igns and lays
out a garden, so that sweet and seemly things may grow, wide and
beautiful vistas open and weeds and foulness disappear. Always a
garden plan develops and renews itself and discovers new
possibilities, but what makes all its graciousness and beauty possible
is the scheme and the persistent intention, the watching and the
waiting, the digging and burning, the weeder clips and the hoe. That
is the sort of plan, a living plan for things that live and grow, that
the Socialist seeks for social and national life.

To make all this distincter I will show the planlessness of certain
contemporary things, of two main sets of human interests in fact, and
explain what inferences a Socialist draws in these matters. You will
then see exactly what is meant when we deny that this present state of
affairs has any constructive plan, and you will appreciate in the most
generalized form the nature of the constructive plan which Socialists
are making and offering the world.

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM

Sec. 1.

The first--the chief aspect of social life in relation to which the
Socialist finds the world now planless and drifting, and for which he
earnestly propounds the scheme of a better order, is that whole side
of existence which is turned towards children, their begetting and
upbringing, their care and education. Perpetually the world begins
anew, perpetually death wipes out failure, disease, unteachableness
and all that has served life and accomplished itself; and to many
Socialists, if not to all, this is the supreme fact in the social
scheme. The whole measure of progress in a generation is the measure
in which the children improve in physical and mental quality, in
social co-ordination, in opportunity, upon their parents. Nothing else
matters in the way of success if in that way the Good Will fails.

Let us now consider how such matters stand in our world at the present
time, and let us examine them in the light of the Socialist spirit. I
have already quoted certain facts from the London Education
Committee's Report, by which you have seen that by taking a school
haphazard--dipping a ladle, as it were, into the welter of the London
population--we find more than eighty in the hundred of the London
children insufficiently clad, more than half unwholesomely
dirty--eleven per cent. verminous--and more than half the infants
infested with vermin! The nutrition of these children is