some generations, has been
owing to the creation of slums, the employment of children in
factories, the dragging of mothers into workshops and factories, owing
to the economic pressure created by low wages, sweating, and other
operations of capitalism which the anti-Socialist campaign is designed
to support, and which it is the purpose of Socialism to supplant."

Now let us compare with these emphatic denials addressed to the
general public the deliberate statements of the intellectual leaders
of British and foreign Socialism regarding marriage and the family,
addressed to their followers.

The celebrated "Manifesto" issued by the founder of modern
international Socialism declares: "On what foundation is the present
family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. The
bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its
complement vanishes. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of
wives in common, and thus, at the most, what the Communists might
possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in
substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised,
community of women."[900] The founders of British Socialism state:
"Even now it is necessary that a certain code of morality should be
supposed to exist, and to have some relation to that religion which,
being the creation of another age, has now become a sham. With this
sham, moreover, its accompanying morality is also stupid, and this is
clung to with a determination, or even ferocity, natural enough, since
its aim is the perpetuation of individual property in wealth, in
workman, in wife, in child."[901]

"Like every other institution of existing society, marriage, as we
know it, is a consequence of private property. The primitive
swag-monger could think of no better method of keeping his swag
together after his death than by making the child of a particular
slave-wife his heir. The chief pre-eminence of the Sultana of the
harem lay in the fact that she acted, so to speak, as the conveyancer
of the estate."[902] The spokesmen of the Social-Democratic Federation
say: "What is the position of Socialism towards the question of
marriage as at present constituted? The existing monogamic relation is
simply the outcome of the institution of private or individual
property. It has developed, in proportion to the accentuation of the
institution of private, as against communal, property. When private
property ceases to be the