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The Woman Socialist

she will engage in such useful work as her special tastes will direct.

A free woman, she will thus be able to give her love freely. And in the sense that no mercenary motive will influence towards matrimony, and no unhallowed sex-impulse will be the drawing power between the man and the woman, but mutual admiration and esteem and pure affection, there will be free love, love as free as the air, and as pure; as radiant as the sunshine and as warm; as beautiful as Nature and as holy.

It is more than probable that the ordinary Church marriage service will be abolished. But it ought to be abolished. It is a degradation of marriage to regard it and speak of it as a kind of safety-valve for those who cannot keep themselves in the holy condition of celibacy. By its wording it actually sanctions lustfulness and animalism of the worst description, if it be practised within the sacred bonds of marriage. That a man may not be punished in the next world for his incontinence, his wife shall suffer in this, is its sinister gospel! No inquiry is made by the officiating clergyman as to the general fitness of the pair to mate;