"The 'Review' lately returned to a contributor a clever and readable article in which he emphasized certain absurdities and miseries of the present marriage system. His letter in the reply to us raises some interesting questions, and we are glad to publish it: ... 'It is disappointing to be advised to frankly discuss subjects of such importance as religion and marriage only in hushed whispers behind closed doors. In the fear of offending conservative prejudice on these topics, some Socialists become more conservative than the bourgeois themselves.... Of course, the main stream and most important phase of Socialism is the political-economic agitation, but at the same time the Socialist movement inevitably brings into being, at least for a great part of its adherents, a new culture, a new literature, a new art, a new attitude toward sex relations and religion and individual freedom, a new conception of life as a whole. In face of this fact it is sickening to see individuals, whom one knows to be atheists, defending Socialism as the will of God and the fulfilment of Christianity; and other individuals, whom one knows to be free-lovers, going out of their way to defend the home and family against the inroads of capitalism. Nevertheless such things are seen.... There are thousands of women who are worn out with the bearing of unwelcome children on account of ignorance of proper ways of preventing conception.... If sex life, the personal heart life, of revolutionists were more free and joyous, if they breathed an atmosphere of liberty and spontaneity, free from religious and moral superstitions, if they became now as much like the free people of the future as possible, would they not be that much more ardent and joyous and unceasing workers of the Great Revolution? And if former non-Socialists, especially women who had suffered grievously from the evils of the marriage system, or been intellectually blindfolded by religious teaching, were first led into the light of more emancipated ideas by some of us Socialists, would not they serve and glorify Socialism forever?... If the Christian Socialists have a right to their God, and monogamists to their eternal marriage, then surely in a revolutionary movement like ours, the complete revolutionists have, to say the least, an equal right to their agnosticism and their free union."
Clarence M. Meily, before speaking explicitly of free-love, praises lust and sensuality in the highest terms on page 129 of his book, "Puritanism": "Freed from the privation of millenniums of unrequited toil, with the wealth and wonders of the world at its command, it is fairly certain that the emancipated working class, still wan from its centuries of service and sacrifice, will take great joy in repudiating, finally and forever, the fallacies and aberration of asceticism.... Not the denial of life, but the laudation and triumph of life, will be the keynote of the new ethics. The lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the eye, the pride of life, will become new formulas, holy and pure in the light of the perfect development of the whole man, and of all men, to which the race will dedicate itself."
Meily then approaches the marriage question and says: "The question of the status of marriage in the new society is one of extreme importance, since it is here that reactionaries of all sorts center their opposition to social reconstruction. It is both idle and disingenuous to assert that marriage as a legal and civil institution is not likely to undergo profound modification.... The artificial perpetuation of the marriage tie, in the face of the disinclination of the parties involved to continue the relation, will cease to be a matter of public concern, or the occasion of state interference. The dissolution of the marriage relation will become as
purely a personal and private affair as is the assumption of the relation now. Some sort of registration may be required for the purpose of vital