Love, being the most powerful agitator of human elements that was ever known, stirs the slime which is always found even in the noblest natures; while in men whose souls have been kneaded with sludge it becomes the greatest coefficient of vice and crime. Love, like all other sentiments, has a pathology of its own, a superior pathology, because it so widens its sphere of action as to enclose a larger field and has more prepotent needs to satisfy. A man incapable of a base deed even though dying of hunger, even though about to lose all that he holds most dear, may compromise with his conscience when a question of love arises, and many, many blemishes stain the texture of the noblest and loftiest natures. Love wants to possess us bound hands and feet, and this is an inexhaustible source of disgrace, guilt, mean cowardice and great crimes.

The degradations of love are as numberless as the grains of sand in the sea, as many as love's own delights; they are of every size and adapt themselves to the infinite degrees of human baseness. It seems to me, however, that in a general study of physiology they can be reduced to two principal forms, that is to say, impotency and prostitution.

Impotency is not only a disease that should receive the care of the physician or the hygienist; it is not only a case which requires the attention of the legislator: but it is a moral shame that must be thoroughly studied by the psychologist who endeavors to outline the natural story of love.

In the very simplest organism of inferior animals every desire of love ceases when age, disease or a wound has exhausted the energy of the genital organs. In man, instead, the most irresistible and bestial needs are so teeming with psychical elements of the moral and the intellectual world as to survive the disease of the organ. An innocent man loves even without being aware of his manhood, and a woman can die of love although knowing nothing of the existence of the womb. True it is, no amorous note arises in the eunuch, or if the phantoms of a strange lasciviousness are noticed wandering here and there, they are specters that belong to the limbo of the most transcendent pathology. These poor pariahs of nature are, however, very rare; while our rachitic civilization makes by hundreds the semi-eunuchs who fill with cuckoldly ornaments the sanctuary of the family and the low world of wandering loves. Statistics, fortunately, cannot obtain the exact number of these "half-men" and consign them to their inexorable files; be it enough for us to know that they are many, very many, much more numerous than feminine virtue and patience could tolerate.

Nature's whole love, true love, nude but innocent love, is not all sentiment or thought, but also a function of reproductive life, a need of the senses. Martyrs and saints could mutilate themselves and die in the beatitude of their mutilations; but the majority of men does not consist of saints or martyrs. Every mutilation of love is a shame and the most fecund generator of many other minor shames. In the chaste and cool dawn of early youth, more than one woman consented unwittingly to an infamous compact by which a man offered her a great name and great wealth in exchange for a "yes." The wretched man loved her, desired her, but could not possess her as nature commanded man to possess woman; he wished to own the temple and feel the emotion of owning it without having the right to enter it. Sometimes the eunuch was not an abject being and did confess his shame before his betrayal, but the innocent maiden did not understand and accepted the compact. And who does not believe himself a hero or a martyr at that age? And the eunuch embraced his precious prey, inundated her with sterile kisses, and endeavored to warm her with his impotent caresses; and the marmoreal statue of adolescent virginity trembled with new and, to her, incomprehensible emotions. Later on, the virgin realized that she was a woman, that in vain she was a woman, and love attacked and seized virtue, and felled it despairing and imploring, and the covenant sworn in good faith was broken by the most powerful of affections. How many domestic misfortunes, what a fruitful stream of bastards, how many brigands spring from this contaminated source!

O you, real eunuchs, half-eunuchs, quarter-eunuchs, do not hope to be loved by a woman on whom you have imposed an infamous contract! No virtue, no oath can resist the sacred laws of love; nobody is stronger than nature. And if you have found a heroine, why make a martyr of her? Do you want to be the executioner of her whom you say you love?

And you, generous women, noble women, who can elevate to the highest regions even the lowest passion, do not accept any compact involving a mutilation of love. You, teachers of every kind of sacrifice, you think that you will make happy an outcast of nature, you impose upon yourselves, smiling perhaps, the sublime mission of redeeming a desperate man: but I assure you that neither virtue nor sacrifice nor heroism can stifle that formidable cry of the universe of the living that wants you to be wives and mothers. While the martyr, with the palm of sacrifice tightly pressed to her bosom, will try to smile, a cruel, deep, painful stab in her heart will warn her: "You, Eve and daughter of Eve, will become a mother only through a crime, will enter the sanctuary of sanctuaries, the tabernacle of maternity, only through the door of domestic treason."

No; love is not all senses and all lust. Sentiment can be such a great part of it as to conceal voluptuousness in the most secluded recess of a hidden region. No; woman can be happy even without voluptuousness if she only feels herself loved: but she wishes to love, and should love, "a man." I appeal to all the daughters of Eve, and, to be spared blushing, they may reply with a nod of the head and without moving their lips: Is it not true that you would prefer a hundred times to be loved by a "real man," even with a vow of chastity, rather than to be profaned and satiated with lust at the hands of a eunuch? Is it not true that above all you want to have for support that firm column called "an honorable man"? And certainly he is not an honorable man who claims the possession of a woman and demands to be loved by her when he is not a man.

The half-men who at forty, at fifty years of age aspire to have a family, after having dragged their half-virility through the lasciviousness of prostitution and the dainties of the erotic kitchen, should never suppose that lechery can take the place of true love in a woman. They can prostitute their spouse, but they can never make her love them earnestly and deeply. They are foredoomed by the inexorable laws of nature to figure largely in the population of cuckoldom.

When impotency falls like a thunderbolt on the head of two happy lovers, it is only a disease, a misfortune that concerns the physician and the pharmacist; but when it precedes love, it is cowardice, degradation, infamy. The honest man should never attempt to conceal it from himself or justify it; he should either courageously renounce love, a thing that does not concern him, or expose the sore and ask the armed hand of the surgeon to cut and cauterize it. Let him become a man again, and then see if he can aspire to the delights of sentiment. Before becoming a farmer, he should possess a farm.

The complicated mechanism of our social organism, in the same manner as it offers to the thirst of ardent youth voluptuousness without love, imposes on many lovers, with a more cruel amputation, love without voluptuousness. Here we have the two chief sources of the thousand sorrows which human society prepares for those who love: "Voluptuousness without love," that is, all the degradations and shames of prostitution; "Love without voluptuousness," that is, all the tortures of enforced chastity. Between these two hells the enamored youth remains a long time suspended, until, to avoid death, he takes lechery and imagination into a somber old boat and flees away with them to hide in the reedy marshes and among the miasmas of self-abuse—the lowest of the degradations of love, and one which occupies a proper place between impotency and prostitution. Yes; as man enjoys all the Olympus of love, he must also submit to all its degradations.

In the book which I will dedicate to the hygiene of love this problem will be thoroughly studied. Here I shall refer to it only so far as it concerns the physiology of sentiment. It is painful to admit it, but it is true: our modern society has rendered love so difficult to many unhappy creatures as to make them pass under the Caudine Forks of this cruel dilemma: either to buy voluptuousness and counterfeit love with it, or dream of love in the mire of solitary lasciviousness. In one way or the other, we are forced to become counterfeiters and to blush for ourselves at the manner in which we satisfy the most powerful of human needs.

Solitary love is not only a sin against hygiene, and one which kills health and vigor, but it is also an offense against morals, a poison of happiness. He who repeatedly falls into the crime and is frequently obliged to blush, tarnishes more every day the limpid purity of his own dignity, weakens the strong spring of virile resolutions and becomes a greater coward in all the battles of life. While he blushes for himself and curses himself and the love that condemns him to a continuous debasement, he blushes more than ever in the presence of the woman of whom he does not feel worthy and of whom he becomes less worthy at each fall. He poisons the wave of love at its very first source and, even when he later succeeds in loving, has spoiled the purity of his tastes and his aspirations and in the arms of a woman who loves him complains of the solitary twinges of a morbid voluptuousness, like one who, having burned his mouth with the pungent tastes of pipe and brandy, can no longer relish the flavors of pineapple and strawberry.

Love is the greatest of conquests, the sweetest of delights, the joy of joys; to renounce it in order to replace it with degradation is worse than a crime, it is an infamy. Better a hundred times chastity with its sublime tortures, prostitution with its filth. True and complete love is a splendid banquet under the fragrant trees of a garden, amidst the glittering of the chalices, the harmonies of music and the witty jests of friends; solitary love is a furtive meal with a bone picked up in the fetidness of a dunghill and gnawed in the dark.

Prostitution is, after solitary abuse, the greatest degradation of love, and, what is worse,—it should be said at once,—a necessary one in modern society. Tibullus hurls at it a splendid malediction:

("Whoever thou art who first hast taught to sell the pleasures of love, may an ill-boding stone crush thy bones!")

This imprecation, repeated by all moralists of every succeeding age, could not prevent for one day the sale of love, and universal experience demonstrates that St. Augustine was a sounder philosopher when he wrote:

"Aufer meretrices de rebus humanis, turbaveris omnia libidinibus; constitue matronarum loco, labe ac dedecore dehonestaveris."

("Take the prostitutes out of human things, and you will disturb the whole world with lust; put them in the place of wives, and you will defile home with disease and dishonor.")

If St. Augustine had written but this sentence, I would proclaim him a great psychologist; in a few words he has shown all the sides of the tremendous problem, given a lesson of toleration to the intolerant, of social science to economists, and today, after so many centuries, his words are as true, profound, inexorable as when he addressed them to a world so different from ours.

Difficult problems are not solved by fleeing from or by concealing them; and yet many physicians, many philosophers attempt to solve the most burning questions of modern society after the manner of a child who by closing his eyes believes that he is fleeing from the dog that threatens him. To Dr. Monlau in Spain and Dr. Bergeret in France, who thought that they would be able to save society by abolishing prostitution, I replied in a few words which I wish to save from the shipwreck of the newspapers in order to gather them in the shadow of this book:

"I have never wondered at finding philosophers who study man in Fichte or in Kant without having ever touched his palpitating body, or examined any of his fibers with the microscope; who advise the legislator to destroy in the social organism, with iron and fire, that livid and cancerous spot called prostitution; neither have I given the alarm or extolled it as a miracle when I heard the auto-da-fÉ invoked against the houses of ill fame by moralists who have had the rare fortune of having been born without the sixth sense, or the still rarer merit of smothering it with the extinguisher of an iron will. But when I hear these intolerant cries from the mouth of a physician, I shake my head diffidently, and with a compassionate voice I ask myself: 'Is he really a physician? Has this moralist actually seen a man in convulsive delirium and cut into his cold and rigid flesh on the chilly marble slab of the anatomical cabinet? He who hurls the anathema at prostitution, is he really the physician who should act as a kind link between the legislator, who in man sees only a defendant to punish, and the philanthropist, who in him considers only an unhappy creature to heal and help?'

"These and other questions I addressed to the illustrious Spanish physician Monlau when he proposed to his government the absolute suppression of the houses of ill fame; and then I had the pleasure of seeing my poor words printed in the progressive Spanish medical journals. Now I make the same reproach to Dr. Bergeret, who, in one of his memoirs on prostitution in the country places and small towns of France, went so far as to fling the anathema against that caustic wound which civilization has opened in the diseased flesh of the modern social organism; and I, with a sad air, repeat to the French physician a melancholy: 'Tu quoque, fili mi?'

"Bergeret lost much of his time and ink in narrating lurid stories of what occurred in some villages of France. And who does not know similar stories? We have them in Italy, in Germany; we can find them in every country where humanity loves and suffers, gets drunk and prostitutes itself; wherever the eyes of the authorities cannot penetrate into the most secret fissures of the social edifice where lie concealed the lurid parasites that sting and devour us. But between deploring the evils that are the results of clandestine prostitution and destroying all toleration on this ground there is an abyss over which the physician and the legislator should not pass on the waxen wings of an Arcadian flight, but which should be crossed over the solid bridge of a wise criticism.

"Then, my dear moralist, my dear theorist, you say that men learn vice in the houses of ill fame; but, then, without taverns would there be no assassins, without pharmacists would there be no poisoners, without manufacturers of gunpowder and bayonets would there be no wars? And who, pray, is the cause of the existence of houses of ill fame, taverns, daggers, poisons, firearms, if not man himself, that man whom you ought to be able to understand if it is true that you also are made of the same dough? Your morals are those of the inquisitor who burns the sinner whom he cannot convert; they are as false and coarse as those of the legislator who has only the prison and the scaffold for the education of the guilty; as those of the surgeon who barbarously amputates the member which, with a wiser and more merciful science, he should preserve. Modern civilization substitutes the school for the inquisitor's stake, has more faith in books than in prisons and halters, more in preservative medicine than in the surgeon's knife. And as long as the social organism is diseased, as long as it is a poor creature imbued with evil humors, with many curious bones and many scrofulous tumors, we will kindly cauterize its flesh to keep it alive, to divert into more ignoble parts those acrid humors that would poison the sources of life, until we shall succeed with the tonic cure of education in renewing the blood in the veins of this old invalid and in pouring this new blood into his flesh, his bones and his nerves, to rebuild them.

"This is why we still preserve the cautery of prostitution, and we wish to guard it with the same jealous care with which a physician keeps a precious wound open to save the life of a diseased organism.

"And believe me, O egregious colleague of the country beyond the Alps, when life shall be no longer threatened and the organism shall have new blood, then we will close this wound, too, together with many other ones which are still bleeding. We will close the house of voluptuousness when every man will have his nest and love will not be considered a crime any longer."

There are some savage races among which prostitution is unknown, while no civilized nation is without prostitutes; on the contrary, every country, even the most moral, has the high prostitutes and the very high, the low and the very low. Not in all countries are prostitutes cynically named according to the price they ask for their favors, as in Persia, where they are termed "the fifty tomani," "the twenty tomani," etc.; but everywhere a tariff is the index of the hierarchy of vice and a scale of lechery. Alexander Severus did not want the money collected through taxes on houses of prostitution to be paid into the treasury; and Ulpian, his minister, used it for the maintenance of the theaters and the public health. With Juvenalian sagacity, the government of Brazil devotes to the regulation of vice the money received from the sale of decorations and titles of nobility. We find everywhere women who sell themselves, but we also find, to our honor, that society is everywhere ashamed of this stain, conceals and does not mention it, and a mysterious mephitic air hangs heavily over the simony of love.

A thousand muddy streamlets carry their tributes to prostitution; but at the first source the cause is one and powerful: in man an imperious appetite for voluptuousness, in woman an imperious want of bread or licentiousness, or licentiousness and bread at the same time. Unfortunately woman can always sell five minutes of voluptuousness without love, without desire; she can sell herself with disgust in her heart and hatred on her lips. And the joy she sells is paid for according to the requirements of beauty, luxury, fashion, according to the infamous art with which she knows how to feign pleasure and counterfeit love. Procurers and procuresses hasten to the market of lechery to test the flesh of the precious victims, to fatten the lean and buy the plump for the higher bidder; and panders and bawds, keeping within the shadow of the law, conceal in the lurid or gilded prisons of prostitution that quivering herd of youth and shame. And prisoners in the same gloomy atmosphere are martyrs of love and nymphomaniacs; victims of hunger and of ignorance; fallen angels and foul demons; all the lowest strata of feminine society, all the bloody carrions of the great social battles.

There, in those dark haunts of licentiousness, man forgets how to love, loses the holy poetry of the heart and the mysterious quivers of sentiment, prostitutes the most gigantic forces of thought and affection. Without hunger, he partakes of savory food; thirstless, he becomes intoxicated; without the necessity of overcoming modesty, he obtains everything, and money levels all virtues and concedes the maddest polygamy; and there one sees the nude and chaste statue of Love dragged in the fetid bog by a frolicsome tipsy crowd. Such is the love that modern civilization offers to all those hundred thousand pariahs who cannot find the straw to weave the chaste nest of the family, to all those who cannot make a vow of chastity and do not wish to deceive an innocent maiden or steal another man's woman.

Our civilized society can really be proud of this; the philanthropists with their tearful dirges, the economists with their wise reflections, the legislators with their elaborate codes, can join in a chorus to sing hosannas to this stupendous solution of the problem. Either a starving family or prostitution; either children cast into the depth of misery or faith betrayed in the house of a friend; proletariate or infamy; degradation or crime. Stupendous dilemmas that crown our society with numberless horns and sow deception, hunger and corruption everywhere. If a thick bark of hypocrisy did not cover the rotten trunk of our modern civilization, what a horrible spectacle should we behold! And when a sincere moralist or a true philosopher attempts to cut the bark away and show to us through a little fissure how deep the decay is, then we flee horrified and clamor against such impudence, such sacrilege!

The government should, therefore, deal with prostitution as a malady to be treated, not because there is any hope of cure, but because society owes to every sick person a physician and a bed. It should not be permitted to grow, to spread, to parade its lurid sores, to cover itself with tinsel and paint; but it should be watched tenderly as in a hospital, so that in the passer-by it may awaken compassion rather than lechery.

And while the state keeps a good vigil, writers and teachers should raise the level of general culture and teach the elect the paradise of chastity, which contains a treasure of delights for the future of him who waits (this, alas! the libertine will never be able to understand), and preserves for true love, which all may hope to attain, the infinite joys of a virgin voluptuousness. The sale of love should neither be proclaimed as a feast of the human family, nor officially suppressed, because it then overflows and inundates all the paths of society; it should be tolerated and pitied, as we already tolerate and pity many other maladies of our social organism.

To reach this sublime goal, to hope at least to attain it, we must above all scrape off from modern love the hundred coats of hypocrisy; we must not have our children learn love as a crime in the house of vice; but immediately, at the first dawn of youth, they should be taught that it is a sublime delight conceded to the good and the noble and is to be conquered in the same manner as glory and wealth. Not the chambermaid or the prostitute, but a modest and pure girl should be the first teacher of love; a woman who should teach us love before voluptuousness, to be chaste in our desires in order to possess her some day.

We conceal and believe that we are able with silence to suppress the passions and suffocate the desires; but we have concealed too much and have been silent too long. In the most puritanical country in the world, England, one of the most honest and wisest physicians of London published a book—that has already reached the ninth edition—in which he frankly dared assert that free love, without fecundation, is the only remedy against the proteiform corruption that invades modern society, because of the impossibility for most of the people of morally satisfying one of the most powerful needs. This book was a distressing surprise to me. When they can write such a book as this in England and devour nine editions, when an honest physician can calmly discuss preventive intercourse, when Malthus finds such an eloquent and daring commentator who brings his theory from the field of economy into that of morality, of hygiene and even of religion, I believe it my duty to affirm that society is thoroughly diseased and (I say it loudly) should be cured.

Yes; modern society, infected with so much prostitution and adultery, and incessantly proclaiming itself monogamous while it is largely polygamous, demands a physician to cure its sores, to cleanse it from so much degradation, to concede loves virtuous and more free, or at least less soiled with filth and lies. And this physician must be a less hypercritical and less exacting morality, but at the same time more exalted, because more human; a morality that should teach us never to separate voluptuousness from love, and that chastity is the most beautiful and holiest of joys and the most watchful guardian of love.

The elect never prostitute themselves, not even in these times, because they love, and because, having once entered the paradise of love, they feel too great repugnance to descend to the mire of the simony of voluptuousness. They should exert all their faculties with all their strength in order that the masses, too, may elevate themselves to the high spheres in which they dwell, and where they breathe a purer air and cull the most delicate and beautiful flowers.