ad. 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....

Sec. 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 pr