The utility of love from a moral point of view can be shown in other ways.  Many tendencies—­such as club life, the greater ease of securing divorces, the growing independence of women and their disinclination to domesticity—­are undermining that family life which civilization has so slowly and laboriously built up, and fostering celibacy.  Now celibacy is not only unnatural and detrimental to health and longevity, but it is the main root of immorality.  Its antidote is love, the most persuasive champion and promoter of marriage.  No reader of the present volume can fail to see that man has generally managed to have a good time at the expense of woman and it is she who benefits particularly by the modern phases of love and marriage.  Yet in recent years the notion that family life is not good enough for women, and that they should be brought up in a spirit of manly independence, has come over society like a noxious epidemic.  It is quite proper that there should be avenues of employment for women who have no one to support them; but it is a grievous error to extend this to women in general, to give them the education, tastes, habits, sports, and politics of the men.  It antagonizes that sexual differentiation of the more refined sort on which romantic love depends and tempts men to seek amusement in ephemeral, shallow amours.  In plain English, while there are many charming exceptions, the growing masculinity of girls is the main reason why so many of them remain unmarried; thus fulfilling the prediction:  “Could we make her as the man, sweet love were slain.”  Let girls return to their domestic sphere, make themselves as delightfully feminine as possible, not trying to be gnarled oaks but lovely vines clinging around them, and the sturdy oaks will joyously extend their love and protection to them amid all the storms of life.  In love lies the remedy for many of the economic problems of the day.

There is not one of the fourteen ingredients of romantic love which cannot be shown to be useful in some way.  Of individual preference and its importance in securing a happy blend of qualities for the next generation I have just spoken, and I have devoted nearly a page (131) to the utility of coyness.  Jealousy has helped to develop chastity, woman’s cardinal virtue and the condition of all refinement in love and society.  Monopolism has been the most powerful enemy of those two colossal evils of savagery and barbarism—­promiscuity and polygamy; and it will in future prove as fatal an enemy to all attempts to bring back promiscuity under the absurd name of “free love,” which would reduce all women to the level of prostitutes and make men desert them after their charms have faded.  Two other ingredients of love—­purity and the admiration of personal beauty—­are of great value to the cause of morality as conquerors of lust, which they antagonize and suppress by favoring the higher (mental) sexual qualities; while the sense of beauty also co-operates with the instinct which makes for the health of future generations; beauty being simply the flower of health, and inheritable.