REMEMBER that it is not my fault that we find ourselves discussing so inflammable a topic! But if you insist on knowing what education can do to bring our conduct in the realm of love up to the standard of civilization, I can but answer your question. We have found that in the realm of work, civilization demands of us Enterprise, and Democracy, and Responsibility. And I think that all the demands of civilization upon our conduct in the realm of love might be summed up in the same terms. We despise those persons who are afraid of adventure in love; who in devotion to some mawkish dream-ideal, turn away from the more difficult and poignant realities of courtship and marriage; and we are beginning to despise those whose enterprise is too cheaply satisfied in prostitution or in the undemocratic masculine exploitation of women of inferior economic status; and not only the crasser offences against sexual morality, but a[Pg 181] thousand less definable but not less real offences within the realm of legal marriage, may be described as attempts to evade responsibility. I leave you to work out the implications of this system of morals for yourself. What I particularly want to speak of here is the effect of parental influences upon children with respect to their later love-life, and the function of education in dissolving those influences.

It is no secret that adults generally have not yet learned how to be happy in love. And the reason for that, aside from the economic obstacles to happiness which do not come within the scope of our inquiry, is that they are still children. They are seeking to renew in an adult relationship the bond which existed between themselves and their parents in infancy. Or they are seeking to settle a long-forgotten childish grudge against their parents, by assuming the parental r?le in this new relationship. And in both efforts, they find themselves encouraged by each other. Naturally enough! A woman likes to discover, and enjoys “mothering,” the child in her husband; she likes to find also in him the god and hero which her father was to her in her infancy. And a happy marriage is one in which a man is at any moment unashamedly her child or (let us not shrink from[Pg 182] using these infantile and romantic terms!) her god. But it is a bore to have to mother a man all the time; it is in fact slavery. And it is equally a bore to have to look up to a man all the time and think him wise and obey him; for that also is slavery. The happy marriage has something else—the capacity for swift and unconscious change and interchange of these r?les. The happy lovers can vary the tenor of their relationship because they are free to be more than one thing to each other. And they have that freedom because they are equals. That equality is comradeship, is friendship.

Do not imagine that friendship in love implies any absence of that profound worship and self-surrender which is characteristic of the types of love that are modelled upon the infantile and parental patterns. This is as ridiculous as it would be to suppose that equality in other fields of life means that no one shall ever lead and no one ever follow. Equality in love means only the freedom to experience all, instead of compulsion to experience only a part, of the emotional possibilities of love in a single relationship.

I would gladly explicate this aspect of my theme in some detail, were it not that it might incidentally comprise a catalogue of domestic difficulties[Pg 183] and misunderstandings at once too tragic and too ridiculous—and some of you might object to my unfolding what you would consider to be your own unique and private woes in public.

I will, therefore, only point out that even what we term the civilized part of mankind is far from measuring up to this demand of civilization in the world of love, the demand for equality. It may seem somewhat of an impertinence to blame this fact upon the early influences of the home, when there are so many outstanding customs and laws and economic conditions which are founded on the theory of the inequality of men and women. But these customs and laws and conditions are in process of change—and the home influences of which I speak are not. Our problem is to consider if these influences may not be dissolved by the school. For, mark you, what happens when they are not! Wedded love, as based upon those undissolved influences, comes into a kind of disgrace; serious-minded men and women ask themselves whether such a bondage is tolerable; a thousand dramas and novels expose the iniquities of the thing; and the more intellectually adventurous in each generation begin to wonder if the attempt at faithful and permanent love ought not to be abandoned.

[Pg 184]Let me relate only one widely typical—and perhaps only too-familiar—instance. A boy grows up poisoned with mother-love—er, I mean, petted and praised and waited upon by his mother, until he finds the outside world, with its comparative indifference to his wonderfulness, a very cold place indeed. Nevertheless, he adjusts himself to it, becomes a man, and falls in love. With whom does he fall in love? Perhaps with a girl like his mother; or perhaps with one quite opposite to her in all respects,—for he may have conceived an unconscious resentment against his mother, for betraying him by her praise into expecting too much of an unfeeling world. But in any case, he is going to experience again, in his relationship with his sweetheart, the ancient delights of being mothered. He is going to respond to that pleasure so unmistakably as to encourage the girl in further demonstrations of motherliness. He is in fact going to reward her more for motherliness than for any other trait in her possession. And the girl, who wants a lover and a husband and a man, is going to find herself with a child on her hands. But that is not the worst. If the girl does not rebel against the situation, the man is likely to, when he finds out just what it is. For he, too, despite his unconscious infantilism,[Pg 185] wants a girl and a............