ke the old narrow obstacles to marriage. An infinitely
wider horizon opened out before the outer and inner eyes of humanity.
What mattered the well-meaning propriety, what the honorable privilege
of the guild overcome through generations to the young man tempted by
the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Potosi?

It was the knight errant time of the bourgeoisie. It had its own
romances and love dreams, but on a bourgeois footing and, in the last
instance, with bourgeois aims.

Thus it came about that the rising bourgeoisie more and more recognized
the freedom of contracting in marriage and carried it through in the
manner described above, especially in Protestant countries, where
existing institutions were most strongly shaken. Marriage remained class
marriage, but within the class a certain freedom of choice was accorded
to the contracting parties. And on paper, in moral theory as in poetical
description, nothing was more unalterably established than the idea that
every marriage was immoral unless founded on mutual sex-love and
perfectly free agreement of husband and wife. In short, the love match
was proclaimed as a human right, not only as droit de l'homme--man's
right--but also for once as droit de femme--woman's right.

However, this human right differed from all other so-called human rights
in one respect. While in practice other rights remained the privileges
of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, and were directly or indirectly
curtailed for proletarians, the irony of history once more asserted
itself in this case. The ruling class remains subject to well-known
economic influences and, therefore, shows marriage by free selection
only in exceptional cases. But among the oppressed class, love matches
are the rule, as we have seen.

Hence the full freedom of marriage can become general only after all
minor economic considerations, that still exert such a powerful
influence on the choice of a mate for life, have been removed by the
abolition of capitalistic production and of the property relations
created by it. Then no other motive will remain but mutual fondness.

Since sexlove is exclusive by its very nature--although this
exclusiveness is at present realized for women alone--marriage founded
on sexlove must be monogamous. We have seen that Bachofen was perfectly
right in regarding the progress from group marriage to monogamy mainly
as the work of women. Only the advance from the pairing family to
monogamy mu