nd whence is the money to
be obtained?

Here we join issue with those Socialist writers who advocate the
endowment of motherhood and give it their own meaning; and that is why
in a preceding paragraph the word fundamental has been emphasized, since
in the endowment of motherhood as understood by socialists there are two
principles, one which I call fundamental, and a second--that the
endowment shall be by the State--which now falls to be considered. I do
not see how any one can challenge the following sentences from Mr. 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. Since early
in the history of the fishes paternal responsibility has been a factor
of ascending evolution. It has ever been a more and more responsible
thing to be a father. It is now proposed to reduce fatherhood to the
purely physiological act--as amongst, shall we say, the simpler worms;
and the proposal is only "a matter of detail."

Probably we had better go our own way, and waste no more time upon this
kind of thing. Th