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"It will be seen that the proportion of children classed as
'very good' in Section 3 is about ten times as large as in the
poorest section, and that _more than half of the children in
the poorest section are classed as 'bad.'_
"These 'bad' children presented a pathetic spectacle, all bore
some mark of the hard conditions against which they were
struggling. Puny and feeble bodies, dirty and often sadly
insufficient clothing, sore eyes, in many cases acutely
inflamed through continued want of attention, filthy heads,
cases of hip disease, swollen glands--all these and other
signs told the same tale of privation and neglect. It will be
noticed that the condition of the children in Section 2
(middle-class labour) comes about half-way between Sections 1
and 3. In considering the above table it must of course be
remembered that there was no absolute standard by which each
child could be judged, but the broad comparison between the
different classes is unimpeachable. The table affords further
evidence of serious physical deterioration amongst the poorest
section of the community."
And if York and London will not satisfy, let the reader take
Edinburgh, whose Charity Organization Society has produced an
admirable but infinitely distressing report of the physical conditions
of the school children there. It gives a summary account of the homes
of fourteen hundred children in one of the Edinburgh Elementary
Schools, selected because it represented a fair mixture of prosperous
and unprosperous people. I take the first ten entries of this list
just as they come, representing thirty-eight children, and they are a
fair sample of the whole list. No amount of writing could make these
little thumbnail sketches of the reality of domestic life among our
population to-day more impressive than they are, thus barrenly given.
"1. A bad home. Woman twice married; second husband deserted
her six or seven years ago and she now keeps a bad house in
which much drinking and rioting goes on. Daughter on stage
sends 10/- a week, son is out of work. A son is in an
institution. All as filthy as is the house. The food is
irregular. Two children have had free dinners from school this
and last winter, clothes were also given for one each time.
The boy attends regularly. The woman is a hard drinker, and
gets money in undesirable ways. The eldest child has glands,
neck; hair not good but clean; fleabitten. The second child,
adenoids and tonsils. Housing: five in one room. Evidence from
Police, School Charity, Headmistress, School Officers and
Doctors.
"2. The drinking capacity of this family cannot be too much
emphasized. The parents can't agree, and live apart, the man
allowing 7/6 a week when girl is with mother, and 5/- when she
comes to him. She is verminous and very badly kept. Mother
can't get charing, as she lives in so bad a neighbourhood, so
means to move; at present she keeps other women's babies at
6_d._ a day each. Elder boy out of work, a tidy lad, reads in
Free Library. One child has died. Housing: three in one room.
House not so very untidy. Evidence from Police, Church and
Officer.
"3. A miserable family and in very wretched circumstances.
Father deserts home at intervals, but last time seemed 'sent
back by providence,' as the works in the town he was in were
burnt down. Children starving in his absence; one had
pneumonia, and died since of the effects. The eldest child has
adenoids; the second, urticaria; lice, bad; clothes full of
pediculi. Housing: six in two rooms. Mother hard-working, does
her best, but has chronic bronchitis; does not keep house over
tidy. The two elder boys are very idle, tiresome fellows, and
worry the father a great deal. They improved and found work
during the year following the visit, in which time the father
got into decent work in the City. The S. P. C. C. branch had
to interfere on behalf of small children. Three dead since
marriage, when parents were at ages 23 and 20. Food good when
there is any. School gave free dinners and clothes to two.
Evidence from Police, S. P. C. C. branch, School Charity,
Parish Sister, Employer, Headmistress, School Officer and
Doctors.
"4. The father a complete wreck through intemperate and fast
living; speculation first brought him down. Was later moved to
hospital, where he died. Had worked on railway a little time.
Mother hard-working, works out, home untidy owing to her being
out so much. She pays rent regularly, and does her best. An
elder boy groom, fed and clad by his master, sends home what
he can. Eldest boy does odd jobs, but seems a wastrel. Parish
gave 7/6 after father ill, and feeds four children now. Winter
of visit school dined five free daily, and clothed three, and
previous winter three had free dinners and two had clothes. A
school-boy earns. The twins are delicate. There are two
lodgers. The eldest child very dirty; the second, glands; the
third, knock-kneed, pigeon chest; very feeble, enlarged
radices. Three children have died. Housing: nine in three
rooms. Evidence from Police, Poor Law Officer, Parish Sister,
School Charity, Army Charity, Children's Employment, School
Officer, Factor, Pawnbroker and Doctors.
"5. The mother, a nice, clean, tidy woman, doing pretty well
by the children. They kept a little shop for a time, and she
used to do a day's charing now and then, but has too many
babies now. Parents married at 21 and 18 respectively; two
children dead and another expected. He reads papers a good
deal, gets them out of trains. This is his first spell of
regular work. Two boys sell papers, and a Mission gives cheap
meal. Food none too plentiful. One child gets free dinners.
The eldest child has glands; impetigo; thin and badly
nourished. The second, glands, hair lice and nits bad. The
third, boils on neck, glands, thin. The fourth, glands.
Housing: eight in two rooms. They are in two thrift societies.
Evidence from School-master, Police, Parish Sister, Club, Army
Charity, Charity School, Pawnbroker and Doctors.
"6. Father works in a shop in daytime, and in a public-house
at night. Rather soft; but wife industrious and energetic and
does her best. Children well fed and regular at school. Two
children have enlarged tonsils. They get no help, and belong
to two thrift societies. One of six children dead in ten years
of married life. Housing: seven in two rooms. Evidence from
Police, Doctors, Society, Church, Mission, Club, Headmistress,
Charity School and Pawnbrokers.
"7. A family where parents are much given to drink; father
invalided and being helped by a Sick Society, 3/- a week, and
Parish 5/- a week. Housing: five in two rooms. They are in a
burying club. Children fleabitten. Two have died. Food is
rather scanty. Wife _very_ quarrelsome and drunken. The boys
play truant often. Two were given free food and clothes two
winters ago, and this winter one has free dinners and clothes
given. A Mission has given cheap clothes. Evidence from
School-master, Police, Poor Law Officer, C.O.S. branch,
Church, School Charity, Sick Society, Children's Employment,
Factor, School Officer, Charity School, Pawnbroker and
Doctors.
"8. Fairly decent family; mother washes out, and man has very
early work. He drinks, and his employment is somewhat
irregular. A son in the country on a farm, and two dead. They
were married at 21 and 18. The food is erratic, the children
getting 'pieces' at dinner-time, or free school dinners; or
when mother comes home, soup with her. The children are rather
neglected, and the police give the parents an indifferent
character. The eldest child has Eustacian catarrh and
nasopharyngitis; glands. The second, enlarged uvula. Housing:
four in two very small rooms. Evidence from School-master,
Police, Parish Sister, Church, Factor and Doctors.
"9. Father an old soldier without a pension, who reads novels.
All the small children were found eating a large meal of ham
and eggs and strong tea after 8 p.m., he in bed at the time.
They have lapsed from thrift society membership. They are
extremely filthy and the man drinks. A Mission sells them meal
cheap. Wife 18 at marriage and one child died. They feed
pretty largely but unhealthily, and eat 'pieces' at
lunch-time. At time of visit, though very dirty, they were
tidier than ever found before. The eldest child has chronic
suppuration and large perforation of ear. Housing: five in two
rooms. Evidence from Police, Parish Sister, Factor, Soldiers'
Society, Charity School and Doctors.
"10. The man a carter, who drank to a certain extent, and died
some months after visit, when a Charity gave her help. She had
an illegitimate child and two others. He was careless, and
both neglected church-going. No medical evidence. Housing:
five in two rooms. Evidence from Police, two Churches, Parish
Sister, Employer and Charity School."
§ 2.
Now to the Socialist, as to any one who has caught any tinge of the
modern scientific spirit, these facts present themselves simply as an
atrocious failure of statesmanship. Indeed, a social system in which
the mass of the population is growing up under these conditions, he
scarcely recognizes as a State, rather it seems to him a mere
preliminary higgledy-piggledy aggregation of human beings, out of
which a State has to be made. It seems to him that this wretched
confusion of affairs which repeats itself throughout the country
wherever population has gathered, must be due to more than individual
inadequacy; it must be due to some general and essential failure, some
unsoundness in the broad principles upon which the whole organization
is conducted.
What is this general principle of failure beneath all these particular
cases?
In any given instance this or that reason for the failure of a child
may be given. In one case it may be the father or mother drinks, in
another that the child is an orphan, neglected by aunt or stepmother,
in another that the mother is an invalid or a sweated worker too
overwrought to do much for him, or, though a good-hearted soul, she is
careless and dirty or ignorant, or that she is immoral and reckless,
and so on and so on. Our haphazard sample of ten Scotch cases gives
instances of nearly all these alternatives. And from these proximate
causes one might work back to more general ones, to the necessity of
controlling the drink traffic, of abolishing sweating, of shortening
women's hours of labour, of suppressing vice. But for the present
argument it is not necessary to follow up these special causes. We can
make a wider generalization. For our present analysis it is sufficient
to say that one more general maladjustment covers every case of
neglected or ill-brought-up children in the world, and that is this,
that with or without a decent excuse, the parent has not been equal to
the task of rearing a civilized citizen. We have demanded too much
from the parent, materially and morally, and the ten cases we have
quoted are just ten out of ten millions of the replies to that demand.
Of fifty-two children born, fourteen are dead; and of the remainder we
can hardly regard more than thirteen as being tolerably reared.
Is it not obvious then that, unless we are content that things should
remain as they are, we must put the relations of parent to child on
some securer and more wholesome footing than they are at the present
time? We demand too much from the parent, and this being recognized,
clearly there are only two courses open to us. The first is to relieve
the parents by lowering the standard of our demand; the second is to
relieve them by supplementing their efforts.
The first course, the Socialist holds, is not only cruel and unjust to
the innocent child, but an entirely barbaric and retrogressive thing
to do. It is a frank abandonment of all ideas of progress and world
betterment. He puts it aside, therefore, and turns to the alternative.
In doing that he comes at once into harmony with all the developmental
tendencies of the last hundred years. For a hundred years there has
been going on a process of supplementing and controlling parental
effort.
A hundred years or so ago, the parent was the supreme authority in a
child's destiny--short only of direct murder. Parents were held
responsible for their children's rearing to God alone; should they
fail, individual good-hearted people might, if they thought proper,
step in, give food, give help--provided the parents consented, that
is, but it was not admitted that the community as a whole was
concerned in the matter. Parents (and guardians in the absence of
parents) were allowed to starve their children, leave them naked, prey
upon their children by making them work in factories or as
chimney-sweeps and the like; the law was silent, the State acquiesced.
Good-hearted parents, on the other hand, who were unsuccessful in the
world's affairs, had the torment of seeing their children go short of
food and garments, grow up ignorant and feeble, their only hope of
help the chancy kindliness of their more prosperous neighbours and the
ill-organized charities left by the benevolent dead.
Through all the nineteenth century the irresistible logic of necessity
has been forcing people out of the belief in that state of affairs,
has been making them see the impossibility of leaving things so
absolutely to parental discretion and conscience, has been forcing
them towards a constructive and organizing, that is to say towards a
Socialist attitude. Essentially the Socialist attitude is this, an
insistence that parentage can no longer be regarded as an isolated
private matter; that the welfare of the children is of universal
importance, and must, therefore, be finally a matter of collective
concern. The State, which a hundred years ago was utterly careless of
children, is now every year becoming more and more their Guardian,
their Over-Parent.
To-day the power of the parents is limited in ways that would have
seemed incredible a hundred years ago. In the first place they must no
longer unrestrictedly use their very young children to earn money for
them in toil and suffering. A great mass of labour legislation forbids
them. In the next place their right to inflict punishment or to hurt
wantonly has been limited in many ways. The private enterprises of
charitable organizations for the prevention of cruelty and neglect has
led to a growing system of law in this direction also. Nor may a
parent now prevent a child getting some rudiments of an education.
Between the parent and Heaven now, in addition to the more or less
legalized voluntary interference of well-disposed private people,
there do appear certain rare functionaries who--while they interfere
not at all between good and competent parents and their children, do,
in certain instances, save a parental default from its complete
fruition. There are the school attendance officer and the sanitary
inspector. Then there are--in the London County Council area--the
"Ringworm" nurses, who examine the children systematically and by
means of certain white and red cards of remonstrance and warning
intimidate the parent into good behaviour or pave the way for a
prosecution. Everywhere there is the factory inspector--and in certain
cases the police. All these functionaries and "accessory consciences"
have been thrust in between the supremacy of the parent and the child
within the century.
So much the Socialist regards as all to the good, as all in the
direction of that great constructive plan of organized human welfare
at which he aims. And they all amount to a destruction, so much with
this and so much with that, of the independence of the family, an
invasion of the old moral isolation of parent and child.
But while a number of people (who haven't read the Edinburgh Charity
Organization Society's Report) are content to regard these
interventions as "going far enough," the Socialist considers these
things as only the beginning of the organization of the welfare of the
nation's children. You will notice that all these laws and regulations
at which we have glanced are in the nature of prohibitions or
compulsions; few have any element of aid. By virtue of them we have
diminished the power of the inferior sort of parents to do evil by
their child, but we have done little or nothing to increase and
stimulate their powers to do good. We may prevent them doing some
sorts of evil things to the child; they may not give it poisonous
things, or let it live in morally or physically contagious places, but
we do not insure that they shall give it wholesome things--better than
they had themselves. We must, if our work is ever to reach effectual
fruition, go on to the logical completion of that process of
supplementing the parent that the nineteenth century began.
Consider, for instance, the circumstances of parentage among the large
section of the working classes whose girls and women engage in factory
labour. In many cases the earnings of the woman are vitally necessary
to the solvency of the family budget, the father's wages do not nearly
cover the common expenditure. In some cases the women are unmarried,
or the man is an invalid or out of work. Consider such a woman on the
verge of motherhood. Either she must work in a factory right up to the
birth of her child--and so damage its health through her strain and
fatigue,[2] or she must give up her work, lose money and go short of
food and necessities and _so_ damage the coming citizen. Moreover,
after the child is born, either she must feed it artificially and
return to work (and prosperity) soon, with a very great risk indeed
that the child will die, or she must stay at home to nourish and tend
it--until her landlord sells her furniture and turns her out!
[2] The facts of the case are put very clearly, and quite
invincibly, by Miss Margaret Macmillan in _Infant
Mortality_. See also _The Babies' Tribute to the Modern
Moloch_, by F. Victor Fisher. (Twentieth Century Press,
1_d._) These are small polemical tracts. The case is treated
fully, authoritatively and without bias in _Infant
Mortality_ by Dr. G. Newman.
Now it does not need that you should be a Socialist to see how cruel
and ridiculous it is to have mothers in such a dilemma. But while
people who are not Socialists have no remedy to suggest, or only
immediate and partial remedies, such, for example, as the forbidding
of factory work to women who are about to be or have recently been
mothers--an expedient which is bound to produce a plentiful crop of
"concealment of birth" and infanticide convictions--the Socialist does
proffer a general principle to guide the community in dealing not only
with this particular hardship, but with all the kindred hardships
which form a system with it. He declares that we are here in the
presence of an unsound and harmful way of regarding parentage; that we
treat it as a _private affair_, that we are still disposed to assume
that people's children are almost as much their private concern as
their cats, and as little entitled to public protection and
assistance. The right view, he maintains, is altogether opposed to
this; parentage is a public service and a public duty; a good mother
is the most precious type of common individual a community can have,
and to let a woman on the one hand earn a living as we do, by sewing
tennis-balls or making cardboard boxes or calico, and on the other,
not simply not to pay her, but to impoverish her because she bears and
makes sacrifices to rear children, is the most irrational aspect of
all the evolved and chancy ideas and institutions that make up the
modern State. It is as if we believed our civilization existed to make
cheap cotton and tennis-balls instead of fine human lives.
The Socialist takes all that the nineteenth century has done in
remedial legislation as a mere earnest of all that it has still to do.
He works for a consistent application of the principle that England,
for example, tacitly admitted when she opened her public elementary
schools and compelled the children to come in; the principle that the
Community as a whole is the general Over-Parent of all its children;
that the parents must be made answerable to the community for the
welfare of their children, for their clear minds and clean bodies,
their eyesight and weight and training; and that, on the other hand,
the parents who do their duty well are as much entitled to collective
provision for their needs and economic security as a soldier, a judge
or any other sort of public servant.
§ 3.
Now do not imagine the case for the State being regarded as the
Over-Parent, and for the financial support of parents is based simply
upon the consideration of neglected, underfed, undereducated and
poverty-blighted children. No doubt in every one of the great
civilized countries of the world at the present time such children are
to be counted by the hundred thousand--by the million; but there is a
much stronger case to be stated in regard to that possibly greater
multitude of parents who are not in default, those common people, the
mass of our huge populations, the wives of the moderately skilled
workers or the reasonably comfortable employees, of the middling sort
of people, the two, three and four hundred pounds a year families who
toil and deny themselves for love of their children, and do contrive
to rear them cleanly, passably well grown, decent minded, taught and
intelligent to serve the future. Consider the enormous unfairness with
which we treat them, the way in which the modern State, such as it is,
trades upon their instincts, their affections, their sense of duty and
self-respect, to get from them for nothing the greatest social service
in the world.
For while the least fortunate sort of children have at any rate the
protection of the police and school inspectors, and the baser sort of
parent has all sorts of public and quasi-public helps and doles, the
families that make the middle mass of our population are still in the
position of the families of a hundred years ago, and have no help
under heaven against the world. It matters not how well the home of
the skilled artisan's wife or the small business man's wife has been
managed--she may have educated her children marvellously, they may be
clean, strong, courteous, intelligent--if the husband gets out of work
or suffers from business ill-luck or trade depression, or chances to
be killed uninsured, down they all go to want. Such insurance as they
are able to make, and it needs a tremendously heavy premium to secure
an insurance that will not mean a heavy fall of income with the
bread-winner's death--must needs be in a private insurance office, and
there is no effectual guarantee for either honesty or solvency in
that. In most of the petty insurance business the thrifty poor are
enormously overcharged and overreached. Rumour has been busy, and I
fear only too justly, with the financial outlook of some of the
Friendly Societies upon which the scanty security of so many
working-class families depends. Such investments as the lower and
middle-class father makes of surplus profits and savings must be made
in ignorance of the manoeuvres of the big and often quite ruthless
financiers who control the world of prices. If he builds or trades, he
does so as a small investor, at the highest cost and lowest profit.
Half the big businesses in the world have been made out of the lost
savings of the small investor; a point to which I shall return later.
People talk as though Socialism proposed to rob the thrifty
industrious man of his savings. He could not be more systematically
robbed of his savings than he is at the present time. Nowhere beyond
the limit of the Post Office Savings' Bank is there security--not even
in the gilt-edged respectability of Consols, which in the last ten
years have fallen from 114 to under 82. Consider the adventure of the
thrifty well-meaning citizen who used his savings-bank hoard to buy
Consols at the former price, and now finds himself the poorer for not
having buried his savings in his garden. The middling sort of man
saves for the sake of wife and child; our State not only fails to
protect him from the adventures of the manipulating financier, but it
deliberately avoids competition with banker, insurance agent and
promoter. In no way can the middle-class or artisan parent escape the
financier's power and get real security for his home or his children's
upbringing.
Not only is every parent of any but the richest classes worried and
discouraged by the universal insecurity of outlook in this private
adventure world, but at every turn his efforts to do his best for his
children are discouraged. If he has no children, he will have all his
income to spend on his own pleasures; he need only live in a little
house, he pays nothing for school, less for doctor, less for all the
needs of life, and he is taxed less; his income tax is the same, no
bigger; his rent, his rates, his household bills are all less....
The State will not even help him to a tolerable home, to wholesome
food, to needed fuel for the new citizens he is training for it. The
State now-a-days in its slow awakening does show a certain concern in
the housing of the lowest classes, a concern alike stimulated and
supplemented by such fine charities as Peabody's for example, but no
one stands between the two-hundred-a-year man and his landlord in the
pitiless struggle to get. For every need of his children whom he toils
to make into good men and women, he must pay a toll of owner's
profits, he must trust to the anything but intelligent greed of
private enterprise.
The State will not even insist that a sufficiency of comfortable,
sanitary homes shall be built for his class; if he wants the
elementary convenience of a bathroom, he must pay extra toll to the
water shareholder; his gas is as cheap in quality and dear in price as
it can be; his bread and milk, under the laws of supply and demand,
are at the legal minimum of wholesomeness; the coal trade cheerfully
raises his coal in mid-winter to ruinous prices. He buys clothes of
shoddy and boots of brown paper. To get any other is nearly impossible
for a man with three hundred pounds a year. His newspapers, which are
supported by advertisers and financiers, in order to hide the obvious
injustice of this one-man-fight against the allied forces of property,
din in his ears that his one grievance is local taxation, his one
remedy "to keep down the rates"--the "rates" which do at least repair
his roadway, police his streets, give him open spaces for his babies
and help to educate his children, and which, moreover, constitute a
burthen he might by a little intelligent political action shift quite
easily from his own shoulders to the broad support of capital and
land.
If the children of the decent skilled artisan and middle-class suffer
less obviously than the poorer sort of children, assuredly the parents
in wearing anxiety, in toil and limitation and disappointment, suffer
more. And in less intense and dramatic, but perhaps even more
melancholy ways, the children of this class do suffer. They do not die
so abundantly in infancy, but they grow up, too many of them, to
shabby and limited lives; in Britain they are still, as a class,
extraordinarily ill educated--many of them still go to incompetent,
understaffed and ill-equipped private adventure schools--they are sent
into business prematurely, often at fourteen or fifteen, they become
mechanical "respectable" drudges in processes they do not understand.
They may escape want and squalor for a while, perhaps, but they cannot
escape narrowness and limitation and a cramped and anxious life. If
they get to anything better than that, it is chiefly through almost
heroic parental effort and sacrifice.
The plain fact is that the better middle-class parents serve the State
in this matter of child-rearing, the less is their reward, the less is
their security, the greater their toil and anxiety. Is it any wonder
then that throughout this more comfortable but more refined and
exacting class, the skilled artisan and middle-class, there goes on
something even more disastrous, from the point of view of the State,
than the squalor, despair and neglect of the lower levels, and that is
a very evident strike against parentage? While the very poor continue
to have many children who die or grow up undersized, crippled or
half-civilized, the middle mass, which _can_ contrive with a struggle
and sacrifice to rear fairly well-grown and well-equipped offspring,
which has a conscience for the well-being and happiness of the young,
manifests a diminishing spirit for parentage, its families fall to
four, to three, to two--and in an increasing number of instances there
are no children at all.
With regard to the struggling middle-class and skilled artisan class
parent, even more than to the lower poor, does the Socialist insist
upon the plain need, if only that our State and nation should
continue, of endowment and help. He deems it not simply unreasonable
but ridiculous that in a world of limitless resources, of vast
expenditure, of unparalleled luxury, in which two-million-pound
battleships and multi-millionaires are common objects, the supremely
important business of rearing the bulk of the next generation of the
middling sort of people should be left almost entirely to the unaided,
unguided efforts of impoverished and struggling women and men. It
seems to him almost beyond sanity to suppose that so things must or
can continue.
§ 4.
And what I have said of the middle-class parent is true with certain
modifications of all the classes above it, except that in a monarchy
you reach at last one State-subsidized family--in the case of Britain
a very healthy and active group, the Royal family--which is not only
State supported, but also beyond the requirements of any modern
Socialist, State bred. There are enormous handicaps at every other
social level upon efficient parentage, and upon the training of
children for any public and generous end. Parentage is treated as a
private foible, and those who undertake its solemn responsibilities
are put at every sort of disadvantage against those who lead sterile
lives, who give all their strength and resources to vanity and
socially harmful personal indulgence. These latter, with an ampler
leisure and ampler means, determine the forms of pleasure and social
usage, they "set the fashion" and bar pride, distinction or relaxation
to the devoted parent. The typical British aristocrat is not parent
bred, but class bred, a person with a lively sense of social
influences and no social ideas. The one class that is economically
capable of making all that can be made of its children is demoralized
by the very irresponsibility of the wealth that creates this
opportunity. This is still more apparent in the American plutocracy,
where perhaps half the women appear to be artificially sterilized
spenders of money upon frivolous things.
No doubt there is in the richer strata of the community a certain
proportion of families with a real tradition of upbringing and
service; such English families as the Cecils, Balfours and Trevelyans,
for example, produce, generation after generation, public-spirited and
highly competent men. But the family tradition in these cases is an
excess of virtue rather than any necessary consequence of a social
advantage; it is a defiance rather than a necessity of our economic
system. It is natural that such men as Lord Hugh and Lord Robert
Cecil, highly trained, highly capable, but without that gift of
sympathetic imagination which releases a man from the subtle mental
habituations of his upbringing, should idealize every family in the
world to the likeness of their own--and find the Socialist's
Over-Parent of the State not simply a needless but a mischievous and
wicked innovation. They think--they will, I fear, continue to
think--of England as a world of happy Hatfields, cottage Hatfields,
villa Hatfields, Hatfields over the shop, and Hatfields behind the
farmyard--wickedly and wantonly assailed and interfered with by a band
of weirdly discontented men. It is a dream that the reader must not
share. Even in the case of the rich and really prosperous it is an
illusion. In no class at the present time is there a real inducement
to the effectual rearing of trained and educated citizens; in every
class are difficulties and discouragements.
This state of affairs, says the Socialist, is chaotic or indifferent
to a sea of wretchedness and failure, in health, vigour, order and
beauty. Such pleasure as it permits is a gaudy indulgence filched from
children and duty; such beauty--a hectic beauty stained with
injustice; such happiness--a happiness that can only continue so long
as it remains blind or indifferent to a sea of wretchedness and
failure. Our present system of isolated and unsupported families keeps
the mass of the world beyond all necessity painful, ugly and squalid.
It stands condemned, and it must end.
§ 5.
Let me summarize what has been said in this chapter in a compact
proposition, and so complete the statement of the First Main
Generalization of Socialism.
_The ideas of the private individual rights of the parent and of his
isolated responsibility for his children are harmfully exaggerated in
the contemporary world. We do not sufficiently protect children from
negligent, incompetent, selfish or wicked parents, and we do not
sufficiently aid and encourage good parents; parentage is too much a
matter of private adventure, and the individual family is too
irresponsible. As a consequence there is a huge amount of avoidable
privation, suffering and sorrow, and a large proportion of the
generation that grows up, grows up stunted, limited, badly educated
and incompetent in comparison with the strength, training and beauty
with which a better social organization could endow it._
_The Socialist holds that the community as a whole should be
responsible, and every individual in the community, married or single,
parent or childless, should be responsible for the welfare and
upbringing of every child born into that community. This
responsibility may be entrusted in whole or in part to parent, teacher
or other guardian--but it is not simply the right but the duty of the
State--that is to say of the organized power and intelligence of the
community--to direct, to inquire, and to intervene in any default for
the child's welfare._
_Parentage rightly undertaken is a service as well as a duty to the
world, carrying with it not only obligations but a claim, the
strongest of claims, upon the whole community. It must be provided for
like any other public service; in any completely civilized State it
must be sustained, rewarded and controlled. And this is to be done not
to supersede the love, pride and conscience of the parent, but to
supplement, encourage and maintain it._
§ 6.
This is the first of the twin generalizations upon which the whole
edifice of modern Socialism rests. Its fellow generalization we must
consider in the chapter immediately to follow.
But at this point the reader unaccustomed to social questions will
experience a difficulty. He will naturally think of this much of
change we have broached, as if it was to happen in a world that
otherwise was to remain just as the world is now, with merchants,
landowners, rich and poor and all the rest of it. You are proposing,
he may say, what is no doubt a highly desirable but which is also a
quite impossible thing. You propose practically to educate all the
young of the country and to pay at least sufficient to support them
and their mothers in decency--out of what? Where will you get the
money?
That is a perfectly legitimate question and one that must be answered
fully if our whole project is not to fall to the ground.
So we come to the discussion of material means, of the wherewithal,
that is to say to the "Economics" of Socialism. The reader will see
very speedily that this great social revolution we propose necessarily
involves a revolution in business and industry that will be equally
far reaching. The two revolutions are indeed inseparable, two sides of
one wheel, and it is scarcely possible that one could happen without
the other.
Of course the community supports all its children now--the only point
is that it does not support them in its collective character as a
State "as a whole." All the children in the world are supported by all
the people in the world, but very unfairly and irregularly, through
the intervention of that great multitude of small private proprietors,
the parents. When the parents fail, Charity and the Parish step in. If
the reader will refer to those ten cases from Edinburgh I have already
quoted in Chapter III., § 1, he will note that in eight out of the ten
there comes in the eleemosynary element; in the seventh case
especially he will get an inkling of its waste. A change in the system
that diminished (though it by no means abolished) this separate
dependence of children upon parents, each child depending upon those
"pieces" from its particular parental feast, need not necessarily
diminish the amount of wheat, or leather, or milk in the world; the
children would still get the bread and milk and boots, but through
different channels and in a different spirit. They might even get
more. The method of making and distribution will evidently have to be
a different one and run counter to currently accepted notions; that is
all. Not only is it true that a change of system need not diminish the
amount of food in the world; it might even increase it. The Socialist
declares that his system would increase it. He proposes a method of
making and distribution, a change in industrial conditions and in the
conventions of property, that he declares will not only not diminish
but greatly increase the production of the world, and changes in the
administration that he is equally convinced will insure a far juster
and better use of all that is produced.
This side of his proposals we will proceed to consider in our next
chapter.