d only by her natural love
for husband and children."[928]

Men and women being sexually free in the Socialist State of the
future, the law will take cognisance neither of breach of promise,
seduction, prostitution, and desertion of the family, nor of even
graver offences against the present code of morality. The philosopher
of British Socialism informs us: "Society is directly concerned--(1)
with the production of offspring, (2) with the care that things
sexually offensive to the majority shall not be obtruded on public
notice, or obscenity on 'young persons.' Beyond this, all sexual
actions (of course excluding criminal violence or fraud) are matters
of purely individual concern."

"Offences connected with sexual matters, from rape downwards, may be
viewed from two or three different sides, and are complicated in ways
which render the subject difficult of discussion in a work intended
for promiscuous circulation. Here, as in the last case--viz. of theft
or robbery--we must be careful in considering such offences to
eliminate the element of brutality or personal injury, which may
sometimes accompany the crime referred to, from the offence itself.
For the rest I confine myself to remarking that this class also,
though not so obviously as the last, springs from an instinct
legitimate in itself but which has been suppressed or distorted. The
opinions of most, even enlightened, people on such matters are,
however, so largely coloured by the unconscious survival in their
minds of sentiment derived from old theological and theosophical views
of the universe, that they are not of much value. This is partly the
reason why the ordinary good-natured bourgeois, who can complacently
pass on by the other side after casting a careless look on the most
fiendish and organised cruelty in satisfaction of the economic
craving--gain--is galvanised into a frenzy of indignation at some
sporadic case of real or supposed ill-usage perpetrated in
satisfaction of some bizarre form of the animal craving--lust. Until
people can be got to discuss this subject in the white light of
physiological and pathological investigation rather than the dim
religious gloom of semi-mystical emotion, but little progress will be
effected towards a due appreciation of the character of the offences
referred to. It is a curious circumstance, as illustrating the change
of men's view of offences, that an ordinary indecent assault, which in
the Middle Ages--in Chauc