At present excessive labour on the part of the proletariat, and enforced idleness on the part of many men and women within the classes, are fatal to progress. Vital forces are exhausted on the one hand, repressed on the other, while the sub-conscious feeling that craves unity and solidarity is outraged and restrained. To restore work to its legitimate place in human life is a primary aim of the new domestic system. That system must be built up on the principle that work for the benefit of all is the duty and privilege of each, and without a due share of social labour no normal man or woman in health can attain to inward peace.
As regards religion, man’s abstract thought must purge itself from materialized ideals, his concrete thought from selfish aims, for he is essentially a religious being and psychical studies affirm that within him there lie latent faculties that relate him to worlds unseen—worlds as yet unrealizable in human consciousness.
In the visible world religious forces must be directed to the great work of social reform. To unselfishly promote the welfare of generations unborn is a profoundly religious course of action. The purest, noblest feelings of man may be enlisted in the cause of progress through union—for social reconstruction, scientific education, gentle training of the young, associated domestic life, facilitation of happy marriage—and for the comfort of all mankind, whether good or bad, clever or dull, fortunate or unfortunate.
Co-operation in work to the banishment of idleness and its accompanying misery ennui is the primary object of the new domestic system, but other ends to attain are—economy, by means of joint labour and joint expense to the relief of monetary anxieties and domestic worries; stability of social position, i.e. no member needing to fear that his home will break up independently of his wishes; social intercourse and enjoyment relieved of conventional etiquette or tyranny; freedom for friendship between the sexes and such conditions of family union as will promote mental capacity and altruistic sentiment in each individual; early marriage without disregard of social responsibility and based upon mutual knowledge of character, habits and tastes; a fitting refuge for old age, rendering impossible the premature destruction of valuable social forces which age alone can supply, and securing the material, intellectual and emotional surroundings necessary for comfort up to the last moment of life.
In the lower social strata where any reconstruction of family life is not yet possible, what is immediately required is a gradual rise of wages with steady improvement in all the conditions of industrial labour. Society also must relinquish such patronage of the poor as fosters their too rapid increase, undermines their self-dependence and tends generally to deterioration of race. Parental responsibility must be strongly inculcated and strictly upheld. Public teaching should be given in all natural laws affecting society, especially the laws of health, increase, and heredity; and, under conditions respectful to human dignity, Malthusian doctrine should be taught, and a knowledge of neo-Malthusian method very carefully imparted.
In the higher social strata within the newly constructed modern homes sexual conduct and parentage with its far-reaching results for good or evil must be controlled or guided into the path of racial regeneration. The scientific study of man’s nature gives sexual passion an honourable position relatively to human life. It rests on the conscience of each adult generation as an imperative social duty to influence the young generation in such wise as that this great passion shall subserve physical and social health and cease to create degradation.
A due activity in growing organs strengthens organic function; therefore, with early marriages and freedom to young love, checked only by scientific knowledge of the laws of health, propagation at the age of maturity is bound to put forth vitality of good quality. In conscious evolution sexual functions are no longer regarded as essentially allied with propagation. They are regarded, however, as properly subject in youth to parental and social control; and that control acts as a perpetual restraint upon licentious, dissolute tendencies and a shield to the young love that seeks personal happiness consistent with domestic purity.
No less potent is the action of control in another direction. Physiology of sex and the laws of inheritance are carefully studied by guardians of domestic peace who, rejecting the ordinary and vulgar conception accept the teaching of science, and science points to philoprogenitiveness, or love of offspring, as the proper motor force in reproduction. Were this force the antecedent cause of parentage throughout the nation, disease and premature death would be undermined and gradually subside. “Indiscriminate survival” gives way before that “rational selection and birth of the fit” which is a fundamental condition of social well-being—the master-spring to a rapid evolution of general happiness.
The transition, however, from our present state of confused sentiment, illogical thought, and disastrous action in the field of eugenics or stirpiculture, to clearness of purpose and consistency of life, must necessarily be a work of extreme delicacy and patient endeavour. Its achievement requires the nuclei of collectivist homes. Its nurture must take place in the bosom of a superior domestic life. The process, in short, implies an alteration in humanity itself, to be brought about by such preparatory alteration in outward conditions as will set up and bring into play the constant interaction of new social forces.
Individualism in domestic life vitiates the movement towards socialism outside domestic life, for it gives us misshapen units unfit for a better social system—a system that seeks to banish tyranny, despotism, pride, self-will and every anti-social emotion in order to establish the perfect justice and equality that are essential to the highest ethical state. It is a necessity of socialism to lay hold of the family and fashion it anew so that it may produce a superior material of human life, i.e. individual men and women whose enjoyments lie chiefly in sympathy and whose spontaneous impulses are towards an essentially social life.