"Prostitution for private gain is morally repellent. But the same outward act done for a cause transcending individual interest loses its character of prostitution." [Ibid., page 123.]
"There are few points on which advanced radicals and Socialists are more completely in accord than their hostility to the modern legal monogamic marriage." [Ibid., page 151.]
"There are excellent men and women, possibly the majority, born with dispositions for whom a permanent union is doubtless just the right thing; there are other excellent men and women born with lively imaginations and Bohemian temperaments for whom it is not precisely the right thing." [Ibid., page 157.]
"Herein we have an instance of the distinction between bourgeois morality and Socialist morality. To the first it is immoral to live in a marital relation without having previously subscribed to certain legal formalities.... To the second ... to live in a state of unlegalized marriage defileth not a man, nor woman." [Ibid., page 158.]
"Socialism will strike at the root at once of compulsory monogamy." [Ibid., page 159.]
Quotations from this base free-love book will end with the following: "If it be asked 'is marriage a failure?' the answer of any impartial person must be 'monogamic marriage is a failure'--the rest is silence. We know not what the new form of the family, the society of the future in which men and women will be alike economically free, may involve, and which may be generally adopted therein. Meanwhile we ought to combat by every means within our power the metaphysical dogma of the inherent sanctity of the monogamic principle." ["Outlooks From a New Standpoint," by Ernest Belfort Bax, page 160 of the 1891 edition.]
"Outlooks From a New Standpoint," from which these quotations have been taken, was advertised in the price list of the Social Democratic