“AND you?”
“I would push the world on, as I said before, by building from below and by purely material means. Instead of hitting the family a blow in its vital part, I would foster its wellbeing. I would give it drains and ventilation; I would, from the common fund that all the families have pooled in the taxes, make better the houses; I would even call upon the more prosperous families to help the poorer, but my one aim and object would be the protection of the family in all that makes for its vitality.
“I would foster family ambition and the saving and hoarding instinct, and cooking and household management and everything that would keep heads of families by the hearth instead of talking Syndicalism in pot-houses and scandal in clubs. I can not say all I would do, but broadly I would do everything possible for material betterment and everything possible for the betterment of Family Life.
“And that is what will happen, Socialism or no Socialism. We began by talking of the world as a globe of fire; we went on to hills and seas, saurians, animals, men, civilised men, Man with a universal mind.
“We have reached the world as it is—a collection of families or molecules, constituting Man with a universal mind.
The Danger of Dreams
“That mind, new-born, is filled with dreams and illusions: Anarchism, Socialism, Syndicalism, and so forth.
“Let Man remember this: He was built out of facts, not theories; matter, not fancies; families, not individuals; and that to grow in the fashion that these new theorists would have him grow, he would have to destroy the molecules that constitute him and resolve himself into his original atoms.”
“What is a molecule?”
“A molecule is a family of atoms.”