chooses in the domain of
art, or science, or any kind of work. Free pursuit in new branches of
art and knowledge, free creation, and free development thus might be
fully guaranteed. And such a community would not know misery amidst
wealth. It would not know the duality of conscience which permeates our
life and stifles every noble effort. It would freely take its flight
towards the highest regions of progress compatible with human nature.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] What this school is now, I don't know. In the last years of
Alexander II.'s reign it was wrecked, like so many other good
institutions of the early part of his reign.

[Illustration]

MOTHERHOOD AND MARRIAGE

By HENRIETTE FUERTH.

(_Translated from the German for_ MOTHER EARTH by ANNY MALI HICKS.)

Knowledge becomes understanding only when its scope includes the
origin, the development and the conclusion of things.--Bachofen,
"Right to Motherhood."

"THE future will endeavor to extend its power through its own ideas of
facts and appearances, however unfamiliar these may seem, rather than to
be influenced by a past and submerged civilization with a spirit far
removed from its own."

There could hardly be a more appropriate introduction to our remarks on
motherhood and marriage than these words of Bachofen's, for there are
few human relations whose traditional stages, taking through outside
causes and effects an established form, have become eternal law and
sacrament, as is the case in the realm of sex relations. Motherhood and
marriage! For most people these two conceptions are inseparably bound
together, or, rather, are in ratio connected as their ideas of morality
and religion are synonymous. Marriage in the Romish Church is a
religious sacrament, and in the collective Christian and Jewish worlds
the only sex relation acknowledged as customary and possible, is the one
based on a monogamous union. To work out logically from this
standpoint, the only condition of motherhood which is socially
justified, is that one which is the result of marital relations. In
consequence motherhood without the consent of the State or the benefit
of the clergy is just as logically condemned. And they who thus sit in
judgment, flatter themselves to be the prophets of an advanced and
enlightened era,--ingrafting their personal feelings and rights on the
religious and lawful order of the universe. Or, in common parlance, and
as our introduction so aptly put it,