No such gross error can work good results. This disproportionate concentration of feeling on the individual child, and neglect of the child in general, produces a world full of people with a congested family life, full of morbid sensitiveness and potential difficulty and suffering, and a weak, anæmic social life, full of mutual neglect and dereliction of duty.
The well-known illustration of education can be used again still farther to show this. Suppose a small community, wherein the parents are all very anxious for the education of their own children and profoundly indifferent to the education of anybody's else children. Suppose these parents all labour religiously to buy books, pictures, statues, music, and to have the best of tutors for their own children.
It can be seen without much mathematical effort how inferior would be the supplies purchasable by the individual parent's funds compared to those purchasable by their collective funds. Separately, they could not compass a good teacher to each family, nor good pictures, nor many books and instruments, nor any statuary and music to speak of. Collectively and for less money, they could have all these things in far higher degree of excellence.
It is social parentage, such as we have, which gives us the school as we have it. It is the weakness and irresponsibility of our social parentage which leaves the school as it is, and fails to push on to something far fuller and better. What thought, what care, what service, does the average mother give to other people's children? None. She does not imagine it to be her duty. She imagines that her duty lies only toward her own children, and that it is no faintest fault of hers if other children suffer. If she sees little ones visibly neglected and injured, she merely blames their individual parents, and gives no further thought to the matter.
Now, once for all, what is the advantage of living in a society instead of living alone? It is that we do not have to spend all our time and strength in very imperfectly taking care of ourselves, as the separate individual would be obliged to do, but are more and more perfectly taken care of by one another. We all share in the advantages of living together,—the protection not only of numbers, but of our specialised defenders, civil and military; the vast accumulations of knowledge and skill acquired by many and transmitted to all; the increasing measure of mutual love, in which we thrive and grow. The more perfectly a society can distribute these advantages to all its citizens, the more swiftly and healthfully does it advance and improve.
Public peace and safety, public justice, public education, the public hall, the public road, the public library and gallery and museum and bath,—these are what react so favourably upon the individual, and make better homes and citizens. The father is, to some extent, awake to the duties of social parentage; the mother, hardly at all. The difference is this: the father serves his children by means of serving other people; the mother serves her children personally, with her own hands. Suppose a number of families (we cannot call it a community, because it would not be one), wherein the fathers endeavoured to serve their children personally with their own hands only, each man building, weaving, farming, fishing, blacksmithing, making dishes and tools and instruments, and trying in all ways to meet the family needs himself personally.
It will readily be seen how little the families of these men would have. The time, strength, and skill of one man do not go far, if he tries to do all things himself. Why do women imagine that their time, strength, and skill severally will serve better than in combination? Why are they content to give their children only what they can do themselves alone, thus depriving them of the rich possibilities of civilised motherhood, combined, collective, mutually helpful?
The term "city fathers," and its painful lack of companionship in city mothers, shows the wide gulf between the development of social parentage in men and women. The accidents to little children from electric and cable cars are pitifully numerous. What mother has taken any steps to prevent these accidents? Individually, each tries to protect her own, as does the animal or savage. Collectively, they do nothing; yet it is the lack of this collective motherhood which makes our cities so unsafe for children. The idea that, if each takes care of her own, all will be cared for, is as false for women as it is for men. If each man took care of his own, and not of the others, we should have no soldiers, no policemen, no government, no society, only that social chaos called anarchy.
Social health and progress demand collective action, the largest mutuality, the care and service of all, which is the only guarantee of safety and prosperity to each. Our fatherhood is to a considerable degree socialised. Our motherhood is flatly anarchistic, refusing all co-ordination.
An earnest—hotly earnest—woman once disputed this suggestion of mutual service in motherhood, thus: "When I make the bed for my child, I put some of my personality between the sheets. My child sleeps better if I make his bed for him." I gazed at her calmly.