speak of, save in colourless euphemisms, and their various drama has had
to be carried on by evasion and subterfuge pitiably silly indeed in this
robustly procreative world. Silly, but how preposterous, too, and no
longer to be endured.

It was a gain indeed to drag these vital human interests into the arena
of undaunted discussion, but things are clearly seen to have already
passed beyond that stage. Discussion has already set free in the world
braver and truer ideals, ideals no longer afraid of life, but, in the
courage of their joyousness, feasibly close to all its breathing facts.
Men and women refuse any longer to allow their most vital instincts to
be branded with obloquy, and the fulness of their lives to be thwarted
at the bidding of an impure and irrational fiction of propriety. On
every hand we find the right to happiness asserted in deeds as well as
words. The essential purity of actions and relations to which a merely
technical or superstitious irregularity attaches is being more and more
acknowledged, and the fanciful barriers to human happiness are
everywhere giving way before the daylight of common sense. Love and
youth and pleasure are asserting their sacred natural rights, rights as
elemental as those forces of the universe by which the stars are
preserved from wrong, and the merely legal and ecclesiastical fictions
which have so long overawed them are fleeing like phantoms at cockcrow.
It is no longer sinful to be happy--even in one's own way; and the
extravagances of passion, the ebullitions of youth, and the vagaries of
pleasure are no longer frowned down by a sour-visaged public opinion,
but encouraged, or, if necessary, condoned, as the dramatic play of
natural forces, and as welcome additions to the gaiety of nations. The
true sins against humanity are, on the other hand, being exposed and
pilloried with a scientific eye for their essential qualities.