to the sixteenth century. Its
establishment in Sweden has apparently been satisfactory, and it is now
sought to extend it to other countries.[65]

It is interesting to compare, or to contrast, the movement of which
Ellen Key has been a conspicuous champion with the futile movement
initiated nearly a century ago by the school of Saint-Simon and Prosper
Enfantin, in favour of "la femme libre."[66] That earlier movement had no
doubt its bright and ideal side, but it was not supported by a sound and
scientific view of life; it was rooted in sand and soon withered up. The
kind of freedom which Ellen Key advocates is not a freedom to dispense
with law and order, but rather a freedom to recognize and follow true
law; it is the freedom which in morals as well as in politics is
essential for the development of real responsibility.

People talk, Ellen Key remarks, as though reform in sexual morality
meant the breaking up of a beautiful idyll, while the idyll is
impossible as long as the only alternative offered to so many young men
and women at the threshold of life is between becoming "the slave of
duty or the slave of lust." In these matters we already possess licence,
and the only sound reform lies in a kind of "freedom" which will correct
that licence by obedience to the most fundamental natural instincts
acting in harmony with the claims of the race, which claims, it must be
added, cannot be out of harmony with the best traditions of the race.
Ellen Key would agree with a great German, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who
wrote more than a century ago that "a solicitude for the race conducts
to the same results as the highest solicitude for the most beautiful
development of the inner man." The modern revolt against fossilized laws
is inevitable; it is already in progress, and we have to see to it that
the laws written upon tables of stone in their inevitable decay only
give place to the mightier laws written upon tables of flesh and blood.
Life is far too rich and manifold, Ellen Key says again, to be confined
in a single formula, even the best; if our ideal has its worth for
ourselves, if we are prepared to live for it and to die for it, that is
enough; we are not entitled to impose it on others. The conception of
duty still remains, duty to love and duty to the race. "I believe in a
new ethics," Ellen Key declares at the end of _The Women's Movement_,
"which will be a synthesis growing out of the nature of man and the
nature of wom