WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME?
§ 1.
For reasons that will become clearer when we tell something of the
early history and development of Socialism, the Socialist propositions
with regard to the family lie open to certain grave misconceptions.
People are told--and told quite honestly and believingly--that
Socialism will destroy the home, will substitute a sort of human stud
farm for that warm and intimate nest of human life, will bring up our
children in incubators and crèches and--Institutions generally.
But before we come to what modern Socialists do desire in these
matters, it may be well to consider something of the present reality
of the home people are so concerned about. The reader must not
idealize. He must not shut his eyes to facts, dream, as Lord Hugh
Cecil and Lord Robert Cecil--those admirable champions of a bad
cause--probably do, of a beautiful world of homes, orderly, virtuous,
each a little human fastness, each with its porch and creeper, each
with its books and harmonium, its hymn-singing on Sunday night, its
dear mother who makes such wonderful cakes, its strong and happy
father--and then say, "These wicked Socialists want to destroy all
this." Because, in the first place, such homes are being destroyed and
made impossible now by the very causes against which Socialism fights,
and because in this world at the present time very few homes are at
all like this ideal. In reality every poor home is haunted by the
spectre of irregular employment and undermined by untrustworthy
insurance, it must shelter in insanitary dwellings and its children
eat adulterated food because none other can be got. And that, I am
sorry to say, it is only too easy to prove, by a second appeal to a
document of which I have already made use.
One hears at times still of the austere, virtuous, kindly, poor Scotch
home, one has a vision of the "Cottar's Saturday night." "Perish all
other dreams," one cries, "rather than that such goodness and
simplicity should end." But now let us look at the average poor Scotch
home, and compare it with our dream.
Here is the reality.
These entries come from the recently published Edinburgh Charity
Organization Society's report upon the homes of about fourteen hundred
school-children, that is to say, about eight hundred Scotch homes.
Remember they are _sample homes_. They are, as I have already
suggested by quoting authorities for London and York--and as any
district visitor will recognize--little worse and little better than
the bulk of poor people's homes in Scotland and England at the present
time. I am just going to copy down--not a selection, mind--but a
series of consecutive entries taken haphazard from this implacable
list. My last quotation was from cases 1, 2, 3 and so on; I've now
thrust my fingers among the pages and come upon numbers 191 and 192,
etc. Here they are, one after the other, just as they come in the
list:--
"191. A widow and child lodging with a married son. Three
grown-up people and three children occupy one room and
bed-closet. The widow leads a wandering life, and is
intemperate. The house is thoroughly bad and insanitary. The
child is pallid and delicate looking, and receives little
attention, for the mother is usually out working. He plays in
the streets. Five children are dead. Boy has glands and is
fleabitten. Evidence from Police, School Officer and Employer.
"192. A miserable home. Father dead. Mother and eldest son
careless and indifferent. Of the five children, the two eldest
are grown up. The elder girl is working, and she is of a
better type and might do well under better circumstances; she
looks overworked. The mother is supposed to char; she gets
parish relief, and one child earns out of school hours. Four
children are dead. The children at school are dirty and
ragged. The mother could get work if she did not drink. The
children at school get free dinners and clothing, and the
family is favourably reported on by the Church. The second
child impetigo; neck glands; body dirty. The third, glands;
dirty and fleabitten. Housing: six in two small rooms.
Evidence from Parish Sister, Parish Council, School Charity,
Police, Teacher, Children's Employment and School Officer.
"193. A widow, apparently respectable and well-doing, but may
drink. She must in any case have a struggle to maintain her
family, though she has much help from Parish, Church, etc. She
works out. The children at school are fed, and altogether a
large amount of charity must be received, as two Churches have
interested themselves in the matter. Three children dead.
Housing: three in two tiny rooms. Evidence from Church, Parish
Council, School Charity, Police, Parish Sister, Teacher,
Insurance and Factor.
"194. The father drinks, and, to a certain extent, the mother;
but the home is tidy and clean, and the rent is regularly
paid. Indeed, there is no sign of poverty. There is a daughter
who has got into trouble. Only two children out of nine are
alive. The father comes from the country and seems intelligent
enough, but he appears to have degenerated. They go to a
mission, it is believed for what they can get from it.
Housing: four in two rooms. Evidence from Club, Church, Factor
and Police.
"195. The husband is intemperate. The mother is quiet, but it
is feared that she drinks also. She seems to have lost control
of her little boy of seven. The parents married very young,
and the first child was born before the marriage. The man's
work is not regular, and probably things are not improving
with him. Still, the house is fairly comfortable, and they pay
club money regularly, and have a good police report. One child
has died. Housing: five in two rooms. Evidence from Parish
Sister, Police, Club, Employer, School-mistress and Factor.
"196. A filthy, dirty house. The most elementary notions of
cleanliness seem disregarded. The father's earnings are not
large, and the house is insanitary, but more might be made of
things if there were sobriety and thrift. There does not,
however, appear to be _great_ drunkenness, and five small
children must be difficult to bring up on the money coming in.
There are two women in the house. The eldest child dirty and
fleabitten. Housing: seven in two rooms. Evidence from Police,
Club, Employer, School-mistress and School Officer.
"197. The parents are thoroughly drunken and dissolute. They
have sunk almost to the lowest depths of social degradation.
There is no furniture in the house, and the five children are
neglected and starved. One boy earns a trifle out of school
hours. All accounts agree as to the character of the father
and mother, though they have not been in the hands of the
police. Second child has rickets, bronchitis, slight glands
and is bow-legged. Two children have died. Housing: seven in
two rooms. Evidence from Police, Parish Sister, Employer and
School-mistress.
"198. This house is fairly comfortable, and there is no
evidence of drink, but the surroundings have a bad and
depressing effect on the parents. The children are sent to
school very untidy and dirty, and are certainly underfed. The
father's wages are very small, and only one boy is working;
there are six altogether. The mother chars occasionally. Food
and clothing is given to school-children. The man is in a
saving club. The eldest child fleabitten; body unwashed. The
second, glands; fleabitten and dirty; cretinoid; much
undergrown. Two have died. Housing: seven in two rooms.
Evidence from School Charity, Factor, Police and
School-mistress.
"199. The house was fairly comfortable and the man appeared to
be intelligent and the wife hard-working, but the police
reports are very bad; there are several convictions against
the former. He has consequently been idle, and the burden of
the family has rested on the wife. There are six children, two
of them are working and earning a little, but a large amount
of charity from school, church and private generosity keeps
the family going. The children are fearfully verminous. There
is a suggestion that some baby farming is done, so many are
about. Eldest child anæmic; glands; head badly crusted; lice
very bad. Second child, numerous glands; head covered with
crusts; lice very bad. Four have died. Housing: eight in two
rooms. Evidence from Police, Teacher, Church, Parish Sister
and Factor.
"200. The home is wretched and practically without furniture.
The parents were married at ages 17 and 18. One child died,
and their mode of life has been reckless, if not worse. The
present means of subsistence cannot be ascertained, as the man
is idle; however, he recently joined the Salvation Army and
signed the pledge. The child at school is helped with food and
clothes. The girl very badly bitten; lice and fleas, hair
nits. Housing: four in one room. Evidence from Church, School
Charity, Co-operative, Employer, Parish Sister, Police and
School-mistress."
Total of children still living, 39.
Total of children dead, 27.
Need I go on? They are all after this fashion, eight hundred of them.
And if you turn from the congested town to the wholesome, simple
country, here is the sort of home you have. This passage is a cutting
from the _Daily News_ of Jan. 1, 1907; and its assertions have never
been contradicted. It fills one with only the mildest enthusiasm for
the return of our degenerate townsmen "back to the land." I came upon
it as I read that morning's paper after drafting this chapter.
"Our attention has been called to a sordid Herefordshire
tragedy recently revealed at an inquest on a child aged one
year and nine months, who died in Weobly Workhouse of
pneumonia. She entered the institution emaciated to half the
proper weight of her age and with a broken arm--till then
undiscovered--that the doctors found to be of about three
weeks' standing. Her mother was shown to be in an advanced
stage of consumption; one child had died at the age of seven
months, and seven now remain. The father, whose work consists
in tending eighty-nine head of cattle and ten pigs, is in
receipt of eleven shillings a week, three pints of skim milk a
day, and a cottage that has been condemned by the sanitary
inspector and described as having no bedroom windows. We are
not surprised to learn that the coroner, before taking the
verdict, asked the house surgeon, who gave evidence, whether
he could say that death 'was accelerated by anything.' Our
wonder is that the reply was in the negative. The cottage is
in the possession of the farmer who employs the man, but his
landlord is said to be liable for repairs. That landlord is a
clergyman of the Church of England, a J.P., a preserver of
game, and owner of three or four thousand acres of land."
And here, again, is the _Times_, by no means a Socialist organ,
generalizing from official statements:--
"Houses unfit for human habitation, rooms destitute of light
and ventilation, overcrowding in rural cottages, contaminated
water supplies, accumulations of every description of filth
and refuse, a total absence of drainage, a reign of
unbelievable dirt in milk-shops and slaughter-houses, a total
neglect of bye-laws, and an inadequate supervision by
officials who are frequently incompetent; such, in a general
way, is the picture that is commonly presented in the reports
of inquiries in certain rural districts made by medical
officers of the Local Government Board."
And even of such homes as this there is an insufficiency. In 1891-95,
more than a quarter of the deaths in London occurred in workhouses and
other charitable institutions.[9] Now suppose the modern Socialist did
want to destroy the home; suppose that some Socialists have in the
past really wanted to do so, remember that that is the reality they
wanted to destroy.
[9] _Studies Scientific and Social_, Vol. II., Ch. XXIV.; by
Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace. (Macmillan & Co., 1900.)
But does the modern Socialist want to destroy the home? Rather, I
hold, he wants to save it from a destruction that is even now going
on, to--I won't say restore it, because I have very grave doubts if
the world has ever yet held a high percentage of good homes, but raise
it to the level of its better realizations of happiness and security.
And it is not only I say this, but all my fellow Socialists say it
too. Read, for example, that admirable paper, "Economic and Social
Justice," in Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace's _Studies Scientific and
Social_, and you will have the clearest statement of the attitude of a
representative modern Socialist to this question.
§ 2.
The reader must get quite out of his head the idea that the present
system maintains the home and social purity.
In London at the present time there are thousands of prostitutes; in
Paris, in Berlin, in every great city of Europe or America, thousands;
in the whole of Christendom there cannot be less than a million of
these ultimate instances of our civilization. They are the logical
extremity of a civilization based on cash payments. Each of these
women represents a smashed and ruined home and wasted possibilities of
honour, service and love, each one is so much sheer waste. For the
food they consume, their clothing, their lodging, they render back
nothing to the community as a whole, and only a gross, dishonouring
satisfaction to their casual employers. And don't imagine they are
inferior women, that there has been any selection of the unfit in
their sterilization; they are, one may see for oneself, well above the
average in physical vigour, in spirit and beauty. Few of them have
come freely to their trade, the most unnatural in the world; few of
them have anything but shame and loathing for their life; and most of
them must needs face their calling fortified by drink and drugs. For
virtuous people do not begin to understand the things they endure. But
it _pays_ to be a prostitute, it does not pay to be a mother and a
home-maker, and the gist of the present system of individual property
is that a thing _must pay_ to exist.... So much for one aspect of our
present system of a "world of homes."
Consider next the great army of employed men and women, shop
assistants, clerks, and so forth, living in, milliners, typists,
teachers, servants who have practically no prospect whatever of
marrying and experiencing those domestic blisses the Socialist is
supposed to want to rob them of. They are involuntary monks and nuns,
celibate not from any high or religious motive, but through economic
hardship. Consider all that amount of pent-up, thwarted or perverted
emotional possibility, the sheer irrational waste of life implied....
We have glanced at the reality of the family among the poor; what is
it among the rich? Does the wealthy mother of the upper middle-class
or upper class really sit among her teeming children, teaching them in
an atmosphere of love and domestic exaltation? As a matter of fact she
is a conspicuously devoted woman if she gives them an hour a day--the
rest of the time they spend with nurse or governess, and when they are
ten or eleven off they go to board at the preparatory school. Whenever
I find among my press-cuttings some particularly scathing denunciation
of Socialists as home-destroyers, as people who want to snatch the
tender child from the weeping mother to immure it in some terrible
wholesale institution, I am apt to walk out into my garden, from which
three boarding-schools for little children of the prosperous classes
are visible, and rub my eyes and renew that sight and marvel at my
kind....
Consider now, with these things in mind, the real drift of the first
main Socialist proposition, and compare its tendency with these
contemporary conditions. Socialism regards parentage under proper
safeguards and good auspices as "not only a duty but a service" to the
State; that is to say it proposes to pay for good parentage--in other
words to _endow the home_. Socialism comes not to destroy but to save.
And how will the endowment be done? Very probably it will be found
that the most convenient and best method of doing this will be to
subsidize the mother--who is, or should be, the principal person
concerned in this affair--for her children; to assist her, not as a
charity, but as a right in the period before the birth of her
anticipated child, and afterwards to provide her with support for that
child so long as it is kept clean in a tolerable home, in good health,
well taught and properly clad. It will say to the sound mothering
woman, Not type-writing, nor shirt-sewing, nor charing is your
business--these children are. Neglect them, ill-treat them, prove
incompetent, and your mother-right will cease and we shall take them
away from you and do what we can for them; love them, serve them and,
through them, the State, and you will serve yourself. Is that
destroying the home? Is it not rather the rescue of the home from
economic destruction?
Certain restrictions, it is true, upon our present way of doing things
would follow almost necessarily from the adoption of these methods. It
is manifest that no intelligent State would willingly endow the homes
of hopelessly diseased parents, of imbecile fathers or mothers, of
obstinately criminal persons or people incapable of education. It is
evident, too, that the State would not tolerate chance fatherhood,
that it would insist very emphatically upon marriage and the purity of
the home, much more emphatically than we do now. Such a case as the
one numbered 197, a beautiful instance of the sweet, old-fashioned,
homely, simple life of the poor we Socialists are supposed to be
vainly endeavouring to undermine--would certainly be dealt with in a
drastic and conclusive spirit....
§ 3.
So far Socialism goes toward regenerating the family and sustaining
the home. But let there be no ambiguity on one point. It will be
manifest that while it would reinvigorate and confirm the home, it
does quite decidedly tend to destroy what has hitherto been the most
typical form of the family throughout the world, that is to say the
family which is in effect the private property of the father, the
patriarchal family. The tradition of the family in which we are still
living, we must remember, has developed from a former state in which
man owned the wife or child as completely as he owned horse or hut. He
was the family's irresponsible owner. Socialism seeks to make him and
his wife its jointly responsible heads. Until quite recently the
husband might beat his wife and put all sorts of physical constraint
upon her; he might starve her or turn her out of doors; her property
was his; her earnings were his; her children were his. Under certain
circumstances it was generally recognized he might kill her. To-day we
live in a world that has faltered from the rigours of this position,
but which still clings to its sentimental consequences. The wife
now-a-days is a sort of pampered and protected half-property. If she
leaves her husband for another man, it is regarded not as a public
offence on her part, but as a sort of mitigated theft on the part of
the latter, entitling the former to damages. Politically she doesn't
exist; the husband sees to all that. But on the other hand he mustn't
drive her by physical force, but only by the moral pressure of
disagreeable behaviour. Nor has he the same large powers of violence
over her children that once he had. He may beat--within limits. He may
dictate their education so far as his religious eccentricities go, and
be generous or meagre with the supplies. He may use his "authority" as
a vague power far on into their adult life, if he is a forcible
character. But it is at its best a shorn splendour he retains. He has
ceased to be an autocrat and become a constitutional monarch; the
State, sustained by the growing reasonableness of the world,
intervenes more and more between him and the wife and children who
were once powerless in his hands.
The Socialist would end that old legal predominance altogether. The
woman, he declares, must be as important and responsible a citizen in
the State as the man. She must cease to be in any sense or degree
private property. The man must desist from tyrannizing in the nursery
and do his proper work in the world. So far, therefore, as the family
is a name for a private property in a group of related human beings
vesting in one of them, the Head of the Family, Socialism repudiates
it altogether as unjust and uncivilized; but so far as the family is a
grouping of children with their parents, with the support and consent
and approval of the whole community, Socialism advocates it, would
make it for the first time, so far as a very large moiety of our
population is concerned, a possible and efficient thing.
Moreover, as the present writer has pointed out elsewhere,[10] this
putting of the home upon a public basis destroys its autonomy. Just as
the Socialist and all who have the cause of civilization at heart
would substitute for the inefficient, wasteful, irresponsible,
unqualified "private adventure school" that did such infinite injury
to middle-class education in Great Britain during the Victorian period
a public school, publicly and richly endowed and responsible and
controlled, so the Socialist would put an end to the uncivilized
go-as-you-please of the private adventure family. "Socialism in fact
is the State family. The old family of the private individual must
vanish before it just as the old water-works of private enterprise or
the old gas company."[11] To any one not idiotic nor blind with a
passionate desire to lie about Socialism, the meaning of this passage
is perfectly plain. Socialism seeks to broaden the basis of the family
and to make the once irresponsible parent responsible to the State for
its welfare. Socialism creates parental responsibility.
[10] _Socialism and the Family._ (A. C. Fifield. 6_d._)
[11] _Socialism and the Family._
§ 4.
And here we may give a few words to certain questions that are in
reality outside the scope of Socialists altogether, special questions
involving the most subtle ethical and psychological decisions. Upon
them Socialists are as widely divergent as people who are not
Socialists, and Socialism as a whole presents nothing but an open
mind. They are questions that would be equally open to discussion in
relation to an Individualist State or to any sort of State. Certain
religious organizations have given clear and imperative answers to
some or all of these questions, and so far as the reader is a member
of such an organization, he may rest assured that Socialism, as an
authoritative whole, has nothing to say for or against his
convictions. This cannot be made too plain by Socialists, nor too
frequently repeated by them. A very large part of the so-called
arguments against them arise out of deliberate misrepresentations and
misconceptions of some alleged Socialist position in these indifferent
matters.
I refer more particularly to the numerous problems in private morality
and social organization arising from sexual conduct. May a man love
one woman only in his life, or more, and may a woman love only one
man? Should marriage be an irrevocable life union or not? Is sterile
physical love possible, permissible, moral, honourable or intolerable?
Upon all these matters individual Socialists, like most other people,
have their doubts and convictions, but it is no more just to saddle
all Socialism with their private utterances and actions upon these
issues than it would be to declare that the Roman Catholic Communion
is hostile to beauty because worshippers coming and going have knocked
the noses off the figures on the bronze doors of the Church of San
Zeno at Verona, or that Christianity involves the cultivation of
private vermin, because of the condition of Saint Thomas à Beckett's
hair shirt.[12] To argue in that way is to give up one's birthright as
a reasonable being.
[12] "The haircloth encased the whole body down to the
knees; the hair drawers, as well as the rest of the dress,
being covered on the outside with white linen so as to
escape observation; and the whole so fastened together as to
admit of being readily taken off for his daily scourgings,
of which yesterday's portion was still apparent in the
stripes on his body. Such austerity had hitherto been
unknown to English saints, and the marvel was increased by
the sight--to our notions so revolting--of the innumerable
vermin with which the haircloth abounded--boiling over with
them, as one account describes it, like water in a simmering
cauldron. At the dreadful sight all the enthusiasm of the
previous night revived with double ardour. They looked at
each other in silent wonder, then exclaimed, 'See, see what
a true monk he was, and we knew it not!' and burst into
alternate fits of weeping and laughter, between the sorrow
of having lost such a head, and the joy of having found such
a saint." (_Historical Memorials of Canterbury_, by the Rev.
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D.)
Upon certain points modern Socialism is emphatic; women and children
must not be dealt with as private property, women must be citizens
equally with men, children must not be casually born, their parents
must be known and worthy; that is to say there must be deliberation in
begetting children, marriage under conditions. And there Socialism
stops.
Socialism has not even worked out what are the reasonable conditions
of a State marriage contract, and it would be ridiculous to pretend it
had. This is not a defect in Socialism particularly, but a defect in
human knowledge. At countless points in the tangle of questions
involved, the facts are not clearly known. Socialism does not present
any theory whatever about the duration of marriage, whether, as among
the Roman Catholics, it should be absolutely for life, or, as some
hold, for ever; or, as among the various divorce-permitting Protestant
bodies, until this or that eventuality; or even, as Mr. George
Meredith suggested some years ago, for a term of ten years. In these
matters Socialism does not decide, and it is quite reasonable to argue
that Socialism need not decide. Socialism maintains an attitude of
neutrality. And the practical effect of an attitude of neutrality is
to leave these things as they are at present. The State is not
urgently concerned with these questions. So long as a marriage
contract provides for the health and sanity of the contracting
parties, and for their proper behaviour so far as their offspring is
concerned, and for so long as their offspring need it, the demands of
the community, as the guardian of the children, are satisfied. That
certainly would be the minimum marriage, the State marriage, and I,
for my own part, would exact nothing more _in the legal contract_. But
a number of more representative Socialists than I are for a legally
compulsory life marriage. Some--but they are mostly of the older, less
definite, Social Democratic teaching--are for a looser tie. Let us
clearly understand that we are here talking of the legal marriage
only--the State's share. We are not talking of what people will do,
but of how much they are to be made to do. A vast amount of stupid
confusion arises from forgetting that. What was needed more than that
minimum I have specified would be provided, I believe--it always has
been provided hitherto, even to excess--by custom, religion, social
influence, public opinion.
For it may not be altogether superfluous to remind the reader how
little of our present moral code is ruled by law. We have in England,
it is true, certain laws prescribing the conditions of the marriage
contract, penalties of a quite ferocious kind to prevent bigamy, and a
few quite trivial disabilities put upon those illegitimately born. But
there is no legal compulsion upon any one to marry now, and far less
legal restriction upon irregular and careless parentage than would be
put in any scientifically organized Socialism. Do let us get it out of
our heads that monogamy is enforced by law at the present time. It is
not. You are only forbidden to enter into normal marriage with more
than one person. If a man of means chooses to have as many concubines
as King Solomon and live with them all openly, the law (I am speaking
of Great Britain) will do nothing to prevent him. If he chooses to go
through any sort of nuptial ceremony, provided it does not simulate a
legal marriage, with some or all of them he may. And to any one who
evades the legal marriage bond, there is a vast range of betrayal and
baseness as open as anything can be. "Free Love" is open to any one
who chooses to practise it to-day. The real controlling force in these
matters is social influence, public opinion, a sort of conscience and
feeling for the judgment of others that is part of the normal human
equipment. And the same motives and considerations that keep people's
lives pure and discreet now, will be all the more freely in operation
under Socialism, when money will count for less and reputation for
more than they do now. Modern Socialism is a project to change the
organization of living and the circle of human ideas; but it is no
sort of scheme to attempt the impossible, to change human nature and
to destroy the social sensitiveness of man.
I do not deny the intense human interest of these open questions, the
imperative need there is to get the truth, whether one considers it to
be one's own truth or the universal truth, upon them. But my point is
that they are to be discussed apart from Socialist theory, and that
anyhow they have nothing to do with Socialist politics. It is no doubt
interesting to discuss the benefits of vaccination and the justice and
policy of its public compulsion, to debate whether one should eat meat
or confine oneself to a vegetable dietary, whether the overhead or the
slot system is preferable for tramway traction, whether steamboats are
needed on the Thames in winter, and whether it is wiser to use metal
or paper for money; but none of these things have anything to do with
the principles of Socialism. Nor need we decide whether Whistler,
Raphael or Carpaccio has left us the most satisfying beauty, or which
was the greater musician, Wagner, Scarlatti or Beethoven, nor
pronounce on the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy in any prescribed way,
because we accept Socialism.
Coming to graver matters there are ardent theologians who would create
an absolute antagonism between Socialism and Christianity, who would
tie up Socialism with some extraordinary doctrine of Predestination,
or deny the possibility of a Christian being a Socialist or a
Socialist being a Christian. But these are matters on different
planes. In a sense Socialism is a religion; to me it is a religion, in
the sense, that is, that it gives a work to do that is not
self-seeking, that it determines one in a thousand indecisions, that
it supplies that imperative craving of so many human souls, a
devotion. But I do not see why a believer in any of the accepted
creeds of Christianity, from the Apostles' Creed upward, should not
also whole-heartedly give himself to this great work of social
reconstruction. To believe in a real and personal Heaven is surely not
to deny earth with its tragedy, its sorrows, its splendid
possibilities. It is simply to believe a little more concretely than I
do, that is all. To assert the brotherhood of man under God seems to
me to lead logically to a repudiation of the severities of Private
Ownership--that is to Socialism. When the rich young man was told to
give up his property to follow Christ, when the disciples were told to
leave father and mother, it seems to me ridiculous to present
Christianity as opposed to the self-abnegation of the two main
generalizations of Socialism--that relating to property in things, and
that relating to property in persons. It is true that the Church of
Rome has taken the deplorable step of forbidding Socialism (or at
least _Socialismus_) to its adherents; but there is no need for
Socialists to commit a reciprocal stupidity. Let us Socialists at any
rate keep our intellectual partitions up. The Church that now quarrels
with Socialism once quarrelled with astronomy and geology, and
astronomers and geologists went on with their own business. Both
religion and astronomy are still alive and in the same world together.
And the Vatican observatory, by the bye, is honourably distinguished
for its excellent stellar photographs. Perhaps, after all, the Church
does not mean by _Socialismus_ Socialism as it is understood in
English; perhaps it simply means the dogmatically anti-Christian
Socialism of the Continental type.
I am not advocating indifference to any interest I have here set aside
as irrelevant to Socialism. Men have discussed and will, I hope,
continue to discuss such questions as I have instanced with passionate
zeal; but Socialism need not be entangled by their decisions. We can
go on our road to Socialism, we can get to Socialism, to the Civilized
State, whichever answer is given to any of these questions, great or
small.