lting therefrom. They say that we
want promiscuous sex relations, communal life instead of family life
and the turning over of all parental functions to the community, the
State. And to charge that these things are involved in Socialism is at
once absurd and untrue. I venture to say, Jonathan, that the
percentage of Socialists who believe in such things is not greater
than the percentage of Christians believing in them, or the percentage
of Republicans or Democrats. They have nothing to do with Socialism.

Let us see upon what sort of evidence the charge is based: On the one
hand, finding nothing in the programmes of the Socialist parties of
the world to support the charge, we find them going back to the
utopian schemes with communistic features. They go back to Plato,
even! Because Plato in his _Republic_, which was a wholly imaginary
description of the ideal society he conceived in his mind, advocated
community of sex relations as well as community of goods, therefore
the Socialists, who do not advocate community of goods or community of
wives, must be charged with Plato's principles! In like manner, the
fact that many other communistic experiments included either communism
of sex relations, as, for example, the Adamites, during the Hussite
wars, in Germany, and the Perfectionists, of Oneida, with their
"community marriage," all the male members of a community being
married to all the female members; or enforced celibacy, as did the
Shakers and the Harmonists, among many other similar groups, is urged
against Socialism.

I need not argue the injustice and the stupidity of this sort of
criticism, Jonathan. What have the Socialists of twentieth century
America to do with Plato? His utopian ideal is not their ideal; they
are neither aiming at community of goods nor at community of wives.
And when we put aside Plato and the Platonic communities, the first
fact to challenge attention is that the communities which established
laws relating to sex relations which were opposed to the monogamic
family, whether promiscuity, so-called free love; plural marriage, as
in Mormonism, or celibacy, as in Harmonism and Shakerism, were all
_religious_ communities. In a word, all these experiments which
antagonized the monogamic family relation were the result of various
interpretations of the Bible and the efforts of those who accepted
those interpretations to rule their lives in accordance therewith. In
every case communism was only a