esh" with father and mother. Thus science solidifies a
poetic-moral yearning, once held imprisoned in the benumbing shell of
theological dogma, and reflects its morality in the poetic expression of
the monogamic family. The moral, as well as the material, accretions of
the race's intellect, since it uncoiled out of early Communism, bar, to
my mind, all prospect,--I would say danger, moral and hygienic,--of
promiscuity, or of anything even remotely approaching that.

Modern society is in a state of decomposition. Institutions, long held
as of all time and for all time, are crumbling. No wonder those bodies
of society that come floating down to us with the prerogatives of
"teacher" are seen to-day rushing to opposite extremes. On the matter of
"Woman" or "The Family" the divergence among our rulers is most marked.
While both extremes cling like shipwrecked mariners to the water-logged
theory of private ownership in the means of production, the one extreme,
represented by the Roman Catholic church-machine, is seen to recede ever
further back within the shell of orthodoxy, and the other extreme,
represented by the pseudo-Darwinians, is seen to fly into ever wilder
flights of heterodoxy on the matter of "Marriage and Divorce." Agreed,
both, in keeping woman nailed to the cross of a now perverse social
system, the former seeks to assuage her agony with the benumbing balm of
resignation, the latter to relieve her torture with the blister of
libertinage.

Between these two extremes stand the gathering forces of revolution that
are taking shape in the militant Socialist Movement. Opinion among these
forces, while it cannot be said to clash, takes on a variety of
shades--as needs will happen among men, who, at one on basic principles,
on the material substructure of institutional superstructure, cannot
but yield to the allurements of speculative thought on matters as yet
hidden in the future, and below the horizon. For one, I hold there is as
little ground for rejecting monogamy, by reason of the taint that clings
to its inception, as there would be ground for rejecting co-operation,
by reason of the like taint that accompanied its rise, and also clings
to its development. For one, I hold that the smut of capitalist
conditions, that to-day clings to monogamy, is as avoidable an
"incident" in the evolutionary process as are the iniquities of
capitalism that to-day are found the accompaniment of co-operative
labor;--and the furthe