The charge of Immorality is absurd. Socialists demand a higher morality than any now to be found. They demand perfect honesty. Indeed, it is just the stern morality of Socialism which causes ambitious and greedy men to hate Socialism and resist it.
Another charge against Socialists is the charge of desiring Free Love.
Socialists, it has been said, want to destroy home life, to abolish marriage, to take the children from their parents, and to establish "Free Love."
"Free Love," I may say, means that all men and women shall be free to love as they please, and to live with whom they please. Therefore, that they shall be free to live as "man and wife" without marriage, to part when they please without divorce, and to take other partners as they please without shame or penalty.
Now, I say of this charge, as I have said of the others, that there may be some Socialists in favour of free love, just as there are some Socialists in favour of revolution, and some who are not Christians; but I say also that a big majority of Socialists are not in favour of free love, and that in any case free love is no more a part of Socialism than it is a part of Toryism or of Liberalism.
It is not sense to say, because some Free-Lovers are Socialists, that all Socialists are Free-Lovers.
I believe there is not one English Socialist in a hundred who would vote for doing away with marriage, or for handing over the children to the State. I for one would see the State farther before I would part with a child of mine. And I think you will generally find that those who are really eager to have all children given up to the State are men and women who have no children of their own.
Now, I submit that a childless man is not the right man to make laws about children.
As for the questions of free love and legal marriage, they are very hard to deal with, and this is not the time to deal with them. But I shall say here that many of those who talk the loudest about free love do not even know what love is, or have not sense enough to see that just as love and lust are two very different things, so are free love and free lust very different things.
Again, you are not to fall into the error of supposing that the relations of the sexes are all they should be at present. Free love, it is true, is not countenanced; but free lust is very common.