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
profoun