Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/297

cigars, his liberality wins him a favorable recognition in the demi-monde, his name is spoken with respect in the clubs, he dies rich in civil and social honors and if sincere, would have this inscription carved upon his tombstone! "The only love of my life was—I, myself!" The wife invents crazy fashions, strives to surpass all her equals in insane extravagance, dreams day and night of dress, jewels, furniture and carriages, intrigues, lies, slanders other women, destroys the heart-happiness of others, impelled by a fiendish envy, and is able, if the means at her command correspond with her inclinations, to leave a broad swath of desolation and misery behind her, like an army of locusts or a pestilence. Both man and wife vegetate in a mephitic intellectual sphere, without light or inspiration. Their lives are without a single ideal. Their natures, deprived of every organ of flight, without elasticity and aspiration, crawl flat in the mire. They are germs of corruption spreading disease wherever they go, destroying society and dying in the putrefaction they have produced. "Degenerates" are found principally among the upper classes. They are at once the results and the causes of the egotistical organization of society. In society marriages are not entered into on account of love, but to obtain rank and wealth. Wealth and rank are thus maintained, but their owners decay. This is in obedience to the self-regulating and restricting tendencies of every living organism, hence of humanity at large. The suppression of love, the enlargement of egotism which are the prevailing tendencies of the upper strata of society, would lead to the speedy decay of the race if they became universal. The impulse for self-preservation in mankind thus leads to the inevitable decay of families founded on loveless and selfish unions. The universally conceded rapid decay of aristocratic houses has hardly any other