232 ARISTOCRA CY AND E VOL UTION 



Book in made terminable with an ease unapproached at 

 present, the multiplication of children shall be 

 regulated by State authority, and that the children 

 themselves shall be reared by the State rather than 

 by the parents. For both these arrangements there 

 are many obvious arguments, which are from the 

 point of view of the socialist quite unanswerable. 

 If the State binds itself to provide for all the children 

 that are born, it is bound to claim some control over 

 the number of them that shall be thrown on its 

 hands. If the State is to be the sole employer and 

 sole director of labour, it must settle the number of 

 children that shall be educated for each branch of 

 industry. If the solidarity of feeling requisite to 

 make socialism possible is ever to be obtained, it 

 can be obtained only by fusing into one those 

 family groups now so obstinately separate. But 

 here the socialists encounter one of their great 

 stumbling-blocks. 1 In theory the advocates of the 

 extremest and most complete democracy, they are 

 baffled by the habits and character of the very masses 

 to whom they address themselves. There may be 

 unhappy homes, and there may be unnatural parents, 

 but the masses, as a whole, will not listen to any 

 proposal for invading the privacy of the home or 

 for tampering with the parental tie. Any average 



1 The Italian socialist, Giovanni Rossi, who attempted in 1890 

 to found a socialistic colony in Brazil (an attempt which completely 

 failed), attributes his failure largely to the tenacity with which his 

 followers clung to family life. " If I had the power," he writes, " to 

 banish the greatest afflictions of this word, plagues, wars, famines, 

 etc. etc., I would renounce it, if instead I could suppress the family." 



