I am not surprised at this when I think of the influences which have
been abroad militating against the marriage relation.
For many years the platforms of the country rang with talk about a
free-love millennium. There were meetings of this kind held in the
Academy of Music, Brooklyn, Cooper Institute, New York, Tremont
Temple, Boston, and all over the land. Some of the women who were most
prominent in that movement have since been distinguished for great
promiscuosity of affection. Popular themes for such occasions were the
tyranny of man, the oppression of the marriage relation, women's
rights, and the affinities. Prominent speakers were women with short
curls and short dress and very long tongue, everlastingly at war with
God because they were created women; while on the platform sat meek
men with soft accent and cowed demeanor, apologetic for masculinity,
and holding the parasols while the termagant orators went on preaching
the gospel of free love.
That campaign of about twenty years set more devils in the marriage
relation than will be exorcised in the next fifty. Men and women went
home from such meetings so permanently confused as to who were their
wives and husbands that they never got out of the perplexity, and the
criminal and the civil courts tried to disentangle the Iliad of woes,
and this one got alimony, and that one got a limited divorce, and this
mother kept the children on condition that the father could sometimes
come and look at them, and these went into poorhouses, and those went
into an insane asylum, and those went into dissolute public life, and
all went to destruction. The mightiest war ever made against the
marriage institution was that free-love campaign, sometimes under one
name and sometimes under another.