bourgeois belief in the permanency of the existing forms of the family and the home. A portentous sign of the times for the conservatives is the appearance of Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons' book on "The Family," the most scholarly work on the subject by a bourgeois writer that has yet appeared. Like all bourgeois writers Mrs. Parsons has been very chary of using materials furnished by Socialist scholars. Very striking is the absence from her very extensive bibliographical notes of the names of Marx, Engels, Bebel and Ferri. But she was compelled to avail herself freely of the wealth of materials provided by the scholarly and industrious researches of Morgan, Kautsky, and Cunow.
In her now famous Fifteenth Lecture on "Ethical Considerations," she suggests various modes of ameliorating the condition of Woman, and improving conjugal and family relations; but she is again and again driven to admit that the economic independence of women is a condition precedent to her "reforms." Most of her suggestions are tinged with the utopian fancifulness characteristic of the bourgeois theorist. Two excerpts will illustrate these points sufficiently:
