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 cl