SOCIALISM. 583 



lets others sacrifice to self. These traits are contradictory. 

 The implied mental constitution is an impossible one. 



Still more manifest does its impossibility become when we 

 recognize a further factor in the problem love of offspring. 

 &quot;Within the family parental affection joins sympathy in 

 prompting self-sacrifice, and makes it easy, and indeed 

 pleasurable, to surrender to others a large part of the pro 

 ducts of labour. But such surrender made to those within 

 the family-group is at variance with a like surrender made to 

 those outside the family-group. Hence the equalization of 

 means prescribed by communistic arrangements, implies a 

 moral nature such that the superior willingly stints his own 

 progeny to aid the progeny of the inferior. He not only 

 loves his neighbour as himself but he loves his neighbour s 

 children as his own. The parental instincts disappears. One 

 child is to him as good as another. 



Of course the advanced socialist, otherwise communist, has 

 his solution. Parental relations are to be superseded, and 

 children are to be taken care of by the State. The method 

 of Nature is to be replaced by a better method. From the 

 lowest forms of life to the highest, Nature s method has been 

 that of devolving the care of the young on the adults who 

 produced them a care at first shown feebly and unobtru 

 sively, but becoming gradually more pronounced, until, as 

 we approach the highest types of creatures, the lives of par 

 ents, prompted by feelings increasingly intense, are more 

 and more devoted to the rearing of offspring. But just as, 

 in the way above shown, socialists would suspend the natural 

 relation between effort and benefit, so would they suspend 

 the natural relation between the instinctive actions of par 

 ents and the welfare of progeny. The two great laws in the 

 absence of either of which organic evolution would have 

 been impossible, are both to be repealed ! 



844. When, from considering the ideal human nature 



required for the harmonious working of institutions partially 

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