Years of Plenty

by Ivor John Carnegie Brown

V

"The' being no fur' questions, much pleasure call on Mr Leigh for his paper on Industrialism and the Home." (Mild applause.)

The members of the King's Essay Society were scattered about Martin's rooms, lounging in window-seats or strewn on the floor. The air was thick with smoke, the carpet invisible by reason of the mingled feet, tobacco, coffee-cups, books, and crystallised fruit. The Push were present in force, and Lawrence, larger than ever, lounged on the sofa and smoked a cigar with ungainly opulence.

Martin, from his seat by the reading-lamp, began to inform them about the home. He started philosophically, taking as his text the assertion that voluntary associations are always preferable to compulsory grouping and that it should be our object to restrict such compulsion as far as possible. The home is a compulsory association and its sphere must be limited. He pointed out that since the whole trend of industrialism had been to invade the home, to capture the women and to drag them out to wage-slavery, it was irrational to stop in the present position. The home must be either a real thing where women were free from the direct clutches of capitalism and made up for indirect economic dependence by freedom from drudgery in offices and factories, or else we must be logical and complete the tendency by industrialising the home. This process would of course destroy the home as at present understood. But it would substitute for the present compulsory group a voluntary association: and this he would welcome because the home of to-day was not only a compulsory but a fundamentally rotten institution. (Loud applause from emancipated young men.)

He didn't care whether women had votes or not: that was inessential. The great thing was to smash the home by making it a commercial unit. This, he maintained, could be done by the State endowment of motherhood and by marriage contracts in which payment for all domestic work should be made by the husband. There must be honest, open payment; wheedling and pin-money must go. Probably the best solution would be to insist on a fixed percentage of the husband's income going to the wife as a matter of course so long as she lived with him and kept his house.

Even more important was the case of the children. They too must be economic members of a commercial unit. Of course in early childhood that was impossible, but as soon as they reached a reasonable age—say seventeen—they too should have a legal claim to a certain percentage of the family income, to be continued until they were self-supporting. In the interest of youth, no one should be compelled to support himself until the age of twenty-four, for it was wicked to drive people into offices at eighteen, before they had known freedom of any kind. During these seven years the child might either take his salary and go or stay at home as a paying guest. The amount paid for such board would depend on the standard of life of the family. After all the parents had brought the child into the world without asking if he wanted it, and consequently, so far from having rights with regard to the fruit of their pleasure, they had only duties. Aristotle was reduced to pulp with regard to this point.

Such a policy would safeguard the liberties of the child, who, on reaching a reasonable age, could always go away and need not accept his father's politics and religion with his father's beef. The home would thus be a compulsory association only during early childhood and would be a voluntary association for the adolescent. Thus would we solve the woman question and build an honest, self-reliant nation. Let Dr Bosanquet maunder on about organisms and compare the family meal—that ghastly rite—to the Holy Communion. To hell with such sentimentality! (Applause.)

Martin then reverted to political philosophy and maintained that no group whose membership was not spontaneous could have a vital purpose and a common will. In so far as the family remained compulsory it could have no such will: because a man was born a Jones he need not have the same interests as the rest of the Jones' group: indeed most great men loathed their relations. For the small children a home of some sort, whether private or municipal, was inevitable. The question was whether they were going to save the young adult from sentimental tyranny by insisting on incomes and latch-key rights for sons and daughters and building up a multitude of voluntary co-operative groups on a strictly business basis.

"Of course I admit it is more or less impossible," he said as he finished. "But we may as well talk theory."

There was a short interval, and then Rendell, by grace of his three "F's," was chosen to open the discussion.