ssue of the Peasant Wars.
Private property had become the general foundation of society. Beside
the rural population, that cultivated the soil, a strong, self-conscious
handicraft element had arisen, and was dominated by the interests of its
own station. Commerce had assumed large dimensions, and had produced a
merchant class, which, what with the splendor of its outward position
and its wealth, awoke the envy and hostility of a nobility that was
sinking ever deeper into poverty and licentiousness. The burghers'
system of private property had triumphed everywhere, as was evidenced by
the then universal introduction of the Roman law; the contrasts between
the classes were palpable, and everywhere did they bump against one
another. Monogamy became, under such conditions, the natural basis for
the sexual relations; a step such as taken by the Duke of Hessen now did
violence to the ruling morals and customs, which, after all, are but the
form of expression of the economic conditions that happen at the time to
prevail. On the other hand, society came to terms with prostitution, as
a necessary accompaniment of monogamy, and an institution supplemental
thereto;--and tolerated it.

In recognizing the gratification of the sexual impulses as a law of
Nature, Luther but uttered what the whole male population thought, and
openly claimed for itself. He, however, also contributed--through the
Reformation, which carried through the abolition of celibacy among the
clergy, and the removal of the cloisters from Protestant
territories--that to hundreds of thousands the opportunity was offered
to do justice to nature's impulses under legitimate forms. True
again,--due to the existing order of property, and to the legislation
that flowed therefrom,--hundreds of thousands of others continued to
remain excluded. The Reformation was the first protest of the
large-propertied bourgeois or capitalist class, then rising into being,
against the restrictions imposed by feudalism in Church, State and
society. It strove after freedom from the narrow bonds of the guild, the
court and the judiciary; it strove after the centralization of the
State, after the abolition of the numerous seats of idlers, the
monasteries; and it demanded their use for practical production. The
movement aimed at the abolition of the feudal form of property and
production; it aimed at placing in its stead the free property of the
capitalist, i. e., in the stead of the existing