ses 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.

Sec. 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