Part 7 (1/2)
And if you turn from the congested town to the wholesome, simple country, here is the sort of home you have. This pa.s.sage is a cutting from the _Daily News_ of Jan. 1, 1907; and its a.s.sertions have never been contradicted. It fills one with only the mildest enthusiasm for the return of our degenerate townsmen ”back to the land.” I came upon it as I read that morning's paper after drafting this chapter.
”Our attention has been called to a sordid Herefords.h.i.+re tragedy recently revealed at an inquest on a child aged one year and nine months, who died in Weobly Workhouse of pneumonia. She entered the inst.i.tution emaciated to half the proper weight of her age and with a broken arm--till then undiscovered--that the doctors found to be of about three weeks' standing. Her mother was shown to be in an advanced stage of consumption; one child had died at the age of seven months, and seven now remain. The father, whose work consists in tending eighty-nine head of cattle and ten pigs, is in receipt of eleven s.h.i.+llings a week, three pints of skim milk a day, and a cottage that has been condemned by the sanitary inspector and described as having no bedroom windows. We are not surprised to learn that the coroner, before taking the verdict, asked the house surgeon, who gave evidence, whether he could say that death 'was accelerated by anything.' Our wonder is that the reply was in the negative. The cottage is in the possession of the farmer who employs the man, but his landlord is said to be liable for repairs. That landlord is a clergyman of the Church of England, a J.P., a preserver of game, and owner of three or four thousand acres of land.”
And here, again, is the _Times_, by no means a Socialist organ, generalizing from official statements:--
”Houses unfit for human habitation, rooms dest.i.tute of light and ventilation, overcrowding in rural cottages, contaminated water supplies, acc.u.mulations of every description of filth and refuse, a total absence of drainage, a reign of unbelievable dirt in milk-shops and slaughter-houses, a total neglect of bye-laws, and an inadequate supervision by officials who are frequently incompetent; such, in a general way, is the picture that is commonly presented in the reports of inquiries in certain rural districts made by medical officers of the Local Government Board.”
And even of such homes as this there is an insufficiency. In 1891-95, more than a quarter of the deaths in London occurred in workhouses and other charitable inst.i.tutions.[9] Now suppose the modern Socialist did want to destroy the home; suppose that some Socialists have in the past really wanted to do so, remember that that is the reality they wanted to destroy.
[9] _Studies Scientific and Social_, Vol. II., Ch. XXIV.; by Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace. (Macmillan & Co., 1900.)
But does the modern Socialist want to destroy the home? Rather, I hold, he wants to save it from a destruction that is even now going on, to--I won't say restore it, because I have very grave doubts if the world has ever yet held a high percentage of good homes, but raise it to the level of its better realizations of happiness and security.
And it is not only I say this, but all my fellow Socialists say it too. Read, for example, that admirable paper, ”Economic and Social Justice,” in Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace's _Studies Scientific and Social_, and you will have the clearest statement of the att.i.tude of a representative modern Socialist to this question.
-- 2.
The reader must get quite out of his head the idea that the present system maintains the home and social purity.
In London at the present time there are thousands of prost.i.tutes; in Paris, in Berlin, in every great city of Europe or America, thousands; in the whole of Christendom there cannot be less than a million of these ultimate instances of our civilization. They are the logical extremity of a civilization based on cash payments. Each of these women represents a smashed and ruined home and wasted possibilities of honour, service and love, each one is so much sheer waste. For the food they consume, their clothing, their lodging, they render back nothing to the community as a whole, and only a gross, dishonouring satisfaction to their casual employers. And don't imagine they are inferior women, that there has been any selection of the unfit in their sterilization; they are, one may see for oneself, well above the average in physical vigour, in spirit and beauty. Few of them have come freely to their trade, the most unnatural in the world; few of them have anything but shame and loathing for their life; and most of them must needs face their calling fortified by drink and drugs. For virtuous people do not begin to understand the things they endure. But it _pays_ to be a prost.i.tute, it does not pay to be a mother and a home-maker, and the gist of the present system of individual property is that a thing _must pay_ to exist.... So much for one aspect of our present system of a ”world of homes.”
Consider next the great army of employed men and women, shop a.s.sistants, clerks, and so forth, living in, milliners, typists, teachers, servants who have practically no prospect whatever of marrying and experiencing those domestic blisses the Socialist is supposed to want to rob them of. They are involuntary monks and nuns, celibate not from any high or religious motive, but through economic hards.h.i.+p. Consider all that amount of pent-up, thwarted or perverted emotional possibility, the sheer irrational waste of life implied....
We have glanced at the reality of the family among the poor; what is it among the rich? Does the wealthy mother of the upper middle-cla.s.s or upper cla.s.s really sit among her teeming children, teaching them in an atmosphere of love and domestic exaltation? As a matter of fact she is a conspicuously devoted woman if she gives them an hour a day--the rest of the time they spend with nurse or governess, and when they are ten or eleven off they go to board at the preparatory school. Whenever I find among my press-cuttings some particularly scathing denunciation of Socialists as home-destroyers, as people who want to s.n.a.t.c.h the tender child from the weeping mother to immure it in some terrible wholesale inst.i.tution, I am apt to walk out into my garden, from which three boarding-schools for little children of the prosperous cla.s.ses are visible, and rub my eyes and renew that sight and marvel at my kind....
Consider now, with these things in mind, the real drift of the first main Socialist proposition, and compare its tendency with these contemporary conditions. Socialism regards parentage under proper safeguards and good auspices as ”not only a duty but a service” to the State; that is to say it proposes to pay for good parentage--in other words to _endow the home_. Socialism comes not to destroy but to save.
And how will the endowment be done? Very probably it will be found that the most convenient and best method of doing this will be to subsidize the mother--who is, or should be, the princ.i.p.al person concerned in this affair--for her children; to a.s.sist her, not as a charity, but as a right in the period before the birth of her antic.i.p.ated child, and afterwards to provide her with support for that child so long as it is kept clean in a tolerable home, in good health, well taught and properly clad. It will say to the sound mothering woman, Not type-writing, nor s.h.i.+rt-sewing, nor charing is your business--these children are. Neglect them, ill-treat them, prove incompetent, and your mother-right will cease and we shall take them away from you and do what we can for them; love them, serve them and, through them, the State, and you will serve yourself. Is that destroying the home? Is it not rather the rescue of the home from economic destruction?
Certain restrictions, it is true, upon our present way of doing things would follow almost necessarily from the adoption of these methods. It is manifest that no intelligent State would willingly endow the homes of hopelessly diseased parents, of imbecile fathers or mothers, of obstinately criminal persons or people incapable of education. It is evident, too, that the State would not tolerate chance fatherhood, that it would insist very emphatically upon marriage and the purity of the home, much more emphatically than we do now. Such a case as the one numbered 197, a beautiful instance of the sweet, old-fas.h.i.+oned, homely, simple life of the poor we Socialists are supposed to be vainly endeavouring to undermine--would certainly be dealt with in a drastic and conclusive spirit....
-- 3.
So far Socialism goes toward regenerating the family and sustaining the home. But let there be no ambiguity on one point. It will be manifest that while it would reinvigorate and confirm the home, it does quite decidedly tend to destroy what has. .h.i.therto been the most typical form of the family throughout the world, that is to say the family which is in effect the private property of the father, the patriarchal family. The tradition of the family in which we are still living, we must remember, has developed from a former state in which man owned the wife or child as completely as he owned horse or hut. He was the family's irresponsible owner. Socialism seeks to make him and his wife its jointly responsible heads. Until quite recently the husband might beat his wife and put all sorts of physical constraint upon her; he might starve her or turn her out of doors; her property was his; her earnings were his; her children were his. Under certain circ.u.mstances it was generally recognized he might kill her. To-day we live in a world that has faltered from the rigours of this position, but which still clings to its sentimental consequences. The wife now-a-days is a sort of pampered and protected half-property. If she leaves her husband for another man, it is regarded not as a public offence on her part, but as a sort of mitigated theft on the part of the latter, ent.i.tling the former to damages. Politically she doesn't exist; the husband sees to all that. But on the other hand he mustn't drive her by physical force, but only by the moral pressure of disagreeable behaviour. Nor has he the same large powers of violence over her children that once he had. He may beat--within limits. He may dictate their education so far as his religious eccentricities go, and be generous or meagre with the supplies. He may use his ”authority” as a vague power far on into their adult life, if he is a forcible character. But it is at its best a shorn splendour he retains. He has ceased to be an autocrat and become a const.i.tutional monarch; the State, sustained by the growing reasonableness of the world, intervenes more and more between him and the wife and children who were once powerless in his hands.
The Socialist would end that old legal predominance altogether. The woman, he declares, must be as important and responsible a citizen in the State as the man. She must cease to be in any sense or degree private property. The man must desist from tyrannizing in the nursery and do his proper work in the world. So far, therefore, as the family is a name for a private property in a group of related human beings vesting in one of them, the Head of the Family, Socialism repudiates it altogether as unjust and uncivilized; but so far as the family is a grouping of children with their parents, with the support and consent and approval of the whole community, Socialism advocates it, would make it for the first time, so far as a very large moiety of our population is concerned, a possible and efficient thing.
Moreover, as the present writer has pointed out elsewhere,[10] this putting of the home upon a public basis destroys its autonomy. Just as the Socialist and all who have the cause of civilization at heart would subst.i.tute for the inefficient, wasteful, irresponsible, unqualified ”private adventure school” that did such infinite injury to middle-cla.s.s education in Great Britain during the Victorian period a public school, publicly and richly endowed and responsible and controlled, so the Socialist would put an end to the uncivilized go-as-you-please of the private adventure family. ”Socialism in fact is the State family. The old family of the private individual must vanish before it just as the old water-works of private enterprise or the old gas company.”[11] To any one not idiotic nor blind with a pa.s.sionate desire to lie about Socialism, the meaning of this pa.s.sage is perfectly plain. Socialism seeks to broaden the basis of the family and to make the once irresponsible parent responsible to the State for its welfare. Socialism creates parental responsibility.
[10] _Socialism and the Family._ (A. C. Fifield. 6_d._)
[11] _Socialism and the Family._
-- 4.
And here we may give a few words to certain questions that are in reality outside the scope of Socialists altogether, special questions involving the most subtle ethical and psychological decisions. Upon them Socialists are as widely divergent as people who are not Socialists, and Socialism as a whole presents nothing but an open mind. They are questions that would be equally open to discussion in relation to an Individualist State or to any sort of State. Certain religious organizations have given clear and imperative answers to some or all of these questions, and so far as the reader is a member of such an organization, he may rest a.s.sured that Socialism, as an authoritative whole, has nothing to say for or against his convictions. This cannot be made too plain by Socialists, nor too frequently repeated by them. A very large part of the so-called arguments against them arise out of deliberate misrepresentations and misconceptions of some alleged Socialist position in these indifferent matters.
I refer more particularly to the numerous problems in private morality and social organization arising from s.e.xual conduct. May a man love one woman only in his life, or more, and may a woman love only one man? Should marriage be an irrevocable life union or not? Is sterile physical love possible, permissible, moral, honourable or intolerable?
Upon all these matters individual Socialists, like most other people, have their doubts and convictions, but it is no more just to saddle all Socialism with their private utterances and actions upon these issues than it would be to declare that the Roman Catholic Communion is hostile to beauty because wors.h.i.+ppers coming and going have knocked the noses off the figures on the bronze doors of the Church of San Zeno at Verona, or that Christianity involves the cultivation of private vermin, because of the condition of Saint Thomas a Beckett's hair s.h.i.+rt.[12] To argue in that way is to give up one's birthright as a reasonable being.
[12] ”The haircloth encased the whole body down to the knees; the hair drawers, as well as the rest of the dress, being covered on the outside with white linen so as to escape observation; and the whole so fastened together as to admit of being readily taken off for his daily scourgings, of which yesterday's portion was still apparent in the stripes on his body. Such austerity had hitherto been unknown to English saints, and the marvel was increased by the sight--to our notions so revolting--of the innumerable vermin with which the haircloth abounded--boiling over with them, as one account describes it, like water in a simmering cauldron. At the dreadful sight all the enthusiasm of the previous night revived with double ardour. They looked at each other in silent wonder, then exclaimed, 'See, see what a true monk he was, and we knew it not!' and burst into alternate fits of weeping and laughter, between the sorrow of having lost such a head, and the joy of having found such a saint.” (_Historical Memorials of Canterbury_, by the Rev.