tends, by retarding the prompt perception of
relations of material cause and effect, to lower the industrial
efficiency of the community.[17]

The socialist materialist can look forward with unruffled serenity to
the passing of religion, since his very definition of religion as "a
popular striving after the illusory happiness that corresponds with a
social condition which needs such an illusion,"[18] implies that it
cannot pass away till it has ceased to be needful to human happiness.

From the point of view of this Socialist materialism, the monogamous
family, the present economic unit of society, ceases to be a divine
institution, and becomes the historical product of certain definite
economic conditions. It is the form of the family peculiar to a society
based on private property in the means of production, and the production
of commodities for sale. It is not crystallized and permanent, but, like
all other institutions, fluid and subject to change. With the change in
its economic basis, the code of sexual morality and the monogamous
family are sure to be modified; but, in the judgment of such socialists
as Friedrich Engels and August Bebel, we shall probably remain
monogamous, but monogamy will cease to be compulsorily permanent.[19]

"What we may anticipate," says Engels, "about the adjustment of sexual
relations after the impending downfall of capitalist production is
mainly of a negative nature and mostly confined to elements that will
disappear. But what will be added? That will be decided after a new
generation has come to maturity: a race of men who never in their lives
have had any occasion for buying with money or other economic means of
power the surrender of a woman; a race of women who have never had any
occasion for surrendering to any man for any other reason but love, or
for refusing to surrender to their lover from fear of economic
consequences. Once such people are in the world, they will not give a
moment's thought to what we to-day believe should be their course. They
will follow their own practice and fashion their own public
opinion--only this and nothing more."[20]

Changed economic conditions are already reflected in the disintegration
of the traditional bourgeois belief in the permanency of the existing
forms of the family and the home. A portentous sign of the times for the
conservatives is the appearance of Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons' book on
"The Family," the most scholarly work on the