What Goethe and George Sand did, has been done and continues to be done by thousands of others, who are not to be compared with Goethe, yet without in the least losing the esteem and respect of society. All that is needed is a respectable position, the rest comes of itself. All this notwithstanding, the liberties of a Goethe and a George Sand are improper, judged from the standpoint of bourgeois morality, and stand in contradiction with the nature of its social principles. Compulsory marriage is the normal marriage of bourgeois society: it is the only "moral" union of the sexes: all other sexual union, by whomsoever entered into, is immoral. Bourgeois marriage—we have proved the point beyond cavil—is the result of bourgeois property relations. This marriage, which is intimately related with private property and the right of inheritance—demands "legitimate" children as heirs: it is entered into for the purpose of acquiring these: under the pressure of social conditions, it is forced even upon those who have nothing to bequeath:[225] it becomes a social law, the violation of which the State punishes by imprisoning for a term of years the men or women who live in adultery and have been divorced.
In future society there is nothing to bequeath, unless the domestic equipment and personal inventory be regarded as inheritance: the modern form of marriage is thus devoid of foundation and collapses. The question of inheritance is thereby solved, and Socialism need not concern itself about abolishing the same. No right of inheritance can arise where there is no private property.
Woman is, accordingly, free, and her children, where she has any, do not impair her freedom: they can only fill all the fuller the cup of her enjoyments and her pleasure in life. Nurses, teachers, female friends, the rising female generations—all these are ready at hand to help the mother when she needs help.
It is possible that there may be men in the future who will say with Alexander von Humboldt: "I am not built for the father of a family. Moreover, I consider marriage a sin, and the begetting of children a crime." What of it? The power of natural instincts will restore the equilibrium. We are alarmed neither by a Humboldt's hostility to marriage nor by the philosophic pessimism of a Schopenhauer, a Mainlaender or a v. Hartmann, who raise to man the prospect of self-destruction in the "ideal State," In this matter we hold with Fr. Ratzel, who justly says:
"Man may no longer look upon himself as an exception to the laws of Nature; he should rather begin at last to ascertain the law that underlies his own acts and thoughts, and to endeavor to live his life according to the laws of Nature. He will arrive at the point when he will arrange his social life with his fellows, that is, his family and the State, not after the precepts of far-back centuries, but after the rational principles of natural sense. Politics, morals, principles of justice—all of which are at present fed from all possible sources—will be determined according to the laws of Nature alone. An existence worthy of human beings, dreamed of for thousands of years, will finally become reality."[226]
That day is approaching with giant strides. Human society has traversed, in the course of thousands of years, all the various phases of development, to arrive in the end where it started from,—communistic property and complete equality and fraternity, but no longer among congeners alone, but among the whole human race. In that does the great progress consist. What bourgeois society has vainly striven for, and at which it suffers and is bound to suffer shipwreck—the restoration of freedom, equality and fraternity among men—Socialism will accomplish. Bourgeois society could only set up the theory; here, as in so many other respects, their practice was at odds with their theories. It is for Socialism to harmonize the theory with the practice.
Nevertheless, while man returns to the starting point in his development, the return is effected upon an infinitely higher social plane than that from which he started. Primitive society held property in common in the gens and clan, but only in the rawest and most undeveloped stage. The process of development that took place since, reduced, it is true, the common property to a small and insignificant vestige, broke up the gentes, and finally atomized the whole of society; but, simultaneously, it raised mightily the productivity of that society in its various phases and the manifoldness of social necessities, and it created out of the gentes and tribes nations and great States, although again it produced a condition of things that stood in violent contradiction with social requirements. The task of the future is to end the contradiction by the re-transformation upon the broadest basis, of property and productive powers into collective property.
Society re-takes what once was its own, but, in accord with the newly created conditions of production, it places its whole mode of life upon the highest stage of culture, which enables all to enjoy what under more primitive circumstances was the privilege of individuals or of individual classes only.
Now woman again fills the active role that once was hers in primitive society. She does not become the mistress, she is the equal of man.
"The end of social development resembles the beginning of human existence. The original equality returns. The mother-web of existence starts and rounds up the cycle of human affairs"—thus writes Bachofen, in his frequently quoted work "Das Mutterrecht," forecasting coming events. Like Bachofen, Morgan also passes judgment upon bourgeois society, a judgment that, without his having any particular information on Socialism, coincides essentially with our own. He says: