kind are the most useful, the most dignified, the most original and vital. I have seen a great many young people try the experiment of "free love," and I have seen some get enough of it and quit; I could name among these half a dozen of our younger novelists. I know others who are still in it -and I watch their lives and find them to be restless, jealous, egotistical and idle. My defense of monogamy is based upon the fact that I have never known any happy or successful "free lovers." Of course, I know some noble and sincere people who do not believe in the marriage contract, and refuse to be bound by law; but these people are as monogamous as I am, even more tightly bound by honor than if they were duly married.

It seems to be in the very nature of true and sincere love to imagine permanence, to desire it and to pledge it. If you aren't that much in love, you aren't really in love at all, and you had better content yourself with strolling together and chatting together and dining together and playing music together. So many pleasant ways there are in which men and women can enjoy each other's company without entering upon the sacred intimacy of sex! You can learn to take sex lightly, of course, but if you do so, you reduce by so much the chances that true and deep love will ever come to you; for true and deep love requires some patience, some reverence, some tending at a shrine. The animals mate quickly and get it over with; but the great discoveries about love, and the possibilities of the human soul in love, have come because men and women have been willing to make sacrifices for it, to take it seriouslyand more especially to take seriously the beloved person, the rights and needs and virtues of that person. From the lives of such we learn that love is nature's device for taking us out of ourselves, and making us truly social creatures.

Early in my life as a writer I undertook to answer Gertrude Atherton, in her glorification of the sex-corruptions of capitalist society. She indicted American literature for its "bourgeois" qualities-among these the fact that American authors had a prejudice in favor of living with their own wives. Mrs. Atherton set forth the joys of sex promiscuity as they are understood by European artists, and I ventured in replying to remark that "one woman can be more to a man than a dozen can possibly be." That sounds like a paradox,

but it is really a profound truth, and the person who does not understand it has missed the best there is in the sex relation. There is a limit to the things of the body, but to those of the mind and spirit there is no limit, and so there is no reason why true love should ever fall prey to boredom and satiety.

CHAPTER XLV

THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY

(Discusses the question, to what extent one person may hold another to the pledge of love.)

Once upon a time I knew an Anarchist shoemaker, the same who had me sent to jail for playing tennis on Sunday, as I have narrated in "The Brass Check." I remember arguing with him concerning his ideas of sex, which were of the freest. I can hear the very tones of his voice as he put the great unanswerable question: "What are you going to do about the problem of jealousy?" And I had no response at hand; for jealousy is truly a most cruel and devastating and unlovely emotion; and yet, how can you escape it, if you are going to preserve monogamy?

The Anarchist shoemaker's solution was to break down all the prejudices against sexual promiscuity. Free and unlimited license was every person's right, and for any other person to interfere was enslavement, for any other person to criticize was superstition. But the power of superstition is strong in the world, and the shoemaker found men resentful of his teachings, and disposed to confiscate the rights of their wives and daughters. Hence the shoemaker's disapproval of jealousy.

Other men, less purely physiological in their attitude to sex, have wrestled with this same problem of jealousy. H. G. Wells has a novel, "In the Days of the Comet," in which he portrays two men, both nobly and truly in love with the same woman. One in a passion of jealousy is about to murder the other, when a great social transformation is magically brought about, and the would-be murderer wakes up to universal love, and the two men nobly and lovingly share the same woman. Shelley also dreamed this dream, inviting two women to share him. I have known others who tried it, but never permanently. I do not say that it never has succeeded, or that it never can succeed. In this book I am renouncing the future-I am trying to give practical advice to people, for the conduct of their lives here and now, and my advice on

this point is that polygamous and polyandrous experiments in modern capitalist society cost more than they are worth.

I once knew a certain high school teacher, who believed religiously in every kind of freedom. When she married, she and her husband, an artist, made a vow against jealousy; but as it worked out, this vow meant that the wife had a steady job and took care of the husband, while he loafed and loved other women. When finally she grew tired of it, he accused her of being jealous; also, she had brought it down to the matter of money! I know another woman, an Anarchist, widely known as a lecturer on sex freedom. She laid down the general principle of unlimited personal freedom for all, and she tried to live up to her faith. She entered into a "free union" with a certain man, and when she discovered that he was making love to another woman, in the presence of a friend of mine she threw a vase of flowers at his head. You see, her general principles had clashed with another general principle, to the effect that a person who feels deep and strong love inevitably desires that love to endure, and cannot but suffer to see it preyed upon and destroyed.

Let us first consider the question, just what are the true and proper implications of monogamous love? The Roman Catholic church advocates "monogamy," and understands thereby that a man and woman pledge themselves "till death do us part," and if either of them cancels this arrangement it is adultery and mortal sin. I hope that none of my readers understands by "monogamy" any such system of spiritual strangulation. My own idea is rather what some churchman has sarcastically described by the term "progressive polygamy." I believe that a man and woman should pledge their faith in love, and should keep that faith, and endeavor with all their best energies to make a success of it; they should strive each to understand the other's needs, and unselfishly to fulfill them, within the limits of fair play. But if, after such an effort has been truly made, it becomes clear that the union does not mean health and happiness for one of the parties, that party has a right to withdraw from it, and for any government or church or other power to deny that right is both folly and cruelty.

Now, on the basis of this definition of monogamy—or, if you prefer, of progressive polygamy-we are in position to say what we think about jealousy. If two people pledge

their faith, and one breaks it, and the other complains, we do not call that jealousy, but just common decency. Neither do we call it jealousy if one expects the other to avoid the appearance of guilt; for love is a serious thing, not to be played with, and I think that a person who truly loves will do everything possible to make clear to the beloved that he is keeping and means to keep the plighted faith.

You may say that I am using words arbitrarily, in endeavoring thus to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable jealousy, and calling the former by some other name. It does not make much difference about words, provided I make clear my meaning. I could point out a whole string of words which have good meanings and bad meanings, and cannot be discussed without preliminary explanations and distinctions; religion, for example, and morality, and aristocracy, and justice, to name only a few. Most people's thinking about marriage and love has been made like soup in a cheap restaurant, by dumping in all kinds of scraps and notions from such opposite poles of human thought as Christian monkery and Renaissance license, absurdly called "romance." So before you can do any thinking about a problem like jealousy, you have to agree to use the word to mean something definite, whether good or bad.

We shall take jealousy as a "bad" word, and use it to mean the setting up, by a man or woman, of some claim to the love of another person, which claim cannot be justified in the court of reason and fair play. This includes, in the first place, all claims based upon a courtship, not ratified by marriage. It is to the interest of society and the race that men and women should be free to investigate persons of the other sex, and to experiment with the affections before pledges of marriage are made. If sensible customs of love and just laws of marriage were made, there would be no excuse for a woman's giving herself to a man before marriage; she should be taught not to do it, and then if she does it, the risk is her own, and the disgusting perversion of venality and greed known as the "breach of promise suit" should be unknown in our law. The young should be taught that it is the other person's right to change his mind and withdraw at any time before marriage; whatever pains and pangs this may cause must be borne in silence.

The second kind of jealousy is that which seeks to keep