[789] Muirhead, Is the Family Declining? 37.
[790] Carpenter, Love's Coming of Age; quoted from Muirhead, op. cit., 37. The views of various socialists regarding woman and marriage are criticised by Hertzberg, Der Beruf der Frau, 43-57.
[791] Morris and Bax, Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, 299, 300.
[792] Gronlund, The Co-operative Commonwealth, 193-206.
[793] Owen, Marriages of the Priesthood of the Old Immoral World, 54: "I resume the subject of marriage because it is the source of more demoralization, crime, and misery, than any other single cause, with the exception of religion and private property; and these three together form the great trinity of causes of crime and immorality among mankind." For examples of the bitter denunciations which Owen's doctrines naturally provoked see the tract of Brindley, The Marriage System of Socialism (Chester, 1840); and that of Bowes, The 'Social Beasts' (Liverpool, 1840).
[794] For examples see Marriages of the Priesthood, 41, 43, 44, 81.
[795] Owen, op. cit., 81.
[796] Ibid., 86, 87, giving an extract from his six lectures delivered at Manchester in 1837.
[797] Owen's book was written in 1835, just before the passage of the new civil-marriage law; and the violence of its tone may in part have been provoked by the injustice and intolerance sanctioned by the Hardwicke act of 1753, at that time in force. In 1840 he declared, as regards the form of marriage, that the law of 1836 had "exactly" met his "ideas and wishes;" and that all which he then desired was "to see another law enacted, by which Divorces, under wise arrangements, and on principles of common sense, may be obtained equally for rich and poor."—Op. cit., 90. He himself outlines marriage and divorce laws which possess some excellent features: ibid., 88-90.
[798] Robert Dale Owen, "Marriage and Placement," Free Inquirer, May 28, 1831; and his letter to Thomas Whittemore, editor of the Boston Trumpet, May, 1831; both quoted by Besant, Marriage, 23, 24, 26, 27. The Free Inquirer was founded in New York city by Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright in 1829: Johnson, Woman and the Republic, 121.