H. G. Wells

“ For some years the whole organized Socialist movement seemed to me so unimportant, so irrelevant to that progressive development and realization of a great system of ideas which is Socialism, that, like very many other Socialists, I did not trouble to connect myself with any section of it. I don’t believe that the Socialist idea is as yet nearly enough thought out and elaborated for very much of it to be realized of set intention now. Socialism is still essentially education, is study, is a renewal, a profound change in the circle of human thought and motive. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But this by no means exhausts the professions that ought to have a distinct bias for Socialism. The engineer, the architect, the mechanical inventor, the industrial organizer, and every sort of maker must be at one in their desire for emancipation from servitude to the promoter, the trader, the lawyer, and the forestaller, from the perpetually recurring obstruction of the claim of the private proprietor to every large and hopeful enterprise, and ready to respond to the immense creative element in the Socialist idea. ”

“ An immense work of replanning, rebuilding, redistributing lies in the foreground of the Socialist vista. We contemplate an enormous clearance of existing things. We want an unfettered hand to make beautiful and convenient homes, splendid cities, noiseless great highways, beautiful bridges, clean, swift and splendid electric railways; we are inspired by a faith in the coming of clean, wide and simple methods of agricultural production. But it is only now that Socialism is beginning to be put in these terms. ”

“ I must confess that the organized Socialist movement, all the Socialist societies and leagues and federations and parties together in England, seem to me no more than the rustling hem of the garment of advancing Socialism. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Quite little alterations “put them out,” as they say—create a distressing feeling of inadequacy, make them “feel odd.” Whatever little enlargements they may contemplate in reverie, in practice they know they want nothing except, perhaps, a little more of all the things they like. That’s the way with most of us, anyhow. To make a fairly complete intimation of the nature of Socialism to an average, decent, middle-aged, middle-class person would be to arouse emotions of unspeakable terror, if the whole project didn’t also naturally clothe itself in a quality of incredibility. ”

“ One of the numberless relationships of life, the relationship of capital or the employer to the employed, is made to overshadow all other relations. Get that put right, “expropriate the idle rich,” transfer all capital to the State, make the State the humane, amenable, universal employer—that, to innumerable, Socialist working men, is the horizon. The rest he sees in the forms of the life to which he is accustomed. ”

“ They are blind to the fact that there is no organized Socialism at present, uncompromising and complete, and the Socialists who flatter themselves they represent as much are merely those who have either never grasped or who have forgotten the full implications of Socialism. They are just a little step further, a very little step further in their departure from existing prejudices, in their subservience to existing institutions and existing imperatives. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We know what we are for, and that the light that now glimmers so dimly through us must in the end prevail. To us Socialism is no piece of political strategy, no economic opposition of class to class; it is a plan for the reconstruction of human life, for the replacement of a disorder by order, for the making of a state in which mankind shall live bravely and beautifully beyond our present imagining.
7So, largely, I conceive of Socialism. But Socialism and the Socialist movement are two very different things. The Socialist movement is an item in an altogether different scale. ”

“ Take, for example, the Socialism that is popular in New York and Chicago and Germany, and that finds its exponents here typically in the inferior ranks of the Social 10Democratic Federation—the crude Marxite teaching. It still awaits permeation by true Socialist conceptions. It is a version of life adapted essentially to the imagination of the working wage earner, and limited by his limitations. It is the vision of poor souls perennially reminded each Monday morning of the shadow and irksomeness of life, perpetually recalled each Saturday pay time to a watery gleam of all that life might be. ”

“ This class of Socialist passes insensibly into the merely Socialistic philanthropist of the wealthy middle class to whom we owe so much helpful expenditure upon experiments in housing, in museum and school construction, in educational endowment, and so forth. Their activities are not for one moment to be despised; they are a constant demonstration to dull and sceptical persons that things may be different, better, prettier, kindlier and more orderly. ”

“ Such phrases as the citizenship and economic independence of women leave him cold. That Socialism has anything to say about the economic basis of the family, about the social aspects of marriage, about the rights of the parent, doesn’t, I think, at first occur to him at all. Nor does he realize for a long time that for Socialism and under Socialist institutions will there be needed any system of self-discipline, any rules of conduct further than the natural impulses and the native goodness of man. ”

“ 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 30them, and educate them for its own ampler purposes. Socialism, in fact, is the State family. ”

“ I should think that from the point of view of Socialist propaganda, the time is altogether ripe now for a fresh and more vigorous insistence upon the materially creative aspect of the Vision of Socialism, an aspect which is after all, much more cardinal and characteristic than any aspect that has hitherto been presented systematically to the world. An enormous rebuilding, remaking, and expansion is integral in the Socialist dream. ”

“ Well, I with my Socialist dreams would like to answer “No one,” but I’m learning to check my buoyant optimism. The imagination and science in a young man may cry out for the public position, for the valiant public work, for the hard, honourable, creative years. He may sit with his fellow-students and his fellow-workers in a nocturnal cloud of tobacco smoke and fine talk, and vow himself to research and the creative world state. In the morning he will think he has dreamed; he will recall what the world is, what Socialists are, what he has heard wild Socialists say 25about science and his art. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now what sort of contract will the Socialist state require for marriage? Here again there are perfectly clear and simple principles. Socialism states definitely what almost everybody recognizes nowadays with greater or less clearness, and that is the concern of the State for children. The children people bring into the world can be no more their private concern entirely, than the disease germs they disseminate or the noises a man makes in a thin-floored flat. Socialism says boldly the State is the Over-Parent, the Outer-Parent. People rear children for the State and the future ”

“ And even the present disorder, one gathers, is unstable. One hears on every hand of its further decadence. From Father Vaughan to President Roosevelt, and volleying from the whole bench of bishops, comes the witness to that. Not only the old breaches grow wider and more frequent, but in the very penetralia of the family the decay goes on. The birth-rate falls—and falls. The family fails more and more in its essential object. This is a process absolutely independent of any Socialist propaganda; it is part of the normal development of the existing social and economic system. ”

“ 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, 42and enormously to enlarge and stimulate the Socialist movement at the present time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Socialism has been presented on the one hand as a scheme of expropriation to a clamorous popular government of working men, far more ignorant and incapable of management than a shareholders’ meeting, and, on the other, as a scheme for the encouragement of stupid little 21municipal authorities of the contemporary type in impossible business undertakings under the guidance of fussy, energetic, legal minded and totally unscientific instigators. ”

“ At present we deal with all that sort of thing as an infringement of private proprietary rights; the Socialist holds it is the world that is injured.
It follows that motherhood, which we still in a muddle-headed way seem to regard as partly self-indulgence and partly a service paid to a man by a woman, is regarded by the Socialists as a benefit to society, a public duty done. It may be in many cases a duty full of pride and happiness—that is beside the mark. ”

“ They exact respect from inferiors; no touch of Socialist warmth or light qualifies their arrogant manners. Perhaps they, too, broaden their conception of Socialism as time goes on, but so it begins with them. Now to make Socialists of this type the appeal is a very different one from the talk of class war and expropriation, and the abolition of the idle rich, which is so serviceable with a roomful of sweated workers. These people are moved partly by pity, and the best of them by a hatred for the squalor and waste of the present régime. ”

“ A little home, a trifle larger and brighter than his present one, a more abounding table, a cheerful missus released from factory work and unhealthy competition with men, a bright and healthy 11family going to and fro to the public free schools, free medical attendance, universal State insurance for old age, free trams to Burnham Beeches, shorter hours of work and higher wages, no dismissals, no hunting for work that eludes one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”