a
matter of private adventure, and the individual family is too
irresponsible. As a consequence there is a huge amount of avoidable
privation, suffering and sorrow, and a large proportion of the
generation that grows up, grows up stunted, limited, badly educated
and incompetent in comparison with the strength, training and beauty
with which a better social organization could endow it._

_The Socialist holds that the community as a whole should be
responsible, and every individual in the community, married or single,
parent or childless, should be responsible for the welfare and
upbringing of every child born into that community. This
responsibility may be entrusted in whole or in part to parent, teacher
or other guardian--but it is not simply the right but the duty of the
State--that is to say of the organized power and intelligence of the
community--to direct, to inquire, and to intervene in any default for
the child's welfare._

_Parentage rightly undertaken is a service as well as a duty to the
world, carrying with it not only obligations but a claim, the
strongest of claims, upon the whole community. It must be provided for
like any other public service; in any completely civilized State it
must be sustained, rewarded and controlled. And this is to be done not
to supersede the love, pride and conscience of the parent, but to
supplement, encourage and maintain it._

Sec. 6.

This is the first of the twin generalizations upon which the whole
edifice of modern Socialism rests. Its fellow generalization we must
consider in the chapter immediately to follow.

But at this point the reader unaccustomed to social questions will
experience a difficulty. He will naturally think of this much of
change we have broached, as if it was to happen in a world that
otherwise was to remain just as the world is now, with merchants,
landowners, rich and poor and all the rest of it. You are proposing,
he may say, what is no doubt a highly desirable but which is also a
quite impossible thing. You propose practically to educate all the
young of the country and to pay at least sufficient to support them
and their mothers in decency--out of what? Where will you get the
money?

That is a perfectly legitimate question and one that must be answered
fully if our whole project is not to fall to the ground.

So we come to the discussion of material means, of the wherewithal,
that is to say to the "Economics" of Socialism. The reader wi