Part 2

Something more than a failure to state the constructive and educational quality in Socialism on the part of its exponents has to be admitted in accounting for the unnatural want of sympathetic co-operation between them and the bulk of these noble professions. I cannot disguise from myself certain curiously irrelevant strands that have interwoven with the partial statements of Socialism current in England, and which it is high time, I think, for Socialists to repudiate. Socialism is something more than an empty criticism of our contemporary disorder and waste of life, it is a great intimation of construction, organization, science and education. But concurrently with its extension and its destructive criticism of the capitalistic individualism of to-day, there has been another movement, essentially an anarchist movement, hostile to machinery and apparatus, hostile to medical science, hostile to order, hostile to education, a Rousseauite movement in the direction of a sentimentalized naturalism, a Tolstoyan movement in the direction of a non-resisting pietism, which has not simply been confused with the Socialist movement, but has really affected and interwoven with it. It is not simply that wherever discussion and destructive criticism of the present conventional bases of society occur, both ways of thinking crop up together; they occur all too often as alternating phases in the same individual. Few of us are so clear-headed as to be free from profound self-contradictions. So that it is no great marvel, after all, if the presentation of Socialism has got mixed up with Return-to-Nature ideas, with proposals for living in a state of unregulated primitive virtue in purely hand-made houses, upon rain water and uncooked fruit. We Socialists have to disentangle it from these things now. We have to disavow, with all necessary emphasis, that gibing at science and the medical profession, at schools and books and the necessary apparatus for collective thinking, which has been one of our little ornamental weaknesses in the past. That has, I know, kept a very considerable number of intelligent professional men from inquiring further into Socialist theories and teachings. As a consequence there are, especially in the medical profession, quite a number of unconscious Socialists, men, often with a far clearer grip upon the central ideas of Socialism than many of its professed exponents, who have worked out these ideas for themselves, and are incredulous to hear them called Socialistic.

So much for the specifically creative and imagination-using professions. Throughout the whole range of the more educated middle classes, however, there are causes at work that necessarily stimulate thought towards Socialism, that engender scepticisms, promote inquiries leading towards what is at present the least expounded of all aspects of Socialism—the relation of Socialism to the institution of the Family....

The Family, and not the individual, is still the unit in contemporary civilization, and indeed in nearly all social systems that have ever existed. The adult male, the head of the family, has been the citizen, the sole representative of the family in the State. About him have been grouped his one or more wives, his children, his dependents. His position towards them has always been—is still in many respects to this day—one of ownership. He was owner of them all, and in many of the less sophisticated systems of the past his ownership was as complete as over his horse and house and land—more complete than over his land. He could sell his children into slavery, barter his wives. There has been a secular mitigation of the rights of this sort of private property; the establishment of monogamy, for instance, did for the family what President Roosevelt’s proposed legislation against large accumulations might do for industrial enterprises, but to this day in our own community, for all such mitigations and many euphemisms, the ownership of the head of the family is still a manifest fact. He votes. He keeps and protects. He determines the education and professions of his children. He is entitled to monetary consolation for any infringement of his rights over wife or daughter. Every intelligent woman understands that, as a matter of hard fact, beneath all the civilities of to-day, she is actual or potential property, and has to treat herself and keep herself as that. She may by force or subtlety turn her chains into weapons, she may succeed in exacting a reciprocal property in a man, the fact remains fundamental that she is either isolated or owned.

But I need not go on writing facts with which every one is acquainted. My concern now is to point out that Socialism repudiates the private ownership of the head of the family as completely as it repudiates any other sort of private ownership. Socialism involves the responsible citizenship of women, their economic independence of men, and all the personal freedom that follows that, it intervenes between the children and the parents, claiming to support them, protect them, and educate them for its own ampler purposes. 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. They are incompatible with it. Socialism assails the triumphant egotism of the family to-day, just as Christianity did in its earlier and more vital centuries. So far as English Socialism is concerned (and the thing is still more the case in America) I must confess that the assault has displayed a quite extraordinary instinct for taking cover, but that is a question of tactics rather than of essential antagonism.

It is possible to believe that so far as the middle classes are concerned this discretion has been carried altogether too far. Socialists would have forwarded their cause better if they had been more outspoken. It has led to preposterous misunderstandings; and among others to the charge that Socialism implied free-love.... The middle-class family, I am increasingly convinced, is a group in a state of tension. I believe that a modest but complete statement of the Socialist criticism of the family and the proposed Socialist substitute for the conventional relationships might awaken extraordinary responses at the present time. The great terror of the eighties and early nineties that crushed all reasonable discussion of sexual relationship is, I believe, altogether over.

The whole of the present system is riddled with discontents. One factor is the enhanced sense of the child in middle-class life: the old sentiment was that the parent owned the child, the new is that the children own the parents. There has come an intensified respect for children, an immense increase in the trouble, attention and expenditure devoted to them—and a very natural and human accompaniment in the huge fall in the middle-class birth-rate. It is felt that to bear and rear children is the most noble and splendid and responsible thing in life, and an increasing number of people modestly evade it. People see more clearly the social service of parentage, and are more and more inclined to demand a recognition from the State for this service. The middle-class parent might conceivably be horrified if you suggested the State should pay him for his offspring, but he would have no objection whatever to being indirectly and partially paid by a differential income tax graduated in relation to the size of his family.

With this increased sense of the virtue and public service of parentage there has gone on a great development of the criticism of schools and teaching. The more educated middle-class parent has become an amateur educationist of considerable virulence. He sees more and more distinctly the inadequacy of his own private attempts to educate, the necessary charlatanry and insufficiency of the private adventure school. He finds much to envy in the elementary schools. If he is ignorant and short-sighted, he joins in the bitter cry of the middle classes, and clamours against the pampering of the working class, and the rising of the rates which renders his efforts to educate his own children more difficult. But a more intelligent type of middle-class parent sends his boy in for public scholarships, sets to work to get educational endowment for his own class also, and makes another step towards Socialism. Moreover, the increasing intelligence of the middle-class parent and the steady swallowing up of the smaller capitalists and smaller shareholders by the larger enterprises and fortunes, alike bring home to him the temporary and uncertain nature of the advantages his private efforts give his children over those of the working man. He sees no more than a brief respite for them against the economic cataclysms of the coming time. He is more and more alive to the presence of secular change in the world. He does not feel sure his sons will carry on the old business, continue the old practice. He begins to appreciate the concentration of wealth. The secular development of the capitalistic system robs him more and more of his sense of securities. He is uneasier than he used to be about investments. He no longer has that complete faith in private insurance companies that once sustained him. His mind broadens out to State insurance as to State education. He is far more amenable than he used to be to the idea that the only way to provide for one’s own posterity is to provide for every one’s posterity, to merge parentage in citizenship. The family of the middle-class man which fights for itself alone, is lost.

Socialism comes into the middle-class family offering education, offering assurances for the future, and only very distantly intimating the price to be paid in weakened individual control. But far profounder disintegrations are at work. The internal character of the middle-class family is altering fundamentally with the general growth of intelligence, with the higher education of women, with the comings and goings for this purpose and that, the bicycles and games, the enlarged social appetites and opportunities of a new time. The more or less conscious _Strike against Parentage_ is having far-reaching effects. The family proper becomes a numerically smaller group. Enormous numbers of childless families appear; the middle-class family with two, or at most three, children is the rule rather than the exception in certain strata. This makes the family a less various and interesting group, with a smaller demand for attention, emotion, effort. Quite apart from the general mental quickening of the time, it leaves more and more social energy, curiosity, enterprise free, either to fret within the narrow family limits or to go outside them. The _Strike against Parentage_ takes among other forms the form of a strike against marriage; great numbers of men and women stand out from a relationship which every year seems more limiting and (except for its temporary passional aspect) purposeless. The number of intelligent and healthy women inadequately employed, who either idle as wives in attenuated modern families, childless or with an insufficient child or so, or who work for an unsatisfying subsistence as unmarried women, increases. To them the complete conceptions of Socialism should have an extraordinary appeal.

The appearance of the feminine mind and soul in the world as something distinct and self-conscious, is the appearance of a distinct new engine of criticism against the individualist family, against this dwindling property of the once-ascendant male—who no longer effectually rules, no longer, in many cases, either protects or sustains, who all too often is so shorn of his beams as to be but a vexatious power of jealous restriction and interference upon his wife and children. The educated girl resents the proposed loss of her freedom in marriage, the educated married woman realizes as well as resents the losses of scope and interest marriage entails. If it were not for the economic disadvantages that make intelligent women dread a solitary old age in bitter poverty, vast numbers of women who are married to-day would have remained single independent women. This discontent of women is a huge available force for Socialism. The wife of the past was, to put it brutally, caught younger—so young that she had had no time to think—she began forthwith to bear babies, rear babies, and (which she did in a quite proportionate profusion) bury babies—she never had a moment to think. Now the wife with double the leisure, double the education and half the emotional scope of her worn prolific grandmother, sits at home and thinks things over. You find her letting herself loose in clubs, in literary enterprises, in schemes for joint households to relieve herself and her husband from the continuation of a duologue that has exhausted its interest. The husband finds himself divided between his sympathetic sense of tedium and the proprietary tradition in which we live.

For these tensions in the disintegration of the old proprietary family no remedy offers itself to-day except the solutions that arise as essential portions of the Socialist scheme. The alternative is hypocrisy and disorder.

There is yet another and still more effectual system of strains at work in the existing social unit, and that is the strain between parents and children. That has always existed. It is one of our most transparent sentimental pretences that there is any natural subordination of son to father, of daughter to mother. As a matter of fact a good deal of natural antagonism appears at the adolescence of the young. Something very like an instinct stirs in them, to rebel, to go out. The old habits of solicitude, control and restraint in the parent become more and more hampering, irksome, and exasperating to the offspring. The middle-class son gets away in spirit and in fact to school, to college, to business—his sister does all she can to follow his excellent example. In a world with vast moral and intellectual changes in progress the intelligent young find the personal struggle for independence intensified by a conflict of ideas. The modern tendency to cherish and preserve youthfulness; the keener desire for living that prevents women getting fat and ugly, and men bald and incompetent by forty-five, is another dissolvent factor among these stresses. The daughter is not only restrained by her mother’s precepts, but inflamed by her example. The son finds his father’s coevals treating him as a contemporary.

Well, into these conflicts and disorders comes Socialism, and Socialism alone, to explain, to justify, to propose new conventions and new interpretations of relationship, to champion the reasonable claims of the young, to mitigate the thwarted ownership of the old. Socialism comes, constructive amid the wreckage.

Let me at this point, and before I conclude, put one thing with the utmost possible clearness. The Socialist does not propose to destroy something that conceivably would otherwise last for ever, when he proposes a new set of institutions, and a new system of conduct to replace the old proprietary family. He no more regards the institution of marriage as a permanent thing than he regards a state of competitive industrialism as a permanent thing. In the economic sphere, quite apart from any Socialist ideas or Socialist activities, it is manifest that competitive individualism destroys itself. This was reasoned out long ago in the _Capital_ of Marx; it is receiving its first gigantic practical demonstration in the United States of America. Whatever happens, we believe that competitive industrialism will change and end—and we Socialists at least believe that the alternative to some form of Socialism is tyranny and social ruin. So, too, in the social sphere, whether Socialists succeed altogether or fail altogether, or in whatever measure they succeed or fail, it does not alter the fact that the family is weakening, dwindling, breaking up, disintegrating. The alternative to a planned and organized Socialism is not the maintenance of the present system, but its logical development, and that is all too plainly a growing complication of pretences as the old imperatives weaken and fade. We already live in a world of stupendous hypocrisies, a world wherein rakes and rascals champion the sacred institution of the family, and a network of sexual secrets, vaguely suspected, disagreeably present, and only half-concealed, pervades every social group one enters. Cynicism, a dismal swamp of base intrigues, cruel restrictions and habitual insincerities, is the manifest destiny of the present _régime_ unless we make some revolutionary turn. It cannot work out its own salvation without the profoundest change in its determining ideas. And what change in those ideas is offered except by the Socialist?

In relation to all these most intimate aspects of life, Socialism, and Socialism alone, supplies the hope and suggestions of clean and practicable solutions. So far, Socialists have either been silent or vague, or—let us say—tactful, in relation to this central tangle of life. To begin to speak plainly among the silences and suppressions, the “find out for yourself” of the current time, would be, I think, to grip the middle-class woman and the middle-class youth of both sexes with an extraordinary new interest, to irradiate the dissensions of every bored couple and every squabbling family with broad conceptions, and enormously to enlarge and stimulate the Socialist movement at the present time.

_Here ends the paper read by Mr. Wells to the Fabian Society, but in this that follows he sets out the Socialist conception of the new relations that must follow the old much more clearly._

II

I do not think that the general reader at all appreciates the steady development of Socialist thought during the past two decades. Directly one comes into close contact with contemporary Socialists one discovers in all sorts of ways the evidence of the synthetic work that has been and still is in process, the clearing and growth of guiding ideas, the qualification of primitive statements, the consideration, the adaptation to meet this or that adequate criticism. A quarter of a century ago Socialism was still to a very large extent a doctrine of negative, a passionate criticism and denial of the theories that sustained and excused the injustices of contemporary life, a repudiation of social and economic methods then held to be indispensable and in the very nature of things. Its positive proposals were as sketchy as they were enthusiastic, sketchy and, it must be confessed, fluctuating. One needs to turn back to the files of its every-day publications to realize the progress that has been made, the secular emergence of a consistent and continually more nearly complete and directive scheme of social reconstruction from the chaotic propositions and hopes and denials of the earlier time. In no direction is this more evident than in the steady clearing of the Socialistic attitude towards marriage and the family; in the disentanglement of Socialism from much idealist and irrelevant matter with which it was once closely associated and encumbered, in the orderly incorporation of conceptions that at one time seemed not only outside of, but hostile to, Socialist ways of thinking....

Nothing could have brought out this more clearly than the comical attempt made recently by the _Daily Express_ to suggest that Mr. Keir Hardie and the party he leads was mysteriously involved with my unfortunate self in teaching Free Love to respectable working men. When my heat and indignation had presently a little subsided, I found myself asking how it came about, that any one could bring together such discrepant things as the orderly proposals of Socialism as they shape themselves in the projects of Mr. Keir Hardie, let us say, and the doctrine of sexual go-as-you-please. And so inquiring, my mind drifted back to the days—it is a hazy period to me—when Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were alive, when Shelley explained his views to Harriet. These people were in a sort of way Socialists; Palaeo-Socialists. They professed also very distinctly that uncovenanted freedom of action in sexual matters which is, I suppose, Free Love. Indeed, so near are we to these old confusions that there is still, I find, one Palaeo-Socialist surviving—Mr. Belfort Bax. In that large undifferentiated past, all sorts of ideas, as yet too ill defined to eliminate one another, socialist ideas, communist ideas, anarchist ideas, Rousseauism, seethed together and seemed akin. In a sense they were akin in that they were the condemnation of the existing order, the outcome of the destructive criticism of this of its aspects or that. They were all _breccia_. But in all else, directly they began to find definite statement, they were flatly contradictory one with another. Or at least they stood upon different levels of assumption and application.

The formulæ of Anarchism and Socialism are, no doubt, almost diametrically opposed; Anarchism denies government, Socialism would concentrate all controls in the State, yet it is after all possible in different relations and different aspects to entertain the two. When one comes to dreams, when one tries to imagine one’s finest sort of people, one must surely imagine them too fine for control and prohibitions, doing right by a sort of inner impulse, “above the Law.” One’s dreamland perfection is Anarchy—just as no one would imagine a policeman (or for the matter of that a drain-pipe) in Heaven. But come down to earth, to men the descendants of apes, to men competing to live, and passionately jealous and energetic, and for the highways and market-places of life at any rate, one asks for law and convention. In Heaven or any Perfection there will be no Socialism, just as there will be no Bimetallism; there is the sphere of communism, anarchism, universal love and universal service. It is in the workaday world of limited and egotistical souls that Socialism has its place. All men who dream at all of noble things are Anarchists in their dreams, and half at least of the people who are much in love, I suppose, want to be this much Anarchistic that they do not want to feel under a law or compulsion one with another. They may want to possess, they may want to be wholly possessed, but they do not want a law court or public opinion to protect that possession as a “right.”

But it’s still not clearly recognized how distinct are the spheres of Anarchism and Socialism. The last instance of this confusion that has seriously affected the common idea of the Socialist was as recent as the late Mr. Grant Allen. He was not, I think, even in his time a very representative Socialist, but certainly he did present, as if it were a counsel of perfection for this harsh and grimy world, something very like reckless abandonment to the passion or mood of the moment. I doubt if he would have found a dozen supporters in the Fabian Society in his own time. I should think his teaching would have appealed far more powerfully to extreme individualists of the type of Mr. Auberon Herbert. However that may be, I do not think there is at present among English and American Socialists any representative figure at all counselling Free Love. The modern tendency is all towards an amount of control over the function of reproduction, if anything, in excess of that exercised by the State and public usage to-day. Let me make a brief comparison of existing conditions with what I believe to be the ideals of most of my fellow Socialists in this matter, and the reader can then judge for himself between the two systems of intervention.