“I have scarcely ever seen anything like social intercourse between husband and wife, and it is remarkable that the women say little in presence of the men.”

Obviously, at the beginning of the passage quoted, Morgan should have used the word attachment in place of affection.  Bulmer (by accident, I suspect) uses the right word when he says (Brough Smyth, 77) that Australians, notwithstanding their brutal forms of marriage, often “get much attached to each other.”  At the same time it is easy to show that, if not among Australians or Indians, at any rate with such a people as the ancient Greeks, conjugal affection may have existed while romantic love was still impossible.  The Greeks looked down on their women as inferior beings.  Now one can feel affection—­conjugal or friendly—­toward an inferior, but one cannot feel adoration—­and adoration is absolutely essential to romantic love.  Before romantic love could be born it was necessary that women should not only be respected as equal to man but worshipped as his superior.  This was not done by any of the lower or ancient races; hence romantic love is a peculiarly modern sentiment, later than any other form of human affection.

OBSTACLES TO ROMANTIC LOVE

When Shakspere wrote that “The course of true love never did run smooth” he had in mind individual cases of courtship.  But what is true of individuals also applies to the story of love itself.  For many thousands of years savagery and barbarism “proved an unrelenting foe to love,” and it was with almost diabolical ingenuity that obstacles to its birth and growth were maintained and multiplied.  It was crushed, balked, discountenanced, antagonized, discredited, disheartened so persistently that the wonder is not that there should be so little true love even at the present day, but that there is any at all.  A whole volume might be written on the Obstacles to Love; my original plan for this book included a long chapter on this matter; but partly to avoid repetition, partly to save space, I will condense my material to a few pages, considering briefly the following obstacles:  I. Ignorance and stupidity.  II.  Coarseness and obscenity.  III.  War.  IV.  Cruelty.  V. Masculine selfishness.  VI.  Contempt for women.  VII.  Capture and sale of brides.  VIII.  Infant marriages.  IX.  Prevention of free choice.  X. Separation of the sexes.  XI.  Sexual taboos.  XII.  Race aversion.  XIII.  Multiplicity of languages.  XIV.  Social barriers.  XV.  Religious prejudice.

I. IGNORANCE AND STUPIDITY