revails, so long
must the Socialist project remain not simply an impracticable but, in
an illiterate, badly-organized community, even a dangerous suggestion.
I as a Socialist am not blind to these possibilities, and it is
foolish because a man is in many ways on one's side that one should
not call attention to his careless handling of a loaded gun.
Social-Democracy may conceivably become a force that in the sheer
power of untutored faith may destroy government and not replace it. I
do not know how far that is not already the case in Russia. I do not
know how far this may not ultimately be the case in the United States
of America.

The Marxist teaching, great as was its advance on the dispersed
chaotic Socialism that preceded it, was defective in other directions
as well as in its innocence of any scheme of State organization. About
women and children, for example, it was ill-informed; its founders do
not seem to have been inspired either by educational necessities or
philoprogenitive passion. No biologist--indeed no scientific mind at
all--seems to have tempered its severely "economic" tendencies. It so
over-accentuates the economic side of life that at moments one might
imagine it dealt solely with some world of purely "productive"
immortals, who were never born and never aged, but only warred for
ever in a developing industrial process.

Now reproduction and not production is the more central fact of social
life. Women and children and education are things in the background of
the Marxist proposal--like a man's dog, or his private reading, or his
pet rabbits. They are in the foreground of modern Socialism. The
Social Democrat's doctrines go little further in this direction than
the Liberalism that founded the United States, which ignored women,
children and niggers, and made the political unit the adult white man.
They were blind to the supreme importance of making the next
generation better than the present as the aim and effort of the whole
community. Herr Bebel's book, _Woman_, is an ample statement of the
evils of woman's lot under the existing _regime_, but the few pages
upon the Future of Woman with which he concludes are eloquent of the
jejune insufficiency of the Marxist outlook in this direction.
Marriage, which modern Socialism tends more and more to sustain, was
to vanish--at least as a law-made bond; women were to count as men so
far as the State is concerned....

This disregard of the primary importan