presence of an unsound and harmful way of regarding parentage; that we
treat it as a _private affair_, that we are still disposed to assume
that people's children are almost as much their private concern as
their cats, and as little entitled to public protection and
assistance. The right view, he maintains, is altogether opposed to
this; parentage is a public service and a public duty; a good mother
is the most precious type of common individual a community can have,
and to let a woman on the one hand earn a living as we do, by sewing
tennis-balls or making cardboard boxes or calico, and on the other,
not simply not to pay her, but to impoverish her because she bears and
makes sacrifices to rear children, is the most irrational aspect of
all the evolved and chancy ideas and institutions that make up the
modern State. It is as if we believed our civilization existed to make
cheap cotton and tennis-balls instead of fine human lives.

The Socialist takes all that the nineteenth century has done in
remedial legislation as a mere earnest of all that it has still to do.
He works for a consistent application of the principle that England,
for example, tacitly admitted when she opened her public elementary
schools and compelled the children to come in; the principle that the
Community as a whole is the general Over-Parent of all its children;
that the parents must be made answerable to the community for the
welfare of their children, for their clear minds and clean bodies,
their eyesight and weight and training; and that, on the other hand,
the parents who do their duty well are as much entitled to collective
provision for their needs and economic security as a soldier, a judge
or any other sort of public servant.

Sec. 3.

Now do not imagine the case for the State being regarded as the
Over-Parent, and for the financial support of parents is based simply
upon the consideration of neglected, underfed, undereducated and
poverty-blighted children. No doubt in every one of the great
civilized countries of the world at the present time such children are
to be counted by the hundred thousand--by the million; but there is a
much stronger case to be stated in regard to that possibly greater
multitude of parents who are not in default, those common people, the
mass of our huge populations, the wives of the moderately skilled
workers or the reasonably comfortable employees, of the middling sort
of people, the two, three and four h