, on the path toward the higher
development of sexual life on earth, as man has so often had to lead
in other paths, that here it is perhaps woman, by reason of those very
sexual conditions which in the past have crushed and trammelled her, who
is bound to lead the way, and man to follow. So that it may be at last,
that sexual love--that tired angel who through the ages has presided
over the march of humanity, with distraught eyes, and feather-shafts
broken, and wings drabbled in the mires of lust and greed, and golden
locks caked over with the dust of injustice and oppression--till those
looking at him have sometimes cried in terror, "He is the Evil and
not the Good of life!" and have sought, if it were not possible, to
exterminate him--shall yet, at last, bathed from the mire and dust of
ages in the streams of friendship and freedom, leap upwards, with white
wings spread, resplendent in the sunshine of a distant future--the
essentially Good and Beautiful of human existence.

I have given this long and very wearisome explanation of the scope and
origin of this little book, because I feel that it might lead to grave
misunderstanding were it not understood how it came to be written.

I have inscribed it to my friend, Lady Constance Lytton; not because
I think it worthy of her, nor yet because of the splendid part she
has played in the struggle of the women fighting today in England for
certain forms of freedom for all women. It is, if I may be allowed
without violating the sanctity of a close personal friendship so to
say, because she, with one or two other men and women I have known, have
embodied for me the highest ideal of human nature, in which intellectual
power and strength of will are combined with an infinite tenderness and
a wide human sympathy; a combination which, whether in the person of the
man or the woman, is essential to the existence of the fully rounded and
harmonised human creature; and which an English woman of genius summed
in one line when she cried in her invocation of her great French
sister:--

"Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man!"

One word more I should like to add, as I may not again speak or write
on this subject. I should like to say to the men and women of the
generations which will come after us--"You will look back at us with
astonishment! You will wonder at passionate struggles that accomplished
so little; at the, to you, obvious paths to attain our ends which we did
not