their steady and determined aims, to attain to this independence; and gradually to get rid of our present system of hired labour, with its many degradations, and small prospect of rising to a higher position. The chief obstacle to these associations is the poverty and dependence of the working classes, together with the present state of the law, which makes each member of a partnership liable with his whole means, in the event of the failure of the enterprise; and therefore renders one, who has much to lose, unwilling to link himself with those who have little or nothing. Were the law changed, so as to admit of partnerships with limited liabilities, of which change Mr. Mill is much in favour; and were the working classes better off, and able to make desirable terms with the capitalists, there is no doubt that such associations would become very common, as they are in some parts of America. As the wages of labour rise by means of duly limiting procreation, the working class will have less difficulty in effecting this change; and they should not rest satisfied till their condition has been recognised as equally independent, and equally entitled to the respect and deference of mankind, as that of any other members of society. Let not the attention of the reader be diverted in the slightest by these secondary and auxiliary means, from the only real remedy for the social difficulties, namely, preventive intercourse. If it be so, they had better not have been mentioned; for without that primary and radical means, all the rest are not worth talking about, and can have no real effect in advancing human happiness; for they, like all other schemes, if tried alone, can lead only to the aggravation of the want of love, and therefore are delusive. Preventive intercourse is of itself sufficient to remove poverty, without any of these auxiliaries; and if poverty were removed, the other parts of social progress would become comparatively easy, and the working classes would attain without an effort the advantages, which they at present toil after in vain ; while on the contrary all those auxiliary means, or any other imaginable ones, are, without preventive intercourse, utterly impotent, or could at most only relieve poverty a little, at the expense of increased sexual abstinence and consequent miseries. Without preventive intercourse and limited procreation, let us not vainly imagine that we can cheat our doom; or make any real impression upon the appalling evils, moral and physical, which exist among us, and two-thirds of which arise from the fatal antagonism of food and love. If we ignore this antagonism, and shut our eyes as we have hitherto done, to this and other sexual subjects, we may do what else we like; we may bully, we may bluster, we may rage, we may toam at the mouth; we may tear down heaven with our prayers, we may exhaust ourselves in weeping over the sorrows of the poor; we may narcotise ourselves and others with the opiate of Christian resignation; we may dissolve the realities of human woe in a delusive mirage of poetry and ideal philosophy; we may lavish our substance in charity, and labour over possible or impossible Poor-laws; we may form wild dreams of socialism, industrial regiments, universal brotherhood, red republics, or unexampled revolutions; we may strangle and murder each other, we may persecute and despise those whose sexual necessities force them to break through our unnatural moral codes, we may burn alive if we please the prostitutes and the adulterers; we may break our own and our neighbours' hearts against the adamantine laws that surround us, but not one step, not one stall we advance, till we acknowledge these laws, and adopt the only possi ble mode in which they can be obeyed. But if we do this, it is my earnest hope and belief that we shall ultimately triumph over that mighty difficulty, that sexual dead-lock, which has hitherto laughed to scorn all the efforts of our race; that a new era will dawn upon the world, the only real era of improvement in the whole of human history; a blessed era, which shall usher in the golden age, when truth and virtue shall be no longer a mocking phantom, and progress not a dream; when every advance in scien and art shall bear its true fruit, unembittered by the necessary sacr fice of an equivalent amount of love; when the poor friendless prost tute shall no more be seen in our streets, the able-bodied pauper: our workhouse, or the helpless beggar at our gate; when all of shall have a share in the blessings of independence and sexual lo befitting the exalted position of the human race; when the poc houses shall be shut up, and the gaols nearly emptied of their tenan poverty, the chief cause of crime, having been removed; when various classes of our society, no longer separated from each other impassable difference of circumstances, shall fuse into one great a united whole, and learn to look back, with mingled pity and amar ment, on the dark ages of mutual destruction and delusive struggl in which their less fortunate ancestors were plunged. A true Sex Religion can alone save mankind from the mighty wants of Food, Los and Leisure. END OF PART II. PART III. NATURAL RELIGION. DIGNITY, LIBERTY, AND INDEPENDENCE. "Live and let live." MAN stands at the head of the universe, and we can form but a very inadequate conception of the wonderful majesty and glory of his being. We admire the extraordinary energies and transcendant perfections of the simplest organised substances; we can watch a humble plant construct a huge complex fabric, by the magical powers inherent in a cell, almost, inconceivably minute; but when we come to reflect on the natural powers inherent in man, which build up our wondrous being from a cell no less minute, to a perfection of developement, which no imagination can reach, our astonishment can know no bounds. Man is beyond all comparison the most powerful and elevated part of Nature, and the majesty of his position cannot be too highly estimated. If a thing is to be valued in proportion to the great time and care spent in its production, in proportion to the grandeur of its construction and its purpose, and the multiplicity of the energies it possesses, Man cannot be too highly valued. It needed myriads and myriads of ages, for the working powers of life to develope this their master-piece; and it is only by this patient and long continued elaboration, that we could have been produced. Of the boundless energies of Man how shall we obtain a conception? In every little cell within us reside occult powers of life and death, whose study is worth a life-time. By their united agency an individual is formed, so perfect, and with such various endowments, as to deserve the name of the microcosm; for his manifold being is an epitome of the whole universe. Man is nature become self-conscious; the crowning effort of Nature to understand herself, to know, as well as to be. And |