are hopeless in England. Therefore I have
great hopes that my own views, though fundamentally sensible, can be
made to appear fantastic enough to have a chance.

First, then, I lay it down as a prime condition of sane society, obvious
as such to anyone but an idiot, that in any decent community, children
should find in every part of their native country, food, clothing,
lodging, instruction, and parental kindness for the asking. For the
matter of that, so should adults; but the two cases differ in that as
these commodities do not grow on the bushes, the adults cannot have
them unless they themselves organize and provide the supply, whereas the
children must have them as if by magic, with nothing to do but rub the
lamp, like Aladdin, and have their needs satisfied.

The Parents' Intolerable Burden

There is nothing new in this: it is how children have always had and
must always have their needs satisfied. The parent has to play the part
of Aladdin's djinn; and many a parent has sunk beneath the burden of
this service. All the novelty we need is to organize it so that instead
of the individual child fastening like a parasite on its own particular
parents, the whole body of children should be thrown not only upon the
whole body of parents, but upon the celibates and childless as well,
whose present exemption from a full share in the social burden of
children is obviously unjust and unwholesome. Today it is easy to find a
widow who has at great cost to herself in pain, danger, and disablement,
borne six or eight children. In the same town you will find rich
bachelors and old maids, and married couples with no children or with
families voluntarily limited to two or three. The eight children do not
belong to the woman in any real or legal sense. When she has reared
them they pass away from her into the community as independent persons,
marrying strangers, working for strangers, spending on the community the
life that has been built up at her expense. No more monstrous injustice
could be imagined than that the burden of rearing the children should
fall on her alone and not on the celibates and the selfish as well.

This is so far recognized that already the child finds, wherever it
goes, a school for it, and somebody to force it into the school; and
more and more these schools are being driven by the mere logic of facts
to provide the children with meals, with boots, with spectacles, with
dentists and doctors. In fact