the last half, boys. If coition occurs within six days from the cessation of the menses, girls
are usually the result; if from nine to twelve after cessation, boys. Regarding the physical, intellectual, and moral character
of children it is surprising that parents who are careful to secure the best parentage for their canary birds and chickens,
are utterly heedless in reproducing their own species. What graver act than to give life to a human being? What clearer
right has a child than to be well-born? More impressive than the theological “Judgement-day” will be the tribunal before
which diseased and crime-cursed children summon guilty parents to answer for the sin-begetting use of their reproductive
powers. People are little aware to what extent it is incumbent on them to foreordain what their children shall be. Better that
every marriage bond in Christendom be severed than that one child be given life “legally,” when it can have a superior
parentage by coition above statute law. No woman or man should have a second child by his or her marital partner,
when there is another person potently worthy of the selection by whom he or she can have a better child. It was an
ignorant and tyrannical prejudice which forbade Plato, Jesus, Paul, Newton, Humboldt, and other bachelors of the
past, to give to the world that grandest achievement in art—a Child. Many of the noblest Women now live as maligned
“old maids,” and will go down to their graves childless, because the natural right of maternity is denied them.
Good people will think me rash in making such statements; but I appeal from them to the wiser future, which will demand
that the reproductive instinct be inspired by intelligence and placed under the dominion of the will. That sexual intercourse
is yet an Ethiopia, an unexplored tract of human experience, is due to a prevailing impression, among religious people,
that it is “unclean,” and, among Freethinkers, that it is uncontrollable; both views tend to remove it from the jurisdiction
of Reason and Moral Obligation. But, “to the pure all things are pure,” and, while “religion never was designed to make
our pleasures less,” Science brings disciples of God and Fate to answer for their misdeeds before the tribunal of Human
Intelligence. Neither superstitious Supernaturalism with its theatrical terrors, nor learned Infidelity, “full of wise saws
and modern instances,” should deter the sexes from thought and experiment as to the best uses of themselves. That
woman expects man, or man woman, is as natural and proper as desire for food or clothing. Since the mind cannot rule
the body until it becomes acquainted with it, Lovers—who are “servants of Providence, not slaves of Fate”—are divinely
called to be students in the laboratories of their own bodies. The eye, the arm, or leg perishes by non-use; so without
natural vent, exuberant sexual vitality wastes and destroys. Not to mention the fearful loss of vigor through involuntary
emissions, celibate abstinence and solitary vice probably engender more disease and death than all other causes
combined. Though he well knows the cause and cure of these ills, what physician dare prescribe the natural remedy?
Accursed is the “civilization” which thus immolates its best life on the altars of superstitious ignorance! Retribution
comes in wide-spread venereal diseases, syphilis so generally permeating male blood that it is unsafe for a lady to
kiss a man lest she be infected fatally. Though probably less injurious than the fatal drain of involuntary emissions
and self-abuse, yet, because illicit intercourse is usually undisciplined and excessive, it is often extremely hurtful.
Since intense passion is never expressed in obscene terms, the sources of Love are pure; so vice does not consist
in the judicious gratification of sexual desire, but in repression and disordered excess.
Health, Temperance, Self-Control, and native graces are developed by intimate exchange of Heat and Magnetism,
while both sexes are thereby fitted for Parentage. The progress of civilization is marked by the degree of freedom
and intimacy between the sexes. In the East, women appear in public veiled, it being thought sinful for them to allow
their faces to be seen by any men not their husbands; here they walk, ride, dance, pray with, or kiss men, strong in
the dignity of a naturally beneficent mutualism. We now forbid the sexes, unless married, to sleep together; but this
restriction is a relic of Oriental customs, which will vanish as intelligence increases. In schools, churches, theatres,
shops, factories, counting rooms, each sex is benefitted by the presence of the other. The same exchange of impulse,
thought, emotion, magnetism, and grace, which develops and refines both sexes in industrial and social meeting
publicly, will be still more improving in the most intimate relations of private life. It will ere long be seen that a lady
and gentleman can as innocently and properly occupy one room at night as they can now dine together. In the
distorted popular view, Free Love tends to unrestrained licentiousness, to open the flood-gates of passion and
remove all barriers in its desolating course; but it means just the opposite; it means the utilization of animalism,
and the triumph of Reason, Knowledge, and Continence. As is shown in the opening pages of this Essay, to say
that every one should be free, sexually, is to say that every one’s person is sacred from invasion; that the sexual
instinct shall no longer be a savage, uncontrollable usurper, but be subject to Thought and Civilization. The damning
tendency of marriage begins in giving the sexes “legal” license and power to invade, pollute, and destroy each other:
and the immaturity of Science is painfully apparent, when it accepts the fatalistic theory of Love, and abandons the
grave issues of coition to chance and “necessity.” Though my experience is quite limited, facts within my personal
knowledge enable me to affirm without fear of refutation, that Lovers’ exchange, in its inception, continuance, and
conclusion, can be made subject to Choice; entered upon, or refrained from, as the mutual interests of both, or the
separate good of either, requires.
Until Lovers, by pre-good sense, become capable of Temperance and Self-possession in sexual intercourse, it
is an outrage on children to be begotten by them. Though Paul thought it “better to marry than to burn,” it is best
and feasible to neither marry nor burn; for, as in Plato’s phrase, Lovers are persons in whose favor “the gods have
intervened,” sexual intercourse may be constantly under the supervision of both human and divine good sense.
Since children are begotten by their parents, not by an act of Congress, or divine Providence, married people are
forced to study methods of preventing conception; unnatural, disgusting, and very injurious means are frequently
used, especially by some clergymen and moralists who, in their public teachings, hold that coition, except for
reproduction, should be forbidden by law! From six or eight days before appearance of the menses to ten to
twelve days after their cessation occurs, conception may follow coition; but intercourse at other periods rarely
causes impregnation; if, however, it escapes control, it exhausts both persons, admonishing them to keep within
the associative limit, which is highly invigorating, and not to allow themselves to gravitate to the propagative climax.
To participate in generative-sexual intercourse, instead of dwelling so much upon it in thought and imagination,
is Nature’s own method to promote continence. The fact that those in whom the seminal nature is most repressed
—young male victims of sexual weakness, hysterical girls, hypoish boys and men, single women, priests, and poets
—dwell much in thought on social subjects, and yet, by unreasoning custom, are denied natural association with
the opposite sex, is most disastrous to themselves and society. If persons do not acquire habits of continence by
force of will, Nature’s method is sharp and decisive; she confronts them with a child, which effectually tames and
matures both parents. Far better that their attraction lead to “illegal” parentage, than end in marriage, or by suicidal
celibacy. The fashionable method of single persons, and of very many married people, is to get rid of the child
before birth by abortion; but this murderous practice is unworthy of Free Lovers: they accept and rear the child,
but take care that the next one be born of choice, not by accident.
Since the increase of population outruns increase in means of subsistence, Malthus urged that, unless people refuse
to marry, or defer it till middle life, there will be too many consumers for the food grown; and that, if they do not heed
this admonition, Nature sternly represses excessive increase of population, “by the ghastly agencies of war, pestilence,
and famine.” Lycurgus favored destroying imperfect and sickly children; Plato, in his imaginative Republic, advises a
similar weeding-out process; and, thinking sexual desire “a most enervating and filthy cheat,” Shakerism endeavors
to exterminate it—three popular devices to govern propagation and Population: 1. The Shaker-Malthus method, which
forbids sexual intercourse; 2. The abortion-child-murder method, which destroys life before or after birth; 3. The French
-Owen method of barriers, withdrawal, &c., to arrest the process in its course;—but, since they are either unnatural,
injurious, or offensive, all these devices are rejected by Free Lovers. Extending the domain of Reason and self-control
over the whole human system, and believing that all things work together for the good of those that love good, they
not only believe, but know, that, under self-discipline, “every organ or faculty in the body works invariably, in all cases,
and at all times, for the good of the whole.” The thread of philosophy with which people connect scattered facts of their
social experience, is religiously used to entangle so-called “fallen women,” in hopeless depression. But, if each “common”
woman entertains an average number of five men as her customers, for every woman who “sells her virtue” there must
be five “fallen” men who buy it. How came they to have money to buy it? How came she to be so dependent that she
consents to sell the use of her person for food and clothing? Wine, women, and wealth are three prominent objects of
men’s desire; to be able to control the first two, they monopolize the third; having, through property in land, interest on
money, rent, and profits, subjected labor to capital, recipients of speculative increase keep working men poor; and, by
excluding woman from industrial pursuits and poisoning her mind with superstitious notions of natural weakness, delicacy,
and dependence, capitalists have kept her wages down to very much less than men get for the same work.
Thus, men become buyers, and women sellers, of “virtue.” But many women, not in immediate need of money, engage
in “the social evil;” for, allied with this financial fraud is the great social fraud, marriage, by which the sexes are put in
unnatural antagonism, and forbidden natural intercourse; social pleasure, being an object of common desire, becomes
a marketable commodity, sold by her who receives a buyer for the night, and by her who, marrying for a home, becomes
a “prostitute” for life. The usury system enables capitalists to control and consume property which they never earned,
laborers being defrauded to an equal extent; this injustice creates intemperate and reckless desires in both classes;
but when power to accumulate property without work is abolished, the habits of industry, which both men and women
must acquire, will promote sexual Temperance. In marriage, usury, and the exceptionally low wages of women, then, I
find the main sources of “prostitution.” Luckily the profit-system will go down with its twin-relic of barbarism, the marriage
-system; in life united, in death they will not be divided. In telling the woman of Samaria, who had just said to him “I have
no husband,” “Thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband,” Jesus quietly recognized,
without reproof, her natural right to live with men as she chose; and when a woman “taken in adultery, in the very act,”
was brought to him for criticism and sentence, he sent her accusers home to their own hearts and lives by the emphatic
rebuke, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” By the Mosaic Law she should have been
stoned to death, and the lascivious ignorance of religio-“cultured” Massachusetts would imprison her; but wiser Love
points her to the upward path of social and industrial liberty. Impersonal and spiritual, Love has also its material and
special revelations, which make it a sacredly private and personal affair. Why should the right of private judgment,
which is conceded in politics and religion, be denied to domestic life? If Government cannot justly determine what
ticket we shall vote, what church we shall attend, or what books we shall read, by what authority does it watch at key
-holes and burst open bed-chamber doors to drag Lovers from sacred seclusion?
Why should priests and magistrates supervise the Sexual Organs of citizens any more than the brain and stomach?
If we are incapable of sexual self-government, is the matter helped by appointing to “protect” us, “ministers of the
Gospel,” whose incontinent lives fill the world with “scandals?” If unwedded lovers, who cohabit are lewd, will paying
a marriage fee to a minister make them “virtuous?” Sexual organs are not less sacredly the property of individual
citizens than other bodily organs; this being undeniable, Who but the individual owners can rightly determine When,
Where, How and for What purpose they shall be used? The belief that our Sexual Relations can be better governed
by statute, than by Personal Choice, is a rude species of conventional impertinence, as barbarous and shocking as
it is senseless. Personal Liberty and the Rights of Conscience in Love, now savagely invaded by Church, State, and
“wise” Freethinkers, should be unflinchingly asserted. Lovers cannot innocently enact the perjury of marriage; to even
voluntarily become slaves to each other is deadly sin against themselves, their children, and society; hence marriage
vows and laws, and statutes against adultery and fornication, are unreasonable, unconstitutional, unnatural and void.
Against all repressive opposition, Individualism steadily advances to become a law unto itself; the right of private
judgment in religion, wrested by Luther from Intolerance in continental Europe—later asserted in politics by Hampden
and Sydney against the English Stuarts, and by Adams and Jefferson against British-American centralization—is now
legitimately claimed in behalf of sexual self-government. Protestantism, Magna Charta, Habeas Corpus, Trial by Jury,
Freedom of Speech and Press, The Declaration of Independence, Jeffersonian State Rights, Negro-Emancipation,
were fore-ordained to help Love and Labor Reformers bury sexual slavery, with profit-piracy, in their already open
graves. Thanks to the inspired energy of ancestral reformers, the guarantees of personal liberty, which we inherit
from our predecessors, are all-sufficient in this Free-Love battle. Those who resist free tendencies to-day can read
their doom in the prophetic wrath of Proudhon, who, confronting property usurpation and Napoleonic despotism in
France, said, He who fights against ideas will perish by ideas!
Yet not ideas, not intellect merely, but moral appeal, the might of Conscience, and the all-pervasive impulses of the
human heart enter this conflict. Human nature may well blush if the drama of deceit enacted in the “Brooklyn Scandal”
is to be taken as a fair expression of American thought and feeling. But the array of intellect, scholarship, and eloquence
opposed in that struggle; the impressive pomp of courts, the mustering clans of ecclesiastical authority, the listening
attitude of thousands of pulpits, and the recording pens of an omnipresent Press—all these are for a day, fleeting
and contemptible, when weighed against an honest heart-throb between one man and one woman! The loud clamor
of words will cease, the majesty of courts fade, churches vanish, Christianity itself pass away, but the still, small
voice of Love will continue to be heeded by Earth’s millions gathering at its shrines! And as the dictation of statutes is
increasingly resisted and the wrath of slave masters defied, more and more will the bonds of affection be welcomed,
for the yokes which Cupid imposes “are easy and their burden light.” I opened this Essay accepting Love as the regnant
force in social life; I conclude it by emphasizing the same faith. Money, ambition, respectability, isolation, magnetic
fervor, fascinating touch, glowing beauty—whatever influences concur to induce social union, the nourishing power
to continue and prosper it, is the attractive force of personal worth, the call to live and serve together, the impulse to
defer self and partial interests to the welfare of the Being loved. Sired by Wisdom, born of Truth, Love stimulates
enterprise, quickens industry, fosters self-respect, reverences the lowly and worships the Most High, harmonizing
personal impulse with the demands of morality, in a well-informed faith, which renders conventional statutes useless,
where “the heavens themselves do guide the state.”
