cause of the hardness
which you endured, the choice that you made? Women, to whom this comes home
specially at this time, may it not be that you, by taking this way, will
become the mothers in spirit of women in a happier generation, on whom will
never again be imposed our cramped, stifling, sub-human conception of what
women ought to be? You will show to the world not only that the individual
woman of genius may have a value to Humanity beyond her sex, but that every
woman has that value. In solving your own problem, and taking hold of life
where most it hurts you, you will end by making a moral standard nobler, a
humanity richer and more human, a womanhood freer, greater, more Christlike
than it was. And future generations shall rise up and call you blessed.

III

CONSIDERATION OF OTHER SOLUTIONS OF THE PROBLEM OF THE DISPROPORTION OF THE
SEXES

"My spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given."

Shelley: "Adonais."

Let us now move away from that aspect of the moral problem which
has concerned us hitherto--that of the difficulties created by the
disproportion of the sexes at this time and in this country--and consider
the problem as it presents itself under more normal conditions. For even
in ages and in countries where there are an equal number of men and women
there are difficulties in their relations with one another, and a "moral
problem."

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

The answer given to such questions is often to-day on the side of what is
called, mistakenly, I think, "free love." And in considering this answer,
I want to remind you that it is often given by people who are most sincere,
most idealistic, in their own lives and in their own love. Indeed it has
often been pointed out that it is at times of great spiritual exaltation
and fervour that the cult of "free love" is most likely to find adherents.
The great principle that "love i