H. G.
Wells:
"So the monstrous injustice of the present time which makes a
mother dependent upon the economic accidents of her man, which
plunges the best of wives and the most admirable of children into
abject poverty if he happens to die, which visits his sins of waste
and carelessness upon them far more than upon himself, will
disappear. So too the still more monstrous absurdity of women
discharging their supreme social function, bearing and rearing
children in their spare time, as it were, while they earn their
living by contributing some half mechanical element to some trivial
industrial product, will disappear."[18]
But the remarkable circumstance is that Mr. Wells proposes to remedy
these consequences of, for instance, "sins of waste and carelessness,"
not by dealing with those sins but by the simple method that "a woman
with healthy and successful offspring will draw a wage for each one of
them from the State so long as they go on well. It will be her wage.
Under the State she will control her child's upbringing. How far her
husband will share in the power of direction is a matter of detail upon
which opinion may vary--and does vary widely amongst Socialists." How
far a father is to share in directing his children's upbringing is "a
matter of detail," we are told. The phrase suffices to show that
whatever we are dealing with here is either sheer fantasy or else
thinking of so crude a kind as to be unworthy of the name.
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