This sort of social control is not my ideal. Love is like religion, a matter for the individual soul. To change partners in love is very much like changing one’s opinion on some deep and vital matter. The spirit must bear its own inherent witness. But I promised myself not to be Utopian. And may it not conceivably be brought home to a few people to begin with that the men who laugh so spontaneously when the song-and-dance man sings “My wife’s gone to the country, hurray, hurray!” are leading immoral lives and reducing their partners to the rôle of disagreeable prostitutes and unsatisfactory servants? I am not prepared to stress the point unendurably. True marriage, the true and lovely union of a man and a woman, body and spirit, is rare. But to-day it is not even an ideal, not even something admired and striven for. Love in itself is rare and married love is perhaps as rare as beauty or genius. Happiness, too, is rare, happiness in any relation. But even as a man or a woman has made an obvious and shattering mistake if his or her chosen work does not produce a reasonable minimum of lasting inner satisfaction, so may marriage also be tested by a reasonable minimum of lasting--let us say, preference and blessedness. To fall below that minimum is to cheat both the self and society, both the present and posterity, to sacrifice honor to a fetish and vitality to decay. Communist Puritans By Louis Fischer Louis Fischer _is Moscow correspondent of the New York_ Nation. COMMUNIST PURITANS BY LOUIS FISCHER The Soviet state is omnipotent and omnipresent. Bukharin, the arch-theorist, contends that this is a transitional phase in the development of Communism toward perfection. The Bolsheviks’ professed aim is the _reductio ad administratum_ of the functions of the state; they would make government the traffic cop of the nation but not the all-pervading busybody and touch-everybody-everywhere which it is now in Russia. The transitional period, however, may last long. In default of a world revolution it may project itself beyond the present generation and even beyond the next. And in the meantime it is good Communist doctrine to maintain an Argus-eyed, Herculanean-clubbed state. The Soviet Government is alike an administrator, politician, statesman, merchant, manufacturer, banker, shipbuilder, newspaper publisher, school-teacher, and preacher. Such a state is the highest expression of the anti-individualism of socialist philosophy. The single _simian erectus_ is nothing; it is the class, the nation which counts.