I remember as a young girl going to see a play called _A Bunch of Violets_. The heroine discovers that her husband’s previous wife is alive and that her child is therefore illegitimate. She tells her daughter to choose between the parents, explaining the worldly advantages of staying with her rich, influential father. The harangue concludes with words to the effect: ‘With me you will be poor and shamed, and _you can never marry_.’ Doubtless this ridiculous point of view was adopted solely for the benefit of the young girls in the audience, but its unreasonableness disgusted me for one. Even to the limited intelligence of seventeen it is obvious that, since a name is of so much importance in life, an illegitimate girl had better marry as quickly as she possibly can, in order to obtain one! Free love has recently been much discussed in connection with socialism, and, thanks no doubt to the misrepresentations of certain newspapers, the idea seems to have gained ground that the abolition of marriage and the substitution of free love was part of the socialist programme. No more untrue charge could possibly be made, as inquiries at the headquarters of the various socialist bodies will quickly prove. The people who advocate free love are very fond of arguing that so personal a matter only concerns themselves. All who think thus should have had a grave warning in a recent _cause célèbre_, in which murder, attempted suicide, permanent maiming, and a tangle of misery involving innocent children down to the third generation, were proved to have resulted from a ‘free’ union entered on nearly thirty years before. This and the many other tragedies of free love, which appear in the newspapers from time to time, seem to prove the mistake of imagining that we are accountable to none for our actions. A relationship which affects the future generation can never be a private and personal matter. E. R. Chapman in a very interesting essay on marriage published some years ago says: ‘To exchange legal marriage for mere voluntary unions, mere temporary partnerships, would be not to set love free, but to give love its death blow by divorcing it from that higher human element which is the note of marriage, rightly understood, and which places regard for order, regard for the common weal above personal interest and the mere self-gratification of the moment.’ IV POLYGAMY AT THE POLITE DINNER-TABLE ‘Last and hardest of all to eradicate in our midst, comes the monopoly of the human heart which is known as marriage . . . this ugly and barbaric form of serfdom has come in our own time by some strange caprice to be regarded as of positively divine origin.’ --GRANT ALLEN.