fe better than we know how to choose a
partner in marriage. We require a character with our cook or our butler,
we engage an expert to test the drains of our house, we study and work,
and pass examinations to prepare ourselves for business, but in marriage
we take no such sensible precautions, we even pride ourselves that we do
_not_ take them.

We speak of _falling_ in love and we _do fall_. There really is
something ludicrous in our attitude. We English are everlasting children
in an everlasting nursery; we so fiercely refuse seriousness towards the
fundamental emotions. The conventions are sacred; nothing else matters.
We stand for purity, which means with women ignorance, and with men
silence and discretion.

Men and women of our earlier England were more natural. Our novelists
then frankly said that every girl looked with special interest on a
well-formed man. There was no conviction marking this as improper, "the
baser side of love." We have grown more and more distorted and
demagnetized from the natural needs of our nature. We try to cast
discredit on our appetites and the body. We have lost the old firm
tradition of marriage and its duties, and we have succeeded in putting
nothing fixed in its place.

Now, I resent the romantic idea that marriage should be a hazardous
mystery--at least to the woman. The more shrewdly girls can judge men
and men can judge girls (not by mere talking and abstract discussion of
sex problems, there has been too much of that kind of futility), but the
more calmly the young lovers can find agreement with each other, the
more simply they can accept the facts of marriage, the more chance there
will be of permanency of affection.

The conventions of to-day are false, are bound up with concealments or
with an equally untruthful openness. It does not, however, follow from
this that mere destruction of the conventions will be enough; that
everyone's unguided ignorance will lead to success and freedom. The
_laissez faire_ system is as false in the realm of marriage as it is in
industry and economics. While equally false, as I have tried to show, is
the too spiritual view of marriage that love can be found only in
perfect harmony of character between the wife and the husband, and is
independent of duty. It is true that love differs from lust in its
deeper insight into the personality, deeper interest in the character,
as opposed to the inexpressive smooth outline and "unbrained" physical