The appearance of this book in English will prove a godsend to Protestants who may see in it only an attack on Catholicism.  Let them hug no such flattering unction to their souls.  M. Hector France is no savage iconoclast gone mad with sectarian hatred.  He recognizes the good in all religions as answering a temporary need in the evolution of Humanity, and for none has he a more profound respect than the Catholic Church.  Indeed the pomp and magnificence, the architectural grandeur, the vast learning, wealth and influence of this institution appeal to the imagination of both ignorant and cultured alike.  The aim of the distinguished writer of the “Grip of Desire” is far removed from that of vulgar and gratuitous image-breaking.  He seeks to show the danger to human character that comes through meddling with one of the most imperious of natural instincts.  If in the “Chastisement of Mansour” he bodies forth the consequences of unbridled Libertinism, in the “Grip of Desire” he demonstrates the evils attendant on a life of forced Celibacy.  In the first we have the autocratic Reign of the Flesh, in the second the Subjection of legitimate Carnal Desire.

The union of the female to the male is a law of Nature, as solid as the granite bases of the world.  No normally constituted man can disregard that law without doing violence to himself and to his kind.

Kant says:  “Man and woman constitute, when united, the whole and entire being, one sex completes the other.”

Schopenhauer asserts:  “The sexual impulse is the most complete expression of the will to live, in other words, it is the concentration of all volition.”  And in another passage:  “The affirmation of the will to live concentrates itself in the act of procreation, which is its most positive expression.”  Mainlaender gives utterance to the opinion when he says:  “The sexual impulse is the centre of gravity for human existence.  It alone secures to the individual the life which he above all desires ... man devotes himself more seriously to the business of procreation than to any other; in the achievement of nothing else does he condense and concentrate the intensity of his will in so remarkable a manner as in the act of generation.”  And before all those, Buddha wrote:  “Sexual desire is sharper than the hook with which wild elephants are tamed; hotter than flame; it is like an arrow that is shot into the heart of man.”

The present work, if it teach anything at all, teaches that Celibacy is a crime, and the Mother of crime, just as a venomous plant is a producer of poison.  The needs of his organization torment the single man until he robs from others that which he lacks.  Hence Seduction, Rape, Adultery, the Invasion of trouble into families, and furious Jealousies with all their prolific brood of Wrong-doing and Woe.

This is not the place to praise or to blame the book before us.  Each man will judge it according to his individual tastes, temperament and character.  The embryonic, thin-lipped man may consider it bold, far too outspoken.  The full-blooded reader more conversant with the realities of life, will be inclined to look upon it with larger charity, having regard to what the Author has refrained from saying, rather than to what he has said.