and it _may_ disappear and different relations
between the sexes before marriage and to a certain extent within
marriage may be expected."

The Socialist materialist leaves idle speculations of this nature to the
bourgeois Utopians; he knows that a revolution in economic conditions
must precede any material changes in sexual relations, and that when
such changes take place they will take place in response to the stimuli
of the transformed economic environment, and not in accordance with any
preconceived notions of Mrs. Parsons or others.

Those, who are horrified at such proposed modifications of marriage as
Mr. George Meredith's marriages for a fixed, limited period, and Mrs.
Parsons' "trial marriages," will do well to ponder this posthumous
aphorism of the clearsighted Norse genius, Ibsen, recently published in
Berlin:

"To talk of 'men born free' is a mere phrase. There are none such.
Marriages, the relations of man and woman, have ruined the whole race
and set on all the brand of slavery."[26]

In the same case is what we may call the stage-setting of the
monogamous family, the home. The home ceases to be regarded as the
sacred and eternal Palladium of society. It, too, is destined to change,
if not to disappear. "With the transformation of the means of production
into collective property," Engels writes, "the private household changes
to a social industry. The care and education of children becomes a
public matter."[27]

This does not deny the splendid role that the Home has played in the
history of the last three centuries. Many an English and American home
to-day still merits even such an offensively pretentious epithet as
"Palladium." What morals our people have known and practised they have
learned and been drilled in in the homes. That these morals should have
been warped by a class-bias was inevitable. A home, itself the product
of a society divided into classes, could not teach anything but a
class-morality. A purely social morality (if morality be the proper name
for the highest conduct in a classless society) is even yet impossible.

But, much as we owe to the home, (I pity the reader who can recall his
or her early home life with dry eyes), the Nihilism of Socialism tells
us the day of the home is drawing to its close. So it may be as well for
us to consider for a moment the bad side of the home as we know it
to-day. It may be that when we have done so, we shall be able to
anticipate its passing wi