cal critic of a pamphlet in which I
propounded exactly the same opinions as are here set out in the third
chapter, found great comfort in the expression "brood mares." He took
hold of my phrase, "State family," and ran wild with it. He declared
it to be my intention that women were no longer to be wives but "brood
mares" for the State. Nothing would convince him that this was a
glaring untruth. His mind was essentially equestrian; "human stud
farm" was another of his expressions.[15] Ridicule and argument failed
to touch him; I believe he would have gone to the stake to justify his
faith that Socialists want to put woman in the Government _haras_. His
thick-headedness had, indeed, a touch of the heroic.

[15] What makes the expression particularly inappropriate in
my case is the fact that in my _Mankind in the Making_ there
is a clearly-reasoned chapter (Ch. II.) which has never been
answered, in which I discuss and, I think, conclusively
dispose of Mr. Francis Galton's ideas of Eugenics and
deliberate stirpiculture.

Then a certain Father Phelan of St. Louis, no doubt in a state of
mental exaltation as honest as it was indiscriminating, told the world
through the columns of an American magazine that I wanted to tear the
babe from the mother's breast and thrust it into an "Institution." He
said worse things than that--but I set them aside as pulpit eloquence.
Some readers, no doubt, knew better and laughed, but many were quite
sincerely shocked, and resolved after that to give Socialism a very
wide berth indeed. _Honi soit qui mal y pense_; the revolting ideas
that disgusted them were not mine, they came from some hot dark
reservoir of evil thoughts that years of chastity and discipline seem
to have left intact in Father Phelan's soul.

The error in all these cases is the error of overstatement, of getting
into a condition of confused intellectual excitement, and because a
critic declares your window curtains too blue, saying, therefore, and
usually with passion, that he wants the whole universe, sky and sea
included, painted bright orange. The inquirer into the question of
Socialism will find that an almost incurable disease of these
controversies. Again and again he will meet with it. If after that
critic's little proposition about your window curtains he chances to
say that on the whole he thinks an orange sky would be unpleasant, the
common practice is to accuse him of n