lies with a real tradition of upbringing and
service; such English families as the Cecils, Balfours and Trevelyans,
for example, produce, generation after generation, public-spirited and
highly competent men. But the family tradition in these cases is an
excess of virtue rather than any necessary consequence of a social
advantage; it is a defiance rather than a necessity of our economic
system. It is natural that such men as Lord Hugh and Lord Robert
Cecil, highly trained, highly capable, but without that gift of
sympathetic imagination which releases a man from the subtle mental
habituations of his upbringing, should idealize every family in the
world to the likeness of their own--and find the Socialist's
Over-Parent of the State not simply a needless but a mischievous and
wicked innovation. They think--they will, I fear, continue to
think--of England as a world of happy Hatfields, cottage Hatfields,
villa Hatfields, Hatfields over the shop, and Hatfields behind the
farmyard--wickedly and wantonly assailed and interfered with by a band
of weirdly discontented men. It is a dream that the reader must not
share. Even in the case of the rich and really prosperous it is an
illusion. In no class at the present time is there a real inducement
to the effectual rearing of trained and educated citizens; in every
class are difficulties and discouragements.

This state of affairs, says the Socialist, is chaotic or indifferent
to a sea of wretchedness and failure, in health, vigour, order and
beauty. Such pleasure as it permits is a gaudy indulgence filched from
children and duty; such beauty--a hectic beauty stained with
injustice; such happiness--a happiness that can only continue so long
as it remains blind or indifferent to a sea of wretchedness and
failure. Our present system of isolated and unsupported families keeps
the mass of the world beyond all necessity painful, ugly and squalid.
It stands condemned, and it must end.

Sec. 5.

Let me summarize what has been said in this chapter in a compact
proposition, and so complete the statement of the First Main
Generalization of Socialism.

_The ideas of the private individual rights of the parent and of his
isolated responsibility for his children are harmfully exaggerated in
the contemporary world. We do not sufficiently protect children from
negligent, incompetent, selfish or wicked parents, and we do not
sufficiently aid and encourage good parents; parentage is too much