New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialism

by H. G. Wells

“Houses unfit for human habitation, rooms destitute of light and ventilation, overcrowding in rural cottages, contaminated water supplies, accumulations of every description of filth and refuse, a total absence of drainage, a reign of unbelievable dirt in milk-shops and slaughter-houses, a total neglect of bye-laws, and an inadequate supervision by officials who are frequently incompetent; such, in a general way, is the picture that is commonly presented in the reports of inquiries in certain rural districts made by medical officers of the Local Government Board.”

And even of such homes as this there is an insufficiency. In 1891-95, more than a quarter of the deaths in London occurred in workhouses and other charitable institutions.[9] Now suppose the modern Socialist did want to destroy the home; suppose that some Socialists have in the past really wanted to do so, remember that that is the reality they wanted to destroy.

But does the modern Socialist want to destroy the home? Rather, I hold, he wants to save it from a destruction that is even now going on, to—I won’t say restore it, because I have very grave doubts if the world has ever yet held a high percentage of good homes, but raise it to the level of its better realizations of happiness and security. And it is not only I say this, but all my fellow Socialists say it too. Read, for example, that admirable paper, “Economic and Social Justice,” in Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace’s Studies Scientific and Social, and you will have the clearest statement of the attitude of a representative modern Socialist to this question.

§ 2.

The reader must get quite out of his head the idea that the present system maintains the home and social purity.

In London at the present time there are thousands of prostitutes; in Paris, in Berlin, in every great city of Europe or America, thousands; in the whole of Christendom there cannot be less than a million of these ultimate instances of our civilization. They are the logical extremity of a civilization based on cash payments. Each of these women represents a smashed and ruined home and wasted possibilities of honour, service and love, each one is so much sheer waste. For the food they consume, their clothing, their lodging, they render back nothing to the community as a whole, and only a gross, dishonouring satisfaction to their casual employers. And don’t imagine they are inferior women, that there has been any selection of the unfit in their sterilization; they are, one may see for oneself, well above the average in physical vigour, in spirit and beauty. Few of them have come freely to their trade, the most unnatural in the world; few of them have anything but shame and loathing for their life; and most of them must needs face their calling fortified by drink and drugs. For virtuous people do not begin to understand the things they endure. But it pays to be a prostitute, it does not pay to be a mother and a home-maker, and the gist of the present system of individual property is that a thing must pay to exist…. So much for one aspect of our present system of a “world of homes.”

Consider next the great army of employed men and women, shop assistants, clerks, and so forth, living in, milliners, typists, teachers, servants who have practically no prospect whatever of marrying and experiencing those domestic blisses the Socialist is supposed to want to rob them of. They are involuntary monks and nuns, celibate not from any high or religious motive, but through economic hardship. Consider all that amount of pent-up, thwarted or perverted emotional possibility, the sheer irrational waste of life implied….

We have glanced at the reality of the family among the poor; what is it among the rich? Does the wealthy mother of the upper middle-class or upper class really sit among her teeming children, teaching them in an atmosphere of love and domestic exaltation? As a matter of fact she is a conspicuously devoted woman if she gives them an hour a day—the rest of the time they spend with nurse or governess, and when they are ten or eleven off they go to board at the preparatory school. Whenever I find among my press-cuttings some particularly scathing denunciation of Socialists as home-destroyers, as people who want to snatch the tender child from the weeping mother to immure it in some terrible wholesale institution, I am apt to walk out into my garden, from which three boarding-schools for little children of the prosperous classes are visible, and rub my eyes and renew that sight and marvel at my kind….

Consider now, with these things in mind, the real drift of the first main Socialist proposition, and compare its tendency with these contemporary conditions. Socialism regards parentage under proper safeguards and good auspices as “not only a duty but a service” to the State; that is to say it proposes to pay for good parentage—in other words to endow the home. Socialism comes not to destroy but to save.

And how will the endowment be done? Very probably it will be found that the most convenient and best method of doing this will be to subsidize the mother—who is, or should be, the principal person concerned in this affair—for her children; to assist her, not as a charity, but as a right in the period before the birth of her anticipated child, and afterwards to provide her with support for that child so long as it is kept clean in a tolerable home, in good health, well taught and properly clad. It will say to the sound mothering woman, Not type-writing, nor shirt-sewing, nor charing is your business—these children are. Neglect them, ill-treat them, prove incompetent, and your mother-right will cease and we shall take them away from you and do what we can for them; love them, serve them and, through them, the State, and you will serve yourself. Is that destroying the home? Is it not rather the rescue of the home from economic destruction?