denunciation in
describing the immorality and selfish licentiousness which our
marriage system covers with the cloak of legality and sanctity.
"There is an unsoundness in our marriage relations," Hinton
wrote. "Not only practically are they dreadful, but they do not
answer to feelings and convictions far too widespread to be
wisely ignored. Take the case of women of marked eminence
consenting to be a married man's mistress; of pure and simple
girls saying they cannot see why they should have a marriage by
law; of a lady saying that if she were in love she would not have
any legal tie; of its being necessary--or thought so by good and
wise men--to keep one sex in bitter and often fatal ignorance.
These things (and how many more) show some deep unsoundness in
the marriage relations. This must be probed and searched to the
bottom."

At an earlier date, in 1847, Gross-Hoffinger, in his _Die
Schicksale der Frauen und die Prostitution_--a remarkable book
which Bloch, with little exaggeration, describes as possessing an
epoch-marking significance--vigorously showed that the problem of
prostitution is in reality the problem of marriage, and that we
can only reform away prostitution by reforming marriage, regarded
as a compulsory institution resting on an antiquated economic
basis. Gross-Hoffinger was a pioneering precursor of Ellen Key.

More than a century and a half earlier a man of very different
type scathingly analyzed the morality of his time, with a brutal
frankness, indeed, that seemed to his contemporaries a
revoltingly cynical attitude towards their sacred institutions,
and they felt that nothing was left to them save to burn his
books. Describing modern marriage in his _Fable of the Bees_
(1714, p. 64), and what that marriage might legally cover,
Mandeville wrote: "The fine gentleman I spoke of need not
practice any greater self-denial than the savage, and the latter
acted more according to the laws of nature and sincerity than the
first. The man that gratifies his appetite after the manner the
custom of the country allows of, has no censure to fear. If he
is hotter than goats or bulls, as soon as the ceremony is over,
let him sate and fatigue himself with joy and ecstasies of
pleasure, raise and indulge his appetite by turns, as
extravagantly as his strength and m