CUPID’S YOKES:
OR.
The Binding Forces of Conjugal Life.
An Essay to Consider some Moral and Physiological
Phases of
LOVE AND MARRIAGE,
Wherein is
Asserted the Natural Right and Necessity of
SEXUAL SELF-GOVERNMENT;
The Book which the United States Government and Local
Presumption have repeatedly sought to suppress,
but which Still Lives, Challenging Attention.
BY
E. H. HEYWOOD.
AUTHOR OF “HARD CASH,” UNCIVIL LIBERTY,” “YOURS OR MINE,”
“THE LABOR PARTY,” “THE GOOD OF EVIL,” “WAR METHODS OF
PEACE,” AND OTHER ADDRESSES.
——————————
FIFTIETH THOUSAND.
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PRINCETON, MASS.
CO-OPERATIVE PUBLISHING CO.
FEW HAPPY MATCHES.
BY ISAAC WATTS, D. D. August, 1701.
Say, mighty Love, and teach my song,
To whom my sweetest joys belong,
And who the happy pairs
Whose yielding hearts, and joining hands,
Find blessings twisted with their bands,
To soften all their cares.
Not the wild herd of nymphs and swains
That thoughtless fly into the chains,
As custom leads the way;
If there be bliss without design,
Ivies and oaks may grow and twine,
And be as blest as they.
Not sordid souls of earthly mould
Who drawn by kindred charms of gold
To dull embraces move;
So two rich mountains of Peru
May rush to wealthy marriages too,
And make a world of Love.
Not the mad tribe that hell inspires
With wanton flames, those raging fires
The purer bliss destroy;
On Ætna’s top let furies wed,
And sheets of lightning dress the bed
T’ improve the burning joy.
Nor the dull pairs whose marbled forms
None of the melting passions warm,
Can mingle hearts and hands;
Logs of green wood that quench the coals
Are married just like stoic souls,
With osiers for their bands.
Not minds of melancholy strain,
Still silent, or that still complain,
Can the dear bondage bless;
As well may heavenly concerts spring
From two old lutes with ne’er a string,
Or none beside the bass.
Nor can the soft enchantments hold
Two jarring souls of angry mould,
The rugged and the keen;
Sampson’s young foxes might as well
In bands of cheerful wedlock dwell,
With firebrands tied between.
Nor let the cruel fetters bind
A gentle to a savage mind,
For Love abhors the sight;
Loose the fierce tiger from the deer,
For native rage and native fear
Rise and forbid delight.
Two kindred souls alone must meet,
’Tis friendship makes the bondage sweet,
And feeds their mutual loves;
Bright Venus on her rolling throne
Is drawn by gentlest birds alone,
And Cupids yoke* the doves.
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* Since some “cultured” critics think Cupid’s Yokes are “salacious” words, the
Springfield Republican saying that I ought to be imprisoned for giving such a title to
my book, it is interesting to note that the venerated Orthodox hymnist, Dr. Watts, used
these very words nearly two centuries ago voicing in the above poem the same sentiments
which the United States Courts have adjudged “obscene!” The passages on which I
was convicted will be found, in Parker Pillsbury’s Letter to me, entitled “Cupid’s Yokes
and the Holy Scriptures Contrasted,” advertised on another page.—E. H. H.
CUPID’S YOKES.
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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 num-
ber 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 es-
teem, 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 bold 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 “cast- MORAL
ing vote,” thereby giving to his side a majority of one, TIES.
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 sup-
posed 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
____
* A sacrament is any ceremony producing an obligation, sacredly binding.—
Worcester. An invisible hand from heaven mingles hearts and souls by strange,
secret, and unaccountable conjunctions.—South. The mind is God’s book, and its
healthy attractions are his laws.—Austin Kent.
4 CUPID’S YOKES.
“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 con-
stantly 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
VIRTUE, intelligence to know and power to resist wrong.‡ One
CHASTITY. 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 wil1 to obey Thought. But,
since one cannot choose or act, when mental and physical movement
is suppressed, Liberty, occasion, is the primary and indispensable con-
dition of Virtue; while vice originates in stagnant ignorance, which
the policy of repression enforces. The conscience, feeling, or impres-
____
* Everything is right which is conformable to the supreme rule of human ac-
tion; but that only is a right which, being conformable to this supreme rule, is
realized in society, and vested in a particular person. What is our duty to do we
must do because it is right, not because any one can demand it of us.—Whewell.
Duty is a moral obligation imposed from within; obligation a duty imposed from
without.—Worcester. Duty is the relation of obliging force of that which is
morally right.—Webster. There are no rights without corresponding duties.—
Coleridge. Men have no right to do what is not reasonable.—Burke.
† True self-love and social are the same.—Pope. Love worketh no ills to his
neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.—St. Paul.
‡ Virtue implies opposition to passion or wrong.—Fleming. That course of
action, by which a man fulfills or tends to fulfill the purposes of his being, is vir-
tuous.—Worcester. Virtue is nothing but voluntary obedience to truth.—Dwight.
The four cardinal virtues are prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice.—Paley.
The virtuous freely choose to live in accordance with the right reason of Nature.—
Philo.
CUPID’S YOKES. 5
sions which precede and inspire thought announce the presence of
ethical intelligence, and indicate how largely human actions are influ-
enced 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 after-
wards), 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 pre-
valent 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 ques-
tions of Love, virtue, continence or reproduction.
While Passion impels movement in one person towards another, and
tends to overleap unnatural barriers, its proposals are, nev-
ertheless subject to rejection; created and nourished by PASSION,
the object of attraction, it is toned by Love which gener- REASON.
ates, 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 him-
self, 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.
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* Chastity is the regulated and strictly temperate satisfaction, without injury to
others, of those desires which are natural to all healthy, adult beings.—Benjamin
Franklin. Prostitution, sexual intercourse without affection; Chastity, sexual
intercourse with affection.—Robert Owen.
† Freedom is the only cure for the evils which freshly acquired freedom produces.
—Macauley. When appetite draws one way, it may be opposed, not by any appe-
tite or passion, but by some cool principle of action, which has authority without any
impulsive force.—Reid. They only are free who are divinely bound.—John Orvis.
6 CUPID’S YOKES.
The essential principle of Nature, Love, is a law unto itself; but,
resisted by custom, its natural intent and scope are not
FORCE OF generally understood. We were all trained in the school
CUSTOM. 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 sub-
ject impartially. The grave tendencies of the Love question, its imper-
ative 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 baffld 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
MARRIAGE, man with several women—Polygamy; or that of one
A HUMAN man with one woman—Monogamy, is a conventional
DEVICE. 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 ungov-
ernable. 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,
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* The rules of etiquette, the provisions of the statute book, and the commands of
the decalogue have grown from the same root, custom. * * * The right of private
judgment, which our fathers wrung from the Church, remains to be claimed from
Fashion, the dictator of our habits.—Herbert Spencer. The Orinoco-Indian woman,
who would not hesitate to leave her hut without a fragment of clothing on, dare
not commit such a breach of decorum as to go out unpainted.—Humboldt. Habit
is the deepest law of human nature.—Carlyle. We gain a residence in the senses
by birthright, but are born late into ideas, the country of the mind.—Alcott.
† I have observed so few happy matches, and so many unfortunate ones, and have
so rarely seen men love their wives at the rate they did whilst they were their mis-
tresses, that I wonder not that legislators thought it necessary to make marriages
indissoluble to make them lasting. I cannot fitlier compare marriage than to a
lottery; for in both he that ventures may succeed and may miss; if he draws a
prize he hath a rich return for his venture; but in both lotteries there is a pretty
store of blanks for every prize.—Hon. Robert Boyle, 1665.
CUPID’S YOKES. 7
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 con-
science 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 MARRIAGE,
be well, were it not a compulsory choice of evils, and COMPULSIVE.
were they able to determine, in advance, the grave inter-
ests 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 mis-
eries 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
____
* The evolution of human society commenced in the institution of complex mar-
riage. But we are informed by authentic historical documents, that, in the very
early times, public opinion becoming more and more enlightened in certain favored
communities, the woman of these communities—sustained by that public opinion
and shocked and scandalized by the social condition in which they found them-
selves—were enabled to successfully revolt against complex marriage, and to
overthrow it. Strange as it may seem, the old-world women established a new
social organization for the more advanced communities, and a new marriage
system, based on the ground of absolute female supremacy. (How the women
managed to do it the writer shows, but I have not space to quote.—E. H. H.) In
the new order of things the husband became the subject of the wife; the woman
was absolute owner of the homestead; property descended, and relationships were
counted, exclusively in the female line; and the women seized and retained the
principal share of political power. * * * The companions of Romulus (the founder of
Rome) were men who ran away, took to the woods, to escape from the rigors of
female government. These runaways established themselves in easily-defended
fastnesses, distributed the land surrounding them among themselves as “real es-
tate,” following out the lesson which the women had taught them. It was in this
way that the title to “real estate” began to vest in men, to the exclusion of women,
and to descend in the male, instead of the female line. The heads of the groups in
this new society were males, and members of the groups were also males. It was
necessary, therefore, in order that the new society should become complete, that
each male should steal a wife for himself from some neighboring tribe, and bring
her to the mountain fastness. The men did not fail to perform the special duty
that devolved upon them. The case of Rome was not an isolated one. All over
Europe, and all over Asia, men rose against women, transferred the titles to
land, from women to themselves by actual force, dethroned the sovereign witch-
women by whom they had been so long governed, and supplied themselves with
“CAPTIVE WIVES.” This new institution of the “captive wife” gave occasion,
in Europe, to the establishment of monogamy; in Asia, to that of polygamy.—
Wm. B. Greene in “Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic, and Financial Frag-
ments,” pp. 188–208.
† Puberty is the time of life at which a person is capable of procreation or of
bearing young, which according to the civil law, is at 12 years of age for females,
and 14 for males.—Bacon. This is the English view, but puberty varies with cli-
8 CUPID’S YOKES.
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, below, 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 an 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
TYRANNY sin, every priest or magistrate, who “solemnizes” the
OF LUST 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 1icense granted man; but cases are on
ecord 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
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mates; in temperate New England it is often delayed till 15 and 17, while in torrid
regions it comes at 10 and 11, and earlier. It is said that one of Mahomet’s wives
bore him a son when she was but 10 years of age! What kind of a life does such
a fact indicate that this especial “Prophet of God” led among young girls?
* In the entire animal kingdom, the fruits of the first signals of reproductive in-
stinct are constantly imperfect.—Aristotle. Marriages soon after puberty produce
a diseased, puny, and miserable population.—Montesquieu. Give a boy a wife,
and a girl a bird, and death will soon knock at the door.—German Proverb.
† Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal
slaves, except the mistress of every house.—J. S. Mill. The definition of the wife’s
condition, as given in the English law-books, contain all the elements of a definition
of domestic slavery. But the definition of the husband’s status, as given in the
same law-books, is that of a lord, not that of a slave. * * * American legislation is
more absurd that that of England.—Greens “Fragments,” pp. 212–13.
‡ It is said of Valerie Messalina, wife of Claudius Cæsar, that “her husband’s
CUPID’S YOKES. 9
the roofs of “respectable” houses to find the skeleton’s of its femenine
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 apolo-
gize 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, Spirit-
ualists and Atheists, who scout theological perdition, think social hells
of permanent necessity in human life. Nowhere does the human intel-
lect 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,
referred to in the notes below, 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 devo-
tion, 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. Charles
Summer, in his will, gave money to the daughters of the poet Longfellow,
of Dr. S. G. Howe, and of the Rev. Dr. Wm. H. Furness, “in consid-
eration of his profound regard for their estimable parents;” but cases
have occurred, and will multiply, as civilization prevails, where men of
no blood relation, and without a hint of sexual intimacy, give money,
and even estates, to girls and women, worthy of love and distinction,
irrespective of their parents, ennobling themselves and human kind in
so doing.
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chief officers became her adulterers, and were allied with her in all her abomina-
tions. She cast an eye of lust on the principal men in Rome, and whom she could
not seduce to gratify her propensities she would contrive to destroy. She was so
excessive in her sexuality, that she often required the services of the strongest
and most vigorous men to satisfy her lusts.”—History and Philosophy of Mar-
riage, pp. 107–108.
* Victoria C. Woodhull speaks of a New York clergyman who married a beauti-
ful woman, and, sometimes demanding indulgence, six or eight times a day, actually
killed her by his lecherous excesses.—Scarecrows of Sexual Freedom, p. 23. M. Lal-
lemand, in his work on spermatorrhœa, speaks of a Greek who for years indulged
on an average fourteen times a day.—Elements of Social Science, p. 84. I know a
physician, who, the first year, and while his wife was pregnant with twins, in-
dulged seven hundred and thirty times. * * * The woman is now broken down and
barren.—Quintus in Social Revolutionist, June, 1875, p. 187. Here are my mother’s
words:—“Oh! your father’s death is such a relief, he was so amative; I could
never talk to him on any subject, or lie one moment in the morning, without his
becoming excited. I submitted to it all, because I thought I was married, and
ought. I thought it a woman’s duty to submit to what I conceived to be man’s right.
When I think of my suffering during child-bearing and nursing, when I look on a
life of force and violation, I must say your father’s death was a relief.” My mother
sleeps in the grave.—Cora Corning in Social Revolutionist, July, 1857.
10 CUPID’S YOKES.
Though man may “propose,” and woman “accept,” a notion inhabits
the average male head that the irresistibly attractive
“WHO IS force of woman’s nature makes her responsible for any
SHE?” 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, as in the
Sickles and McFar1and case, 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. Beecher’s confessions and “let-
ters of contrition,” with his later denials, sadly illustrate the pathetic
penitence, the sniveling cowardice, and brazen-faced falsity with which
“great men” endeavor to appease, cajole, and defy equivocal public
opinion.† The harsh judgments pronounced on women which abound
in the literature‡ of all ages, are equa1led only by the evidences of
ludicrous puerility which men display when confronted with their sexual
“deeds done in the body.” 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 suffi-
ciently startling to convince all serious-minded people of
NATIONAL the imperative need of investigation; especially of the
GAG-LAW. 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 ignor-
ance forbidding them to inquire. It is even thought dangerous to discuss
the subject at all.§ In families, schools, sermons, lectures, and news-
papers its candid consideration is so studiously suppressed that children
* Mr. Beecher says he never made such a statement. † My allusions to Mr.
B. are not intended to indorse the “exposure” view, for his alleged relations to
Mrs. Tilton are none of my business; but his words and acts as a public teacher of
morals, and his false attitude, as an official “solemnizer” of
the social crime of marriage, make him a legitimate subject of criticism. While his natural right to
commit adultery is unquestionable, his right to lie about it is not so clear.
‡ Better a thousand women should perish than that one man cease to see the light.
—Euripides. Frailty! thy name is Woman!—Shakespeare. Unhappy sex! whose
beauty is your snare!—Dryden. A state’s anger should not take knowledge either
of fools or women.—Ben Jonson. I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and concep-
tion; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy
husband and he shall rule over thee.—Gen. iii. 15. Her house is the way to hell,
going down to the chambers of death. Who can find a virtuous woman?—Solomon,
who kept 700 wives and 300 concubines, or “fast” women!
§ The woman that deliberates is lost, Addison. The man who reflects is a de-
praved animal,—Rousseau. Regarding physicians who do not follow the beaten
CUPID’S YOKES. 11
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 “ob-
scene” 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 I make the following extract:—
§ 148.—That no obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper,
print, or other publication of an indecent character, nor any article or thing de-
signed 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 deliv-
ery, 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 herein-
before-mentioned articles or things, shall take or cause to be taken, from the mail
any such letter or package, shall he deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on con-
viction thereof, shall, for every offence, BE FINED NOT LESS THAN ONE HUNDRED DOL-
LARS 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.
I Credit Congress and President Grant with good intentions in framing
this “law;” for, ignorant of the cause of the evils they proposed to
correct, they were probably unaware of the unwarrantable stretch of
despotism embodied in their measure, and of the abuse which would be
made of it. A humane man, Dr. Lewis has not the savage disposition
which the extracts I have quoted, below, from his book, indicate; the
influence of “obscene literature” may be as depraving as he affirms;
but his measures of repression are a clear invasion of natural right, and
will serve only to hasten the downfall of marriage, which he writes
to uphold. “Prohibition a Failure” is the title of a book, in which Dr.
Lewis, by irrefutable logic, shows that the policy which he brings to
the social question is indefensible and self-defeating when applied to the
liquor traffic. When the Doctor as intelligently studies Social reform
as he has temperance, he will blush to remember the heated words that
have fallen from his pen. Regarding Anthony Comstock, representative
of the Young Mens’ Christian Association and the real author of the
“law” quoted above, I regret to be unable to entertain so favorable an
opinion. In a letter addressed to Hon. C. L. Merriam, M. C., dated
Brooklyn, N. Y., Jan. 18, 1873, he says: “There were four publishers
on the 2nd of last March; to-day three of these are in their graves, and
it is charged by their friends that I WORRIED THEM TO DEATH. BE THAT AS
IT MAY, I AM SURE THAT THE WORLD IS BETTER OFF WITHOUT THEM.” This is
clearly the spirit that lighted the fires of the Inquisition. Appointed
____
path of custom in prescribing for sexual disease, Dr. Dio Lewis asks, “Is there
no law by which such miscreants may be suppressed? * * * It seems hard that
decent men are not allowed to shoot them on sight as they would shoot a mad dog
—Chastity, pp. 23–205.
12 CUPID’S YOKES.
special supervisor of the U. S. Mails (by what authority I am unable
to learn); and, by religio-sectarian intolerance, constituted censor of
the of the opinions of the people in their most important channel of
inter-communication, he is chiefly known through his efforts to suppress
newspapers and imprison editors disposed to discuss the Social Question.
In Nov., B. L. 1, he procured the arrest and imprisonment of Victoria
C. Woodhull and her editorial associates for publishing a preliminary
ventilation of the “Brooklyn Scandal,” which afterwards filled American
newspapers. Subsequently, be caused the incarceration, during seven
months, of George F. Train for publishing in his newspaper (The Train
Ligue) certain quotations from the Christian Bible, touching the same
“scandal” which the implicated churches employ Mr. Comstock to hush
up. As I write this (Jan. 1, Y. L. 4 ), a note from another subject to his
vengeance, John A. Lant, editor and publisher of the N. Y. Toledo Sun,
dated Ludlow St. Jail, New York, Dec. 30, 1875, says: “Judge Bene-
dict to-day sentenced me to imprisonment in Albany Penitentiary one
year and six months. I will endeavor to send you a copy of the sen-
tence. It is worth to us all it costs me.” Mr. Lant’s crime is sending
through the mails his newspaper, containing criticisms of the “scandal,”
and of Rev. H. W. Beecher! Mr. Comstock’s relation to Mr. Lant, as
heretofore to Mrs. Woodhull and Mr. Train, is that of a religious mono-
maniac, whom the mistaken will of Congress and the lascivious fanaticism
of the Young Mens’ Christian Association have empowered to use the
Federal Courts to suppress free inquiry. The better sense of the Amer-
ican people moves to repeal the National Gag-Law which he now
administers, and every interest of public and private morality demands
thorough discussion of the issue which sectarian pride and intolerance
now endeavor to postpone.
“Beauty is a joy forever,” and for all; the quality of beauty being
to awaken admiration and esteem in observers to the
LOVE, NOT extent of their ability to appreciate it. To be suscepti-
EXCLUSIVE. ble 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 per-
meable 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 monogomy meaning to marry
to one only.* Yet, so called monogamists constantly violate that princi-
ple; 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
____
* To have one wife only and not to marry a second; to disallow second marriage.
—Webster. Monogamy is the marriage of one wife only, as distinguished from
bigamy or polygamy.—Blount. It is the condition of not marrying a second wife
after the death of the first.—Chambers.
CUPID’S YOKES. 13
the less “pure” in doing so? Certainly not; second, third, or subse-
quent 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. David, the “man after God’s
own heart,” compassed the death of Uriah to get possession of his wife,
Bathsheba† and “took more wives and concubines out of Jerusalem
after he was come from Hebron,” for God “gave him the house of Saul
and the wives of Saul into his bosom.” Though Solomon was very
“promiscuously” married, Sunday-School children are yet taught to
revere him as “the wisest man.” 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 mar- THE ONEIDA
riage. Out of the modern Christian Church have come VIEW.
three phases of sexual morality,—Shakerism, or the ut-
ter proscription of sexual intercourse; Mormonism, or sanctified poly-
gamy; 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. I give, therefore, a
brief abstract of their Love doctrine, mainly in the words of their Seer
and pastor, Rev. J. H. Noyes. 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 pente-
costal spirit abolishes exclusiveness in regard to women and children,
as respecting property. The new commandment is that we love each
____
* Polygamy existed legally, and was not put down by the moral sense of the Jew-
ish nation.—Woolsey’s Divorce and Divorce Legislation, p. 12. The Sacred Scrip-
tures present the wisest and best men that ever lived as practising polygamy with
the divine blessing and approval.—History and Philosophy for Marriage, p. 63.
† God did not approve of his method of procedure, for he said to David, “I will
take thy wives and give them to thy neighbour * * * And, of Bathsheba’s child by
him, he said it “shall surely die.” David “wept and fasted” to atone for the
“scandal,” the Prophet Nathan being the exposer in this case, who, as Mrs.
Woodhull to Beecher, said, Thou art the man. God let him have Bathsheba, who
became the mother of Solomon.
‡ “Bible arguments defining the relations of the sexes in the Kingdom of Heaven,”
being part of the First Report of the Oneida Association.
§ Those interested to consult texts are referred to Matt. vi. 10: xxii. 30. Eph.
i. x. John xvii. 10–21. Acts ii. 44, 45; iv. 32. 1 Cor. vii. 29–31. Rom. iv. 15.
1 Cor. vi. 12. See “History of American Socialisms,” pp. 621–9,
14 CUPID’S YOKES.
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 affini-
ties, 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 provis-
ion 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 un-
natural 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 Onei-
dans 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
CHOICE, State has the thanks of all intelligent reformers for per-
NOT mitting Perfectionism to illustrate its ideas of sexuality
COERCION. in its own way. But their conceited and self-righteous
contempt for Socialises 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 tolera-
tion 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
____
* The Oneida Community, coerced by religio-superstitious threats of Christians,
formally abandoned their complex-marriage system in November, Y. L. 7.
‡ If Christians had their way, their outraged sense of “virtue” would impel
them to assail and scatter the Oneida Community. The Presbyterians of Central
New York recently implored the State authorities to abate this “moral nuisance,”
as they call it. Always opposed to reform as a body, “Professing Christians”
are “conscientiously” hostile to efforts to free, legal and illicit “prostitutes,”
from their marriage masters.
CUPID’S YOKES. 15
Socialism, and that the first lesson of progress is to have one’s Individ-
uality 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; de-
clining 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 Lib-
erty, which makes social choice sacred, and Individual Integrity a duty,
domestic life will gravitate towards unity, and Love become the poten-
tially redeeming force which Nature intended it to be.*
But since human nature is imperfect, and passional heats often pre-
cede cool reason, young people cannot too early learn
that they may choose wrongly; and that, If not guided “HONEY-
by the rudder of thought, they must learn wisdom by MOONS.”
collision with the rocks or experience. It is better, how-
ever, 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. Those who
hold, With Victor Hugo, that “the foolishness of Lovers is the Wisdom
of God,” must have a large share of idiocy in their idea of Supreme
Truth. 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 fornica-
tion, 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 hap-
piness in the union of blighted personalities, is our destiny, until we
____
* Adultery is an offence committed against a vicious social order among men, an
imperfect social State, and is engendered by it exclusively; so that, when society
comes or is acknowledged as the normal state of man, adultery will disappear as
the fog of a marsh disappears before the morning sun. * * * Our existing conjugal-
ity, accordingly, is not marriage except in name, because it disallows an inward,
free, or spontaneous tenure, and admits only a legally enforced or outward one. It
is simply a legalized concubinage of the sexes.—Henry James.
† Marriage originated otherwise than in contracts by which one man bound him-
self to one woman exclusively, and, reciprocally, one woman to one man. It has
been almost always based in modern times and in Christian countries on the “affin-
ity theory,” that is, on mutual consent grounded in natural attraction and the
recognized natural interadaptation of the parties to each other, each being the
affectional complement and counterpart of the other; such mutual consent follow-
ing upon a necessary prelude of courting and love making, in which the fact of the
“affinity” is authentically tested in respect to its genuineness.—Greene’s “Frag-
ments,” pp. 201, 202.
16 CUPID’S YOKES.
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
MYSTERY we sow, thereof we reap; Fate is unexplored fact. Wise
OF SEX. 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 peri-
ods 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 surpris-
ing 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
____
* The Shakers, who try to suppress sexual love, and the Oneidans, who would
redeem and glorify it, are now the two leading exponents of Communism, in the
States: amid the ruins of New Harmony Robt. Owen prophecied that individual
property and marriage must go down together; while the old Brook-Farm Asso-
ciation died of too much love of marriage, usury, and “cultured” sentimentalism.
There is some truth in Mr: Noyes’ idea that a religious basis is necessary to suc-
cessful association; but the “religion” must consist in obedience to Justice, Truth,
and Liberty—not to a theological Christ merely. The Shakers and Oneidans have
only taken women and children into the old property conspiracy, and, according
to the popular idea of “co-operation,” they divide the profits, or spoils, among a
larger number of thieves. But, by abolishing interest, rent, and profits, we shall
establish property on the basis of Equity: and Love and Liberty, in the absence
of marriage, will promote associative unity.
† For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and be joined unto his
wife, and they two shall be one fiesh. This is a great mystery.—St. Paul. I
should love to have such children as I can imagine, but I have no great desire to
put into the great lottery of paternity.—DeTocqueville. I cannot doubt that the
structure of animals is governed by principles of similar uniformity with that of
the rest of the universe.—Newton. Little improvement can be expected in morality
until the producing of large families is regarded with the same feeling as drunk-
enness, or any other physical excess.—J. S. Mill. Man scans with scrupulous care
the character and pedigree pf his horses, cattle, and dogs, before he matches them;
but when he comes to his own marriage, he rarely, or ever, takes any such care.—
Darwin’s “Descent of Man.”
‡ The above statements respecting human offspring are based on facts within my
own knowledge. Other theories for predetermining sex are afioat, but this is the
most reliable one I have met. Those wishing to pursue the interesting subject
further are referred to Naphey’s “Physical Life of Woman,” pp. 129, 32; Trall’s
“Sexual Physiology,” pp. 149, 200; and Noyes’ “Scientific Propagation.”
CUPID’S YOKES. 17
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 bache1ors of the past, to give to the
world that grandest achievement in art,—a Child. Many of the no-
blest 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, SEXUAL
among Freethinkers, that it is uncontrollable; both HEALTH.
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,” Sci-
ence 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,
____
* Lycurgus laughed at those who revenge with war and bloodshed the communi-
cation of a married woman’s favors; and allowed that if a man in years should
have a young wife, he might introduce to her some handsome and honest young
man, whom he most approved of, and when she had a child of this generous race,
bring it up as his own. On the other hand, he allowed, that if a man of character
should entertain a passion for a married woman on account of her modesty and the
beauty of her children, he might treat with her husband for admission to her com-
pany, that so planting in a beauty-bearing soil, he might produce excellent chil-
dren, the congenial offspring of excellent parents.—Plutarch’s Lives, p. 36.
† Each generation has enormous power over the natural gifts of those that follow,
and it is a duty we owe to humanity to investigate the range of that power, and
to exercise it in a way that, without being unwise toward ourselves, will be most
advantageous to future inhabitants of the earth. * * * All life is a single in its es-
sence, but various, ever-varying, and inter-active in its manifestations; men, and
all other animals, are active workers and sharers in a vastly more extended system
of cosmic action than any of ourselves, much less of them, can possibly compre-
hend.—Galton’s “Hereditary Genius,” pp. 1, 376.
‡ Thinking woman impure, the ancients called her monthly flowing purgation.
Hence the command of Moses that men should not approach her at certain periods.
But what theology calls “purgation,” science proves to be “the sacred wound of
love in which mothers conceive.”
18 CUPID’S YOKES.
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 fa-
tally. Though probably less injurious than the fatal drain of involun-
tary 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 Parent-
age.† 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 mutu-
alism. 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
____
* Of those unfortunates who jump from bridges, take arsenic, hang themselves,
or otherwise seek death, nearly two-thirds are unmarried, and in some years nearly
three-fourths. In France, Bavaria, Prussia, and Hanover, four out of every five
crazy women are unmarried, and throughout the civilized world there are three or
four single to one marriage woman in the establishments for the insane.—Naphey’s
“Physical Life of Woman,” p. 41. Sydenham says “Hysteric affectious consti-
tute one-half of woman’s chronic diseases.” * * * Hysteria is comparatively un-
known in India, where it is a matter of religious feeling to procure a husband for
a girl as soon as menstruation begins, but in this country, (England), whose cus-
toms enforce celibacy, no other disease is so wide-spread. * * * A happy sexual
intimacy is the best remedy for hysteria.—Elements of Social Science, pp. 176–82.
Thrown upon himself by the asceticism of our morality, the young man falls into
solitary indulgence. Haunted by amatory ideas, and tormented by excitement of
sexual organs, the spirited youth wars manfully for the citadel of his chastity.
* * * Night brings no consolation after the gloomy day, for he lives in constant
dread of nocturnal discharges of semen, which weaken him so much, that in the
morning he feels as if bound down by a weight to his couch. * * * He consults
physicians, but, overawed by the general erroneous moral views on these subjects,
they shrink from their duty to assert the sacredness of the bodily laws in opposi-
tion to preconception. * * * Rosseau was an instructive instance of a most noble
mind, struggling under the inevitable ruin of a secret bodily disease. * * * Pascal
also is thought to have had the disease, and probably Sir Isaac Newton, who is
said to have lived a life of strict sexual abstinence, which produced before death a
total atrophy of the testicles, showing the natural sin which he had committed.
* * * It is a disgrace to medicine and mankind that so important of class of dis-
eases have become the trade of unscientific men.—Ibid, 80, 81, 88, 102. See also
Lewis’ “Chastity,” and Trall’s “Sexual Physiology.”
† The utility of the passions well directed has become a maxim in medicine as
in morality; the fathers in medicine and their modern followers agree in this.—
Naphey’s, p. 76. Children should be the fruit of liberty and light; it is doubtless
of the most elevated voluntary love that heroes have been born.—Michelet. The
passions are the celestial fire that vivifies the moral world; it is to them that the
arts and sciences owe their discoveries, and man the elevation of his position.—
Helvetius.
CUPID’S YOKES. 19
relations of private life. It will ere long be seen that a lady and gen-
tleman 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; out it means SEXUAL
just the opposite; it means the utilization of animalism, CONTINENCE.
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, uncon-
trollable 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 fatal-
istic theory of Love, and abandons the grave issues of coition to chance
and “necessity.” Though my experience is quite limited, facts with-
in my personal knowledge enable me to affirm without fear of refuta-
tion, that Lovers’ exchange, in its inception, continuance, and conclu-
sion, 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 in-
tervened,” 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;‡ unnat-
ural, 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
____
* The evils of celibacy I believe to be a fruitful source of uterine disease. The
sexual instinct is a healthy instinct, claiming satisfaction as a natural right.—Dr.
E. J. Tilt, London. Our appetites, being as much a portion of ourselves as any
other quality we possess, ought to be indulged; otherwise the individual is not
developed. If a man suppresses part of himself, he becomes maimed and shorn.
The proper limit of self-indulgence is, that he shall neither hurt himself nor hurt
others. Short of this, everything is lawful. It is more than lawful; it is neces-
sary. He who abstains from safe and moderate gratification of the senses, lets some
of his essential faculties fall into abeyance, and must, on that account, be deemed
imperfect and unfinished. He may be a monk; he may be a saint; but a man he
is not.—Buckle.
† I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection.—St. Paul. The discharge
of the semen, instead of being the main act of sexual intercourse, is really the
sequal and termination of it. Sexual intercourse, pure and simple, is the conjunc-
tion of the organs of union, and the interchange of magnetic influences, or con-
versation of spirits, through the medium of that conjunction. . . . Abstinence
from the propagative part of sexual intercourse may seem impracticable to de-
praved natures, and yet be perfectly natural and easy to persons properly trained
to chastity. . . . A very large proportion of all children born under the present
system, are begotten contrary to the wishes of both parents, and lie nine months
in their mother’s womb under their mother’s curse.—Noyes’ Male Continence, pp.
12, 13, 15.
‡ When the health of the mother is doubtful, and the family cash box empty or
a pre-disposition to some grave malady inherited, they will ask how conception
may be prevented, or the next child postponed.—Lewis’ Chastity, p. 89.
20 CUPID’S YOKES.
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 conti-
nence 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 vary 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 pop-
ulation 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 popula-
tion, “by the ghastly agencies of war, pestilence, and famine.” Ly-
curgus 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 propaga-
tion and Population: 1. The Shaker-Malthus method, which forbids
sexual intercourse; 2. The abortion-child-murder method, which de-
stroys life before or after birth; 3. The French-Owen method of barri-
ers, withdrawal, &c., to arrest the process in its course;—but, since
they are either uunatural, 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
CAUSES OF so-called “fallen women,” in hopeless depression. But,
“PROSTITUTION.” if each “common” woman entertains an average num-
ber of five men as her customers, for every woman who
“sells her virtue” there must be five “fallen” men who buy it. How
____
* Conception may take place from sexual union within six days before the be-
ginning, to ten days after the cessation, of the menstrual evacuation.—T. L. Nich-
ols’ Human Physiology p. 271. M. Bischoff, the celebrated German physiologist,
says that coition to be fruitful, must take place from eight days before to twelve
after the menses cease. . . . Various unnatural means are employed to prevent the
seminal fluid from entering the womb, thus preventing the union of the sperm
and germ cell which is the essential part of impregnation; among these means are
withdrawal before emission; the use of safes, or sheathes; the introduction of a
piece of sponge so as to guard the mouth of the womb, and the injection of tepid
water into the vagina immediately after coition. But these methods, except the
latter, are injurious and disgusting.—Elements of Social Science pp. 348–9. See
also Owen’s “Moral Physiology.”
CUPID’S YOKES. 21
came they to have money to buy it? How came she to be so depend-
ent 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, sub-
jected 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 inter-
course; 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 pro-
mote 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 SEXUAL
recognized, without reproof, her natural right to live RIGHTS.
with men as she chose; and when a woman “taken in
adultery, in the very act,” was brought to him for criticism and sen-
tence, 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 hnse been stoned to
death, and the lascivious ignorance of religio-“cultured” Massachu-
setts 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
____
* Sexual despotism, making almost every woman, socially speaking, the append-
age of some man, enables men to take systematically the lion’s share of whatever
belongs to both.—John Stuart Mill.. Working women, as compared with men,
are defrauded of fifty per cent. of their rightful earnings.—Amasa Walker.
† It is a lamentable truth that the troubles which respectable, hard-working,
married women undergo, are more trying to the lealth, and detrimental to the l
ooks, than any of the harlot’s career.—Herbert Spencer.
22 CUPID’S YOKES.
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
barbarious 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, un-
natural and void.
Against all repressive opposition, Individualism steadily advances to
become a law unto itself; the right of private judgment
HEARTS, in religion, wrested by Luther from Intolerance in conti-
TRUMPS. nental Europe—later asserted in politics by Hampden
and Sydney against the English Stuarts, and by Adams
and Jefferson against British-American centralization—is now legiti-
mately 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 Re-
formers 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 tenden-
cies 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 elo-
quence opposed in that struggle; the impressive pomp of courts, the
____
* The Master said, “Swear not at all;” and no exception in favor of the mar-
riage oath is made. Sacramental marriage is outside of the normal conditions of
human society. . . . Under the Christian dispensation, no man can rightfully
make himself, by any process, cognizable before the civil courts, a voluntary slave.
. . . No man can rightfully repudiate his own conscience; neither can he, by any
foregone act, mortgage his own conscience in the future. . . . The 11th amend-
ment of the Mass. Constitution says, “No subordination of any one sect or denom-
ination to another shall ever be established by law.” . . . If one sect believe on
moral and religious grounds, that it is wicked to put all people under the alterna-
tive of not marrying at all, or of marrying for life, where is the constitutionality
of the law which forces them to marry in a way against which they have conscien-
tious scruples? Without what show of justice could the courts punish, with fine and
imprisonment, parties living in such a way that fornication and bastardy, through
their example, becomes respectable?—Greene’s “Fragments,” pp. 220–2. Those
who marry as little intend to conspire their own ruin as those who swear allegiance;
and as a whole people is to an ill government, so is one man or woman to an ill
marriage.—Milton. Did South Carolina, which, before negro emancipation, had
no divorces, present a better civilization than Connecticut and Indiana, in which
divorces were readily obtained? Does the Romish Church, which opposes divorce,
embody higher types of character than Protestant Churches favoring it?
CUPID’S YOKES. 23
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 bur-
den light.” I opened this Essay accepting Love as the regnant force in
social life; I conclude it by emphasizing the same faith. Money, ambi-
tion, respectability, isolation, magnetic fervor, fascinating touch, glow-
ing 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 tbe 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.”
____
* Judged by the final test, the chief thing, in life, is love.—Theodore Tilton.
There must be a unitary passional code, enacted by God, and interpreted by at-
traction.—Fourier. Individuality, as the principle of order and repose, is directly
opposed to promiscuity.—Josiah Warren. He whom love alone does not satisfy
cannot have been filled with it.—Richter. No man is qualified to feel the worth of
a woman who reverences herself. . . No woman shall receive an acknowledgement
of love from my lips to whom I cannot consecrate my life.—Goethe. Let the mo-
tive be in the deed not in the event; be not one moved by hope of reward; he
who doeth what is to be done, without affection, obtaineth the Surpeme.—Kreeshna.
☞ At this date June 1, Y. L. 8, Cupid’s Yokes first officially assailed in Halifax,
N. S., while being sold there by Josephine S. Tilton in Y. L. 5, though less than
4 1-2 years old, has been complained of or prosecuted a dozen times or more, twice
burned in public squares by indignant city marshals, repeatedly “suppressed” by
the United States and State Governments, meeting persecution which for supersti-
tious rancor is unparalleled by any book since the appearance of Paine’s Age of
Reason that so shocked conservatives in American and Europe before the Revolution
of B. L. 97. Sentenced to two years imprisonment at hard labor in Dedham Jail,
June 25th, Y. L. 6, July 2d following I discarded the A. D. notation of time which
recognizes a mythical God in the calender, puts Christian collars marked “J. C.”
on naturally free necks, and registers us subjects of the lascivio-religious despotism
which the male-sexual origin and history of the cross impose,—dating instead, Y. L.
in the Year of Love, from the formation of the New England Free Love League in
Boston, Feb. 25th, 1873. Announcing the New Heavens and the New Earth, the
Natural Society, foreseen by sensitives, poets and philosophers, Cupid’s Yokes,
after the “suppression,” rises with the new vigor to wrestle wlth benighted Irration-
alism,—strong in the New Faith, the New Morality which is destined to supersede
present religion, law and order. Like the “little book” spoken of in St, John ’s
Revelation (Chap. x, 2–10), sweet in the mouths but bitter in the bellies of vulgar
bigots, explaining the mystery of Good as foresensed by its servants the prophets,
pronouncing Christian “time no longer,” this oracle of the banner State of Life,
Love, now gives ideas and law to 40,000,000 American people. From Stephen
Pearl Andrews, Mary Wolstonecraft and Charles Fourier, back to Plato and Jesus,
Seers in all ages have favored Intelligence in Love and Parentage; and since Phy-
siological information, “anything designed or intended to prevent conception” is
the objective thought to be suppressed by Comstock’s “laws” it is the imperative
duty of citizens to proclaim it; for, not superstitious Nescience, but knowledge of
ourselves as Human Bodies, naked truth between Man and Woman, Science is the
right rule of faith and practice in Sexuality. More protestant than Protestants,
yet essentially Catholic, Free Love proclaims the Right of Private Judgment in
morals.—E. H. H.