On page 897 of the old 1897 edition of the "Encyclopedia of Social Reform," an earlier work edited by W. D. P. Bliss, we are informed that Socialism would allow all to live in permanent monogamy, but would not force people to remain married if they were unwilling to do so. "The Communist Manifesto," the work that made Marx and Engels famous among Socialists the world over, thus answers the charge made against the Revolutionists regarding their opposition to monogamy:
"What the communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women."
Jules Guesde, a French Socialist, affirms in "Le Catéchisme Socialiste" that "the family is now only an odious form of property and must be transformed or abolished."
The French Socialist leader, Jaurés, in a parliamentary speech said that "They [i.e., married men and women] were free to make the marriage and should in the same way be free to unmake it. In fact, just as the will of one of the parties could have prevented the marriage, so the will of one should be able to end it. The power to annul should, of course, be all the stronger when both parties desire it." It need scarcely be added that free-love would in most cases begin with the voluntary dissolution of the marriage ties.
While the program of the French Socialist Party, adopted at Tours in 1902, does not explicitly advocate free-love, still it calls for "the most liberal legislation on divorce." Ernest Belfort Bax, a prominent English Socialist, in "Outlooks From a New Standpoint," affirms that "a man may justly reject the dominant sexual morality; he may condemn the monogamic marriage system which obtains today; he may claim the right of free union between men and women; he may contend he is perfectly at liberty to join himself, either temporarily or permanently with a woman; and that the mere legal form of marriage has no binding force with him." ["Outlooks From a New Standpoint," by Ernest Belfort Bax, page 114 of the 1891 edition.]
"Prostitution for private gain is morally repellent. But the same outward act done for a cause transcending individual interest loses its character of prostitution." [Ibid., page 123.]
"There are few points on which advanced radicals and Socialists are more completely in accord than their hostility to the modern legal monogamic marriage." [Ibid., page 151.]
"There are excellent men and women, possibly the majority, born with dispositions for whom a permanent union is doubtless just the right thing; there are other excellent men and women born with lively imaginations and Bohemian temperaments for whom it is not precisely the right thing." [Ibid., page 157.]
"Herein we have an instance of the distinction between bourgeois morality and Socialist morality. To the first it is immoral to live in a marital relation without having previously subscribed to certain legal formalities.... To the second ... to live in a state of unlegalized marriage defileth not a man, nor woman." [Ibid., page 158.]
"Socialism will strike at the root at once of compulsory monogamy." [Ibid., page 159.]