People ask, for example, whether sex-relationships should be governed by law at all; whether they should continue in any given case when passion has died, or when love (which is more than passion) has gone.  Should love ever be other than perfectly free, and is not the attempt to bind it essentially “immoral”?  Should it ever be exclusive or proprietary?  Is not the “moral problem” really created, not by human nature, but by the attempt to bind what cannot be bound and to coerce what should be free?

The answer given to such questions is often to-day on the side of what is called, mistakenly, I think, “free love.”  And in considering this answer, I want to remind you that it is often given by people who are most sincere, most idealistic, in their own lives and in their own love.  Indeed it has often been pointed out that it is at times of great spiritual exaltation and fervour that the cult of “free love” is most likely to find adherents.  The great principle that “love is the fulfilling of the law” is held with a fervour which makes any question as to what love is, and how much it involves, seem half-hearted and cold.  Those who preach this doctrine remind us—­and very justly—­of the weakness and insincerity of the “orthodox” moral standard, whether it is enforced by law or by custom.  They revolt against the proprietary and possessive view of marriage as giving a woman “a hold over her husband” when he has “grown tired of her,” or as justifying a man in enforcing upon his wife the rights which only love makes right, when she has grown tired of him.  I appeal, therefore, to those to whom the dispassionate discussion of “free love” seems quite outrageous, to remember that there are those to whom this teaching is not a mere excuse for licence, but an attempt to reach something lovelier and nobler than the present moral code, whose failures and insincerities no thinking person can ignore.

In considering this view, I want first to point out that although to have no legal or enforceable tie in sex-relationships seems on the surface much the simplest and easiest way to arrange life, although permanent monogamous marriage is exceedingly difficult and inconvenient, yet the movement of humanity does seem to have been on the whole in that direction.  It is, of course, untrue to say that among primitive peoples there is anything that can fairly be called promiscuity.  Historians and anthropologists have taught us that among all peoples, however barbarous, there are conventions, sanctions, tabus, by which the relations of men and women are regulated.  The customs of such people may seem to us mere licence; but they are not so.  And some of the customs of more “civilized” countries are at least as horrifying to the “savage” as his can be to us.  Nevertheless, it is true to say that as civilization advances, and especially where the position of women improves, the movement has been towards a more stable and exclusive form of marriage.  We grope uncertainly towards it:  we fail atrociously.  Yet we do not abandon an ideal which asks so much of human nature that human nature is continually invoked to prove its impossibility.