ute
impartially and possibly even print and make ink and paper for the
newspapers in the Great State, but they will certainly not own them.
Only doctrine-driven men have ever ventured to think they would. Nor
will the state control writers and artists, for example, nor the
stage--though it may build and own theatres--the tailor, the dressmaker,
the restaurant cook, an enormous multitude of other busy
workers-for-preferences. In the Great State of the future, as in the
life of the more prosperous classes of to-day, the greater proportion of
occupations and activities will be private and free.

I would like to underline in the most emphatic way that it is possible
to have this Great State, essentially socialistic, owning and running
the land and all the great public services, sustaining everybody in
absolute freedom at a certain minimum of comfort and well-being, and
still leaving most of the interests, amusements, and adornments of the
individual life, and all sorts of collective concerns, social and
political discussion, religious worship, philosophy, and the like to the
free personal initiatives of entirely unofficial people.

This still leaves the problem of systematic knowledge and research, and
all the associated problems of aesthetic, moral, and intellectual
initiative to be worked out in detail; but at least it dispels the
nightmare of a collective mind organised as a branch of the civil
service, with authors, critics, artists, scientific investigators
appointed in a phrensy of wire-pulling--as nowadays the British state
appoints its bishops for the care of its collective soul.

Let me now indicate how these general views affect the problem of family
organisation and the problem of women's freedom. In the Normal Social
Life the position of women is easily defined. They are subordinated but
important. The citizenship rests with the man, and the woman's relation
to the community as a whole is through a man. But within that limitation
her functions as mother, wife, and home-maker are cardinal. It is one of
the entirely unforeseen consequences that have arisen from the decay of
the Normal Social Life and its autonomous home that great numbers of
women while still subordinate have become profoundly unimportant They
have ceased to a very large extent to bear children, they have dropped
most of their home-making arts, they no longer nurse nor educate such
children as they have, and they have taken on no new functions t