otected 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