In this paper I am anxious to define and
discuss the relationship between three
distinct things:
(1) Socialism, i.e. a large, a slowly elaborating
conception of a sane and organized
state and moral culture to replace our present
chaotic way of living,
(2) the Socialist movement, and
(3) the Middle Classes.
The first is to me a very great thing indeed,
the form and substance of my ideal life,
and all the religion I possess. Let me make
6my confession plain and clear. I am, by a
sort of predestination, a Socialist. I perceive,
I cannot help talking and writing about
Socialism, and shaping and forwarding Socialism.
I am one of a succession—one of a
growing multitude of witnesses, who will
continue. It does not—in the larger sense—matter
how many generations of us must
toil and testify. It does not matter, except
as our individual concern, how individually
we succeed or fail, what blunders we make,
what thwartings we encounter, what follies
and inadequacies darken our private hopes
and level our personal imaginations to the
dust. We have the light. We know what
we are for, and that the light that now glimmers
so dimly through us must in the end
prevail. To us Socialism is no piece of political
strategy, no economic opposition of class
to class; it is a plan for the reconstruction
of human life, for the replacement of a disorder
by order, for the making of a state in
which mankind shall live bravely and beautifully
beyond our present imagining.
7So, largely, I conceive of Socialism. But
Socialism and the Socialist movement are two
very different things. The Socialist movement
is an item in an altogether different scale.
I must confess that the organized Socialist
movement, all the Socialist societies and
leagues and federations and parties together
in England, seem to me no more than the
rustling hem of the garment of advancing
Socialism. For some years the whole organized
Socialist movement seemed to me so
unimportant, so irrelevant to that progressive
development and realization of a great system
of ideas which is Socialism, that, like very
many other Socialists, I did not trouble to
connect myself with any section of it. I
don’t believe that the Socialist idea is as yet
nearly enough thought out and elaborated for
very much of it to be realized of set intention
now. Socialism is still essentially education,
is study, is a renewal, a profound change in
the circle of human thought and motive.
The institutions which will express this
changed circle of thought are important indeed,
8but with a secondary importance.
Socialism is the still incomplete, the still
sketchy and sketchily indicative plan of a
new life for the world, a new and better way
of living, a change of spirit and substance
from the narrow selfishness and immediacy
and cowardly formalism, the chaotic life
individual accident that is human life to-day,
a life that dooms itself and all of us to thwartings
and misery. Socialism, therefore, is
to be served by thought and expression, in
art, in literature, in scientific statement and
life, in discussion and the quickening exercise
of propaganda; but the Socialist movement,
as one finds it, is too often no more than a
hasty attempt to secure a premature realization
of some fragmentary suggestion of this
great, still plastic design, to the neglect of
all other of its aspects. As my own sense of
Socialism has enlarged and intensified, I have
become more and more impressed by the
imperfect Socialism of almost every Socialist
movement that is going on; by its necessarily
partial and limited projection from the clotted
9cants and habituations of things as they are.
Some Socialists quarrel with the Liberal
Party and with the Socialist section of the
Liberal Party because it does not go far
enough, because it does not embody a Socialism
uncompromising and complete, because
it has not definitely cut itself off from the
old traditions, the discredited formulæ, that
served before the coming of our great idea.
They are blind to the fact that there is no
organized Socialism at present, uncompromising
and complete, and the Socialists who flatter
themselves they represent as much are
merely those who have either never grasped
or who have forgotten the full implications
of Socialism. They are just a little step
further, a very little step further in their
departure from existing prejudices, in their
subservience to existing institutions and existing
imperatives.
Take, for example, the Socialism that is
popular in New York and Chicago and Germany,
and that finds its exponents here
typically in the inferior ranks of the Social
10Democratic Federation—the crude Marxite
teaching. It still awaits permeation by true
Socialist conceptions. It is a version of life
adapted essentially to the imagination of the
working wage earner, and limited by his
limitations. It is the vision of poor souls
perennially reminded each Monday morning
of the shadow and irksomeness of life, perpetually
recalled each Saturday pay time to
a watery gleam of all that life might be. One
of the numberless relationships of life, the
relationship of capital or the employer to the
employed, is made to overshadow all other
relations. Get that put right, “expropriate
the idle rich,” transfer all capital to the
State, make the State the humane, amenable,
universal employer—that, to innumerable,
Socialist working men, is the horizon. The
rest he sees in the forms of the life to which
he is accustomed. A little home, a trifle
larger and brighter than his present one, a
more abounding table, a cheerful missus
released from factory work and unhealthy
competition with men, a bright and healthy
11family going to and fro to the public free
schools, free medical attendance, universal
State insurance for old age, free trams to
Burnham Beeches, shorter hours of work and
higher wages, no dismissals, no hunting for
work that eludes one. All the wide world of
collateral consequences that will follow from
the cessation of the system of employment
under conditions of individualist competition,
he does not seem to apprehend. Such phrases
as the citizenship and economic independence
of women leave him cold. That Socialism
has anything to say about the economic
basis of the family, about the social aspects
of marriage, about the rights of the parent,
doesn’t, I think, at first occur to him at all.
Nor does he realize for a long time that for
Socialism and under Socialist institutions
will there be needed any system of self-discipline,
any rules of conduct further than the
natural impulses and the native goodness of
man. He takes just that aspect of Socialism
that appeals to him, and that alone, and it is
only exceptionally at present, and very slowly,
12as a process of slow habituation and enlargement,
that he comes to any wider conceptions.
And, as a consequence, directly we pass to
any social type to which weekly or monthly
wages is not the dominating fact of life, and
a simple unthinking faith in Yes or No decisions
its dominant habit, the phrasings, the
formulæ, the statements and the discreet
omissions of the leaders of working-class
Socialism fail to appeal.
Socialism commends itself to a considerable
proportion of the working class simply as a
beneficial change in the conditions of work
and employment; to other sections of the
community it presents itself through equally
limited aspects. Certain ways of living it
seems to condemn root and branch. To the
stockbroker and many other sorts of trader,
to the usurer, to the company promoter, to
the retired butler who has invested his money
in “weekly property,” for example, it stands
for the dissolution of all comprehensible social
order. It simply repudiates the way of living
to which they have committed themselves.
13And to great numbers of agreeable unintelligent
people who live upon rent and interest
it is a projected severing of every bond that
holds man and man, that keeps servants
respectful, tradespeople in order, railways and
hotels available, and the whole procedure of
life going. They class Socialism and Anarchism
together in a way that is as logically
unjust as it is from their point of view justifiable.
Both cults have this in common, that
they threaten to wipe out the whole world of
the villa resident. And this sense of a threatened
profound disturbance in their way of
living pervades the attitude of nearly all the
comfortable classes towards Socialism.
When we discuss the attitude of the middle
classes to Socialism we must always bear this
keener sense of disconcerting changes in
mind. It is a part of the queer composition
of the human animal that its desire for happenings
is balanced by an instinctive dread
of real changes of condition. People, especially
fully adult people, are creatures who
have grown accustomed to a certain method
14of costume, a certain system of meals, a certain
dietary, certain apparatus, a certain
routine. They know their way about in
life as it is. They would be lost in Utopia.
Quite little alterations “put them out,” as
they say—create a distressing feeling of
inadequacy, make them “feel odd.” Whatever
little enlargements they may contemplate
in reverie, in practice they know they
want nothing except, perhaps, a little more
of all the things they like. That’s the way
with most of us, anyhow. To make a fairly
complete intimation of the nature of Socialism
to an average, decent, middle-aged, middle-class
person would be to arouse emotions
of unspeakable terror, if the whole project
didn’t also naturally clothe itself in a quality
of incredibility. And you will find, as a
matter of fact, that your middle-class Socialists
belong to two classes; either they are amiable
people who don’t understand a bit what
Socialism is—and some of the most ardent
and serviceable workers for Socialism are of
this type—or they are people so unhappily
15situated and so unfortunate, or else of such
exceptional imaginative force or training
(which is itself, perhaps, from the practical
point of view, a misfortune), as to be capable
of a discontent with life as it is, so passionate
as to outweigh instinctive timidities and
discretions. Rest assured that to make any
large section of the comfortable upper middle
class Socialists, you must either misrepresent,
and more particularly under-represent Socialism,
or you must quicken their imaginations
far beyond the present state of affairs.
Some of the most ardent and serviceable
of Socialist workers, I have said, are of the
former type. For the most part they are
philanthropic people, or women and men of
the managing temperament shocked into a
sort of Socialism by the more glaring and
melodramatic cruelties of our universally
cruel social system. They are the district
visitors of Socialism. They do not realize
that Socialism demands any change in themselves
or in their way of living, they perceive
in it simply a way of hope from the
16failures of vulgar charity. Chiefly they assail
the bad conditions of life of the lower classes.
They don’t for a moment envisage a time
when there will be no lower classes—that
is beyond them altogether. Much less can
they conceive of a time when there will be no
governing class distinctively in possession of
means. They exact respect from inferiors;
no touch of Socialist warmth or light qualifies
their arrogant manners. Perhaps they, too,
broaden their conception of Socialism as time
goes on, but so it begins with them. Now
to make Socialists of this type the appeal
is a very different one from the talk of class
war and expropriation, and the abolition of
the idle rich, which is so serviceable with a
roomful of sweated workers. These people
are moved partly by pity, and the best of
them by a hatred for the squalor and waste
of the present régime. Talk of the expropriated
rich simply raises in their minds
painful and disconcerting images of distressed
gentlewomen. But one necessary aspect of
the Socialist’s vision that sends the coldest
17shiver down the spine of the working class
Socialist is extraordinarily alluring and congenial
to them, namely, the official and
organized side. They love to think of houses
and factories open to competent inspection,
of municipal milk, sealed and certificated for
every cottager’s baby, of old age pensions
and a high and rising minimum standard of
life. They have an admirable sense of sanitation.
They are the philanthropic and administrative
Socialists as distinguished from
the economic revolutionaries.
This class of Socialist passes insensibly into
the merely Socialistic philanthropist of the
wealthy middle class to whom we owe so
much helpful expenditure upon experiments
in housing, in museum and school construction,
in educational endowment, and so forth.
Their activities are not for one moment to
be despised; they are a constant demonstration
to dull and sceptical persons that
things may be different, better, prettier,
kindlier and more orderly. Many people
impervious to tracts can be set thinking by
18a model village or a model factory. However
petty much of what they achieve may
be, there it is achieved—in legislation, in
bricks and mortar. Among other things,
these administrative Socialists serve to correct
the very perceptible tendency of most
working men Socialists to sentimental anarchism
in regard to questions of control and
conduct, a tendency due entirely to their
social and administrative inexperience.
For more thorough-going Socialism among
the middle classes one must look to those
strata and sections in which quickened imaginations
and unsettling influences are to be
found. The artist should be extraordinarily
attracted by Socialism. A mind habitually
directed to beauty as an end must necessarily
be exceptionally awake to the ugly congestions
of our contemporary civilisation, to
the prolific futile production of gawky, ill-mannered,
jostling new things, to the shabby
profit-seeking that ousts beauty from life and
poisons every enterprise of man. And not
only artistic work, but the better sort of
19scientific investigation, the better sort of
literary work, and every occupation that
involves the persistent free use of thought,
must bring the mind more and more towards
the definite recognition of our social incoherence
and waste. But this by no means
exhausts the professions that ought to have
a distinct bias for Socialism. The engineer,
the architect, the mechanical inventor, the
industrial organizer, and every sort of maker
must be at one in their desire for emancipation
from servitude to the promoter, the
trader, the lawyer, and the forestaller, from
the perpetually recurring obstruction of the
claim of the private proprietor to every large
and hopeful enterprise, and ready to respond
to the immense creative element in the
Socialist idea. Only it is that creative element
which has so far found least expression
in Socialist literature, which appears neither
in the “class war” literature of the working
class Socialist nor the litigious, inspecting,
fining, and regulating tracts and proposals
of the administrative Socialist. To too many
20of these men in the constructive professions
the substitution of a Socialist State for our
present economic method carries with it no
promise of emancipation at all. They think
that to work for the public controls which
an advance towards Socialism would set up,
would be worse for them and for all that they
desire to do than the profit-seeking, expense-cutting,
mercenary making of the present
régime.
This is, I believe, a temporary and alterable
state, contrary to the essential and permanent
spirit of those engaged in constructive
work. It is due very largely to the many
misrepresentations and partial statements
of Socialism that have rendered it palatable
and assimilable to the working men and the
administrative Socialist. Socialism has been
presented on the one hand as a scheme of
expropriation to a clamorous popular government
of working men, far more ignorant
and incapable of management than a shareholders’
meeting, and, on the other, as a
scheme for the encouragement of stupid little
21municipal authorities of the contemporary
type in impossible business undertakings
under the guidance of fussy, energetic, legal
minded and totally unscientific instigators.
Except for the quite recent development of
Socialist thought that is now being embodied
in the New Heptarchy Series of the Fabian
Society, scarcely anything has been done to
dispel these reasonable dreads. I should
think that from the point of view of Socialist
propaganda, the time is altogether ripe now for
a fresh and more vigorous insistence upon
the materially creative aspect of the Vision of
Socialism, an aspect which is after all, much
more cardinal and characteristic than any
aspect that has hitherto been presented systematically
to the world. An enormous rebuilding,
remaking, and expansion is integral
in the Socialist dream. We want to get the
land out of the control of the private owners
among whom it is cut up, we want to get
houses, factories, railways, mines, farms
out of the dispersed management of their
proprietors, not in order to secure their
22present profits and hinder development, but
in order to rearrange these things in a saner
and finer fashion. An immense work of
replanning, rebuilding, redistributing lies in
the foreground of the Socialist vista. We
contemplate an enormous clearance of existing
things. We want an unfettered hand to
make beautiful and convenient homes, splendid
cities, noiseless great highways, beautiful
bridges, clean, swift and splendid electric
railways; we are inspired by a faith in the
coming of clean, wide and simple methods
of agricultural production. But it is only
now that Socialism is beginning to be put in
these terms. So put it, and the engineer and
the architect and the scientific organizer,
agricultural or industrial—all the best of
them, anyhow—will find it correspond extraordinarily
to their way of thinking.
Not all of them, of course. A middle-aged
architect with a note-book full of bits of
gothic, and a reputation for suburban churches,
or full of bits of “Queen Anne” and a connexion
among villa builders, or an engineer
23paterfamilias who has tasted blood as an
expert witness, aren’t to be won by these
suggestions. They’re part of things as they
are. But that is only a temporary inconvenience
to Socialism. The young men do
respond, and they are the future and what
Socialism needs.
And there’s another great constructive
profession that should be Socialist altogether,
and that is the medical profession. Especially
does Socialism claim the younger men
who haven’t yet sunken from the hospitals
to the trading individualism of a practice.
And then there are the teachers, the schoolmasters
and schoolmistresses. The idea of
a great organized making is innate in the
quality of their professions; the making
of sound bodies and healthy conditions, the
making of informed and disciplined minds.
The methods of the profit-seeking schoolmaster,
the practice-buying doctor are imposed
upon them by the necessities of an
individualist world. Both these two great
professions present nowadays, side by side,
24two types—the new type, highly qualified,
official, administrative, scientific, public-spirited;
the old type, capitalistic, with a
pretentious house and equipment, the doctor
with a brougham, and a dispensary, the
schoolmaster or schoolmistress with some
huge old stucco house converted by jerry-built
extensions to meet scholastic needs.
Who would not rather, one may ask, choose
the former way who was not already irrevocably
committed to the latter? Well, I
with my Socialist dreams would like to answer
“No one,” but I’m learning to check my
buoyant optimism. The imagination and
science in a young man may cry out for the
public position, for the valiant public work,
for the hard, honourable, creative years.
He may sit with his fellow-students and his
fellow-workers in a nocturnal cloud of tobacco
smoke and fine talk, and vow himself to
research and the creative world state. In the
morning he will think he has dreamed; he
will recall what the world is, what Socialists
are, what he has heard wild Socialists say
25about science and his art. He will elect
for the real world and a practice.
Something more than a failure to state
the constructive and educational quality in
Socialism on the part of its exponents has to
be admitted in accounting for the unnatural
want of sympathetic co-operation between
them and the bulk of these noble professions.
I cannot disguise from myself certain curiously
irrelevant strands that have interwoven with
the partial statements of Socialism current
in England, and which it is high time, I
think, for Socialists to repudiate. Socialism
is something more than an empty criticism
of our contemporary disorder and waste of
life, it is a great intimation of construction,
organization, science and education. But
concurrently with its extension and its destructive
criticism of the capitalistic individualism
of to-day, there has been another
movement, essentially an anarchist movement,
hostile to machinery and apparatus,
hostile to medical science, hostile to order,
hostile to education, a Rousseauite movement
26in the direction of a sentimentalized
naturalism, a Tolstoyan movement in the
direction of a non-resisting pietism, which
has not simply been confused with the
Socialist movement, but has really affected
and interwoven with it. It is not simply
that wherever discussion and destructive
criticism of the present conventional bases
of society occur, both ways of thinking crop
up together; they occur all too often as
alternating phases in the same individual.
Few of us are so clear-headed as to be free
from profound self-contradictions. So that
it is no great marvel, after all, if the presentation
of Socialism has got mixed up with
Return-to-Nature ideas, with proposals for
living in a state of unregulated primitive
virtue in purely hand-made houses, upon
rain water and uncooked fruit. We Socialists
have to disentangle it from these things now.
We have to disavow, with all necessary
emphasis, that gibing at science and the
medical profession, at schools and books and
the necessary apparatus for collective thinking,
27which has been one of our little ornamental
weaknesses in the past. That has,
I know, kept a very considerable number of
intelligent professional men from inquiring
further into Socialist theories and teachings.
As a consequence there are, especially in the
medical profession, quite a number of unconscious
Socialists, men, often with a far clearer
grip upon the central ideas of Socialism than
many of its professed exponents, who have
worked out these ideas for themselves, and
are incredulous to hear them called Socialistic.
So much for the specifically creative and
imagination-using professions. Throughout
the whole range of the more educated middle
classes, however, there are causes at work
that necessarily stimulate thought towards
Socialism, that engender scepticisms, promote
inquiries leading towards what is at present
the least expounded of all aspects of Socialism—the
relation of Socialism to the institution
of the Family....
The Family, and not the individual, is still
the unit in contemporary civilization, and
28indeed in nearly all social systems that have
ever existed. The adult male, the head of
the family, has been the citizen, the sole
representative of the family in the State.
About him have been grouped his one or
more wives, his children, his dependents.
His position towards them has always been—is
still in many respects to this day—one
of ownership. He was owner of them all,
and in many of the less sophisticated systems
of the past his ownership was as complete
as over his horse and house and land—more
complete than over his land. He could sell
his children into slavery, barter his wives.
There has been a secular mitigation of the
rights of this sort of private property; the
establishment of monogamy, for instance,
did for the family what President Roosevelt’s
proposed legislation against large accumulations
might do for industrial enterprises,
but to this day in our own community, for
all such mitigations and many euphemisms,
the ownership of the head of the family is
still a manifest fact. He votes. He keeps
29and protects. He determines the education
and professions of his children. He is entitled
to monetary consolation for any infringement
of his rights over wife or daughter.
Every intelligent woman understands that, as
a matter of hard fact, beneath all the civilities
of to-day, she is actual or potential property,
and has to treat herself and keep herself as
that. She may by force or subtlety turn
her chains into weapons, she may succeed in
exacting a reciprocal property in a man, the
fact remains fundamental that she is either
isolated or owned.
But I need not go on writing facts with
which every one is acquainted. My concern
now is to point out that Socialism
repudiates the private ownership of the head
of the family as completely as it repudiates
any other sort of private ownership. Socialism
involves the responsible citizenship of
women, their economic independence of men,
and all the personal freedom that follows that,
it intervenes between the children and the
parents, claiming to support them, protect
30them, and educate them for its own ampler
purposes. 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. They are incompatible with
it. Socialism assails the triumphant egotism
of the family to-day, just as Christianity
did in its earlier and more vital centuries.
So far as English Socialism is concerned
(and the thing is still more the case in America)
I must confess that the assault has displayed
a quite extraordinary instinct for taking
cover, but that is a question of tactics rather
than of essential antagonism.
It is possible to believe that so far as the
middle classes are concerned this discretion
has been carried altogether too far. Socialists
would have forwarded their cause better if
they had been more outspoken. It has led to
preposterous misunderstandings; and among
others to the charge that Socialism implied
free-love.... The middle-class family, I
am increasingly convinced, is a group in a
31state of tension. I believe that a modest
but complete statement of the Socialist criticism
of the family and the proposed Socialist
substitute for the conventional relationships
might awaken extraordinary responses at the
present time. The great terror of the eighties
and early nineties that crushed all reasonable
discussion of sexual relationship is, I believe,
altogether over.
The whole of the present system is riddled
with discontents. One factor is the enhanced
sense of the child in middle-class life: the old
sentiment was that the parent owned the
child, the new is that the children own the
parents. There has come an intensified respect
for children, an immense increase in the
trouble, attention and expenditure devoted
to them—and a very natural and human
accompaniment in the huge fall in the middle-class
birth-rate. It is felt that to bear and
rear children is the most noble and splendid
and responsible thing in life, and an increasing
number of people modestly evade it. People
see more clearly the social service of parentage,
32and are more and more inclined to
demand a recognition from the State for this
service. The middle-class parent might
conceivably be horrified if you suggested the
State should pay him for his offspring, but
he would have no objection whatever to
being indirectly and partially paid by a
differential income tax graduated in relation
to the size of his family.
With this increased sense of the virtue and
public service of parentage there has gone on
a great development of the criticism of schools
and teaching. The more educated middle-class
parent has become an amateur educationist
of considerable virulence. He sees
more and more distinctly the inadequacy of
his own private attempts to educate, the
necessary charlatanry and insufficiency of the
private adventure school. He finds much to
envy in the elementary schools. If he is
ignorant and short-sighted, he joins in the
bitter cry of the middle classes, and clamours
against the pampering of the working class,
and the rising of the rates which renders his
33efforts to educate his own children more difficult.
But a more intelligent type of middle-class
parent sends his boy in for public scholarships,
sets to work to get educational endowment
for his own class also, and makes another
step towards Socialism. Moreover, the increasing
intelligence of the middle-class parent
and the steady swallowing up of the smaller
capitalists and smaller shareholders by the
larger enterprises and fortunes, alike bring
home to him the temporary and uncertain
nature of the advantages his private efforts
give his children over those of the working
man. He sees no more than a brief respite
for them against the economic cataclysms of
the coming time. He is more and more alive
to the presence of secular change in the world.
He does not feel sure his sons will carry on the
old business, continue the old practice. He
begins to appreciate the concentration of
wealth. The secular development of the
capitalistic system robs him more and more of
his sense of securities. He is uneasier than
he used to be about investments. He no
34longer has that complete faith in private
insurance companies that once sustained him.
His mind broadens out to State insurance
as to State education. He is far more amenable
than he used to be to the idea that the
only way to provide for one’s own posterity is
to provide for every one’s posterity, to merge
parentage in citizenship. The family of the
middle-class man which fights for itself alone,
is lost.
Socialism comes into the middle-class family
offering education, offering assurances for the
future, and only very distantly intimating
the price to be paid in weakened individual
control. But far profounder disintegrations
are at work. The internal character of the
middle-class family is altering fundamentally
with the general growth of intelligence, with
the higher education of women, with the
comings and goings for this purpose and that,
the bicycles and games, the enlarged social
appetites and opportunities of a new time.
The more or less conscious Strike against
Parentage is having far-reaching effects. The
35family proper becomes a numerically smaller
group. Enormous numbers of childless families
appear; the middle-class family with two,
or at most three, children is the rule rather
than the exception in certain strata. This
makes the family a less various and interesting
group, with a smaller demand for attention,
emotion, effort. Quite apart from the
general mental quickening of the time, it
leaves more and more social energy, curiosity,
enterprise free, either to fret within the narrow
family limits or to go outside them. The
Strike against Parentage takes among other
forms the form of a strike against marriage;
great numbers of men and women stand out
from a relationship which every year seems
more limiting and (except for its temporary
passional aspect) purposeless. The number
of intelligent and healthy women inadequately
employed, who either idle as wives in attenuated
modern families, childless or with an
insufficient child or so, or who work for an
unsatisfying subsistence as unmarried women,
increases. To them the complete conceptions
36of Socialism should have an extraordinary
appeal.
The appearance of the feminine mind and
soul in the world as something distinct and
self-conscious, is the appearance of a distinct
new engine of criticism against the individualist
family, against this dwindling property
of the once-ascendant male—who no longer
effectually rules, no longer, in many cases,
either protects or sustains, who all too often
is so shorn of his beams as to be but a vexatious
power of jealous restriction and interference
upon his wife and children. The
educated girl resents the proposed loss of her
freedom in marriage, the educated married
woman realizes as well as resents the losses
of scope and interest marriage entails. If it
were not for the economic disadvantages that
make intelligent women dread a solitary old
age in bitter poverty, vast numbers of women
who are married to-day would have remained
single independent women. This discontent
of women is a huge available force for Socialism.
The wife of the past was, to put it
37brutally, caught younger—so young that she
had had no time to think—she began forthwith
to bear babies, rear babies, and (which she
did in a quite proportionate profusion) bury
babies—she never had a moment to think.
Now the wife with double the leisure, double
the education and half the emotional scope
of her worn prolific grandmother, sits at home
and thinks things over. You find her letting
herself loose in clubs, in literary enterprises,
in schemes for joint households to relieve herself
and her husband from the continuation of
a duologue that has exhausted its interest.
The husband finds himself divided between
his sympathetic sense of tedium and the proprietary
tradition in which we live.
For these tensions in the disintegration of
the old proprietary family no remedy offers
itself to-day except the solutions that arise
as essential portions of the Socialist scheme.
The alternative is hypocrisy and disorder.
There is yet another and still more effectual
system of strains at work in the existing
social unit, and that is the strain between
38parents and children. That has always
existed. It is one of our most transparent
sentimental pretences that there is any
natural subordination of son to father, of
daughter to mother. As a matter of fact
a good deal of natural antagonism appears
at the adolescence of the young. Something
very like an instinct stirs in them, to rebel,
to go out. The old habits of solicitude,
control and restraint in the parent become
more and more hampering, irksome, and
exasperating to the offspring. The middle-class
son gets away in spirit and in fact to
school, to college, to business—his sister
does all she can to follow his excellent example.
In a world with vast moral and intellectual
changes in progress the intelligent young
find the personal struggle for independence
intensified by a conflict of ideas. The modern
tendency to cherish and preserve youthfulness;
the keener desire for living that prevents
women getting fat and ugly, and men
bald and incompetent by forty-five, is another
dissolvent factor among these stresses. The
39daughter is not only restrained by her
mother’s precepts, but inflamed by her example.
The son finds his father’s coevals
treating him as a contemporary.
Well, into these conflicts and disorders
comes Socialism, and Socialism alone, to
explain, to justify, to propose new conventions
and new interpretations of relationship,
to champion the reasonable claims of the
young, to mitigate the thwarted ownership
of the old. Socialism comes, constructive
amid the wreckage.
Let me at this point, and before I conclude,
put one thing with the utmost possible
clearness. The Socialist does not propose to
destroy something that conceivably would
otherwise last for ever, when he proposes
a new set of institutions, and a new system
of conduct to replace the old proprietary
family. He no more regards the institution of
marriage as a permanent thing than he regards
a state of competitive industrialism as a
permanent thing. In the economic sphere,
quite apart from any Socialist ideas or
40Socialist activities, it is manifest that
competitive individualism destroys itself.
This was reasoned out long ago in the Capital
of Marx; it is receiving its first gigantic
practical demonstration in the United States
of America. Whatever happens, we believe
that competitive industrialism will change
and end—and we Socialists at least believe
that the alternative to some form of Socialism
is tyranny and social ruin. So, too, in the
social sphere, whether Socialists succeed
altogether or fail altogether, or in whatever
measure they succeed or fail, it does not alter
the fact that the family is weakening, dwindling,
breaking up, disintegrating. The alternative
to a planned and organized Socialism
is not the maintenance of the present system,
but its logical development, and that is all
too plainly a growing complication of pretences
as the old imperatives weaken and fade. We
already live in a world of stupendous hypocrisies,
a world wherein rakes and rascals
champion the sacred institution of the family,
and a network of sexual secrets, vaguely
41suspected, disagreeably present, and only
half-concealed, pervades every social group
one enters. Cynicism, a dismal swamp of
base intrigues, cruel restrictions and habitual
insincerities, is the manifest destiny of the
present régime unless we make some revolutionary
turn. It cannot work out its own
salvation without the profoundest change in
its determining ideas. And what change in
those ideas is offered except by the Socialist?
In relation to all these most intimate aspects
of life, Socialism, and Socialism alone, supplies
the hope and suggestions of clean and practicable
solutions. So far, Socialists have either
been silent or vague, or—let us say—tactful,
in relation to this central tangle of life. To
begin to speak plainly among the silences
and suppressions, the “find out for yourself”
of the current time, would be, I think,
to grip the middle-class woman and the
middle-class youth of both sexes with an
extraordinary new interest, to irradiate the
dissensions of every bored couple and every
squabbling family with broad conceptions,
42and enormously to enlarge and stimulate the
Socialist movement at the present time.
Here ends the paper read by Mr. Wells to the Fabian
Society, but in this that follows he sets out the Socialist
conception of the new relations that must follow the old
much more clearly.