Personal habits in the new domestic life will be judged in their relation to the general interests of the household, and regulations made to safeguard these interests. Cleanliness, orderliness, punctuality are essential to home comfort, but conventional etiquette destroys the geniality of domestic freedom. While simple rules of a positive kind are strictly observed, the negative rule of non-interference with personal habits that are unhurtful to others will be the most stringent of all, and for this reason—happiness is the great object to attain, and a supreme condition of happiness is the free interaction of social units without intrusive interference.
Committees will be necessary—for organizing labour on a method that will ensure variety to workers and frequent leisure—for consultation on the best means to adopt in training children individually—for management of the finances—for recreative arrangements—and for purposes of general direction and control.
Authority will of course devolve on these committees chosen by members of the household from among themselves. Every relic of primitive despotism must be banished from the home: it is a self-acting republic. Since children reared in the home will be one day responsible citizens of a republican state, it were well to enlist them early in the work of committees. They will learn thereby to subordinate personal desire to the will of the majority, and to co-operate in action for the common weal. The amusements and conduct of children are well within range of their own understanding, and although supervision by adults is necessary, great freedom should be allowed them in the management of their conduct clubs and amusement committees.
The relinquishment of personal property is not desirable at the present stage of social evolution; for individuals—and there may be some—who, however willing, are unable to adapt themselves to the new system, should possess the power to return to the old system without let or hindrance.
Nevertheless, be it sooner or later, the ideal collectivist home of the future will realize, though at first imperfectly, the beautiful conception held by Isaac Taylor of the ideal family home of the past. Here is the picture: “Home is a garden, high-walled towards the blighting northeast of selfish care. In the home we possess a main means of raising the happiest feelings to a high pitch and keeping them there. No disparagement, no privation is to be endured by some for the aggrandizement or ease of others. Along with great inequalities of dignity, power and merit, there is yet a perfect and unconscious equality in regard to comforts, enjoyments and personal consideration. There is no room for grudges or individual solicitude. Whatever may be the measure of good for the whole the sum is distributed without a thought of distinction between one and another. Refined and generous emotions may thus have room to expand, and may become the fixed habits of the mind. Within the circle of home each is known to all, and all respect the same principles of justice and love. There is therefore no need for that caution, reserve or suspicion that in the open world are safeguards against the guile, lawlessness and ferocity of a few.”[[14]] There, too, may be wholly discarded that reticence with which, as with a cloak, the modern, civilized man, says Lucas Mallet, strives to hide the noblest and purest of his thought.
[14]. Home Education, Isaac Taylor, pp. 33 and 34.
The new system fully worked out will make homes permanent instead of transitory. It will check the premature sending of girls out into the world and the tendency of young life generally to drift. It will develop industrial activities and give effective household labour. It will lessen the sordid cares of humanity and increase its social joys. It will create an environment calculated to restrain tempestuous youth and cause every selfish passion to subside in the presence of mutual love. It will perfect education by co-ordinating the life of the young and securing that the entire juvenile orbit is governed by forces of fixed congruity. It will provide every comfort for old age and garner its dearly-bought experience. It will promote healthy propagation causing the birth of the fit; it will facilitate marriage of the affections and make early marriage possible. It will tend infancy in a wholly superior manner, and by scientific breeding, rearing, training, produce future citizens of the State of a higher intellectual, moral and spiritual type.