The Peace of God passeth understanding

2.12. OF PERSONAL IMMORTALITY.

These are my beliefs. They begin with arbitrary assumptions; they end in
a mystery.

So do all beliefs that are not grossly utilitarian and material,
promising houris and deathless appetite or endless hunting or a cosmic
mortgage. The Peace of God passeth understanding, the Kingdom of Heaven
within us and without can be presented only by parables. But the
unapproachable distance and vagueness of these things makes them none
the less necessary, just as a cloud upon a mountain or sunlight remotely
seen upon the sea are as real as, and to many people far more necessary
than, pork chops. The driven swine may root and take no heed, but man
the dreamer drives. And because these things are vague and impalpable
and wilfully attained, it is none the less important that they should be
rendered with all the truth of one's being. To be atmospherically vague
is one thing; to be haphazard, wanton and untruthful, quite another.

But here I may give a specific answer to a question that many find
profoundly important, though indeed it is already implicitly answered in
what has gone before.

I do not believe I have any personal immortality. I am part of an
immortality perhaps; but that is different. I am not the continuing
thing. I personally am experimental, incidental. I feel I have to do
something, a number of things no one else could do, and then I am
finished and finished altogether. Then my substance returns to the
common lot. I am a temporary enclosure for a temporary purpose; that
served, and my skull and teeth, my idiosyncracy and desire, will
disperse, I believe, like the timbers of a booth after a fair.

Let me shift my ground a little and ask you to consider what is involved
in the opposite belief.

My idea of the unknown scheme is of something so wide and deep that I
cannot conceive it encumbered by my egotism perpetually. I shall serve
my purpose and pass under the wheel and end. That distresses me not at
all. Immortality would distress and perplex me. If I may put this in a
mixture of theological and social language, I cannot respect, I cannot
believe in a God who is always going about with me.

But this is after all what I feel is true and what I choose to believe.
It is not a matter of fact. So far as that goes there is no evidence
that I am immortal and none that I am not.

I may be altogether wrong in my beliefs; I may be misled by the
appearances of things. I believe in the great and growing Being of the
Species from which I rise, to which I return, and which, it may be, will
ultimately even transcend the limitation of the Species and grow into
the Conscious Being, the eternally conscious Being of all things.
Believing that, I cannot also believe that my peculiar little thread
will not undergo synthesis and vanish as a separate thing.

And what after all is my distinctive something, a few capacities, a few
incapacities, an uncertain memory, a hesitating presence? It matters no
doubt in its place and time, as all things matter in their place and
time, but where in it all is the eternally indispensable? The great
things of my life, love, faith, the intimation of beauty, the things
most savouring of immortality, are the things most general, the things
most shared and least distinctively me.

2.13. A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY.

And here perhaps, before I go on to the question of Conduct, is the
place to define a relationship to that system of faith and religious
observance out of which I and most of my readers have come. How do these
beliefs on which I base my rule of conduct stand to Christianity?

They do not stand in any attitude of antagonism. A religious system so
many-faced and so enduring as Christianity must necessarily be saturated
with truth even if it be not wholly true. To assume, as the Atheist and
Deist seem to do, that Christianity is a sort of disease that came upon
civilization, an unprofitable and wasting disease, is to deny that
conception of a progressive scheme and rightness which we have taken as
our basis of belief. As I have already confessed, the Scheme of
Salvation, the idea of a process of sorrow and atonement, presents
itself to me as adequately true. So far I do not think my new faith
breaks with my old. But it follows as a natural consequence of my
metaphysical preliminaries that I should find the Christian theology
Aristotelian, over defined and excessively personified. The painted
figure of that bearded ancient upon the Sistine Chapel, or William
Blake's wild-haired, wild-eyed Trinity, convey no nearer sense of God to
me than some mother-of-pearl-eyed painted and carven monster from the
worship of the South Sea Islanders. And the Miltonic fable of the
offended creator and the sacrificial son! it cannot span the circle of
my ideas; it is a little thing, and none the less little because it is
intimate, flesh of my flesh and spirit of my spirit, like the drawings
of my youngest boy. I put it aside as I would put aside the gay figure
of a costumed officiating priest. The passage of time has made his
canonicals too strange, too unlike my world of common thought and
costume. These things helped, but now they hinder and disturb. I cannot
bring myself back to them...

But the psychological experience and the theology of Christianity are
only a ground-work for its essential feature, which is the conception of
a relationship of the individual believer to a mystical being at once
human and divine, the Risen Christ. This being presents itself to the
modern consciousness as a familiar and beautiful figure, associated with
a series of sayings and incidents that coalesce with a very distinct and
rounded-off and complete effect of personality. After we have cleared
off all the definitions of theology, He remains, mystically suffering
for humanity, mystically asserting that love in pain and sacrifice in
service are the necessary substance of Salvation. Whether he actually
existed as a finite individual person in the opening of the Christian
era seems to me a question entirely beside the mark. The evidence at
this distance is of imperceptible force for or against. The Christ we
know is quite evidently something different from any finite person, a
figure, a conception, a synthesis of emotions, experiences and
inspirations, sustained by and sustaining millions of human souls.

Now it seems to be the common teaching of almost all Christians, that
Salvation, that is to say the consolidation and amplification of one's
motives through the conception of a general scheme or purpose, is to be
attained through the personality of Christ. Christ is made cardinal to
the act of Faith. The act of Faith, they assert, is not simply, as I
hold it to be, BELIEF, but BELIEF IN HIM.

We are dealing here, be it remembered, with beliefs deliberately
undertaken and not with questions of fact. The only matters of fact
material here are facts of experience. If in your experience Salvation
is attainable through Christ, then certainly Christianity is true for
you. And if a Christian asserts that my belief is a false light and that
presently I shall "come to Christ," I cannot disprove his assertion. I
can but disbelieve it. I hesitate even to make the obvious retort.

I hope I shall offend no susceptibilities when I assert that this great
and very definite personality in the hearts and imaginations of mankind
does not and never has attracted me. It is a fact I record about myself
without aggression or regret. I do not find myself able to associate Him
in any way with the emotion of Salvation.

I admit the splendid imaginative appeal in the idea of a divine-human
friend and mediator. If it were possible to have access by prayer, by
meditation, by urgent outcries of the soul, to such a being whose feet
were in the darknesses, who stooped down from the light, who was at once
great and little, limitless in power and virtue and one's very brother;
if it were possible by sheer will in believing to make and make one's
way to such a helper, who would refuse such help? But I do not find such
a being in Christ. I do not find, I cannot imagine, such a being. I wish
I could. To me the Christian Christ seems not so much a humanized God as
an incomprehensibly sinless being neither God nor man. His sinlessness
wears his incarnation like a fancy dress, all his white self unchanged.
He had no petty weaknesses.

Now the essential trouble of my life is its petty weaknesses. If I am to
have that love, that sense of understanding fellowship, which is, I
conceive, the peculiar magic and merit of this idea of a personal
Saviour, then I need someone quite other than this image of virtue, this
terrible and incomprehensible Galilean with his crown of thorns, his
blood-stained hands and feet. I cannot love him any more than I can love
a man upon the rack. Even in the face of torments I do not think I
should feel a need for him. I had rather then a hundred times have
Botticelli's armed angel in his Tobit at Florence. (I hope I do not seem
to want to shock in writing these things, but indeed my only aim is to
lay my feelings bare.) I know what love for an idealized person can be.
It happens that in my younger days I found a character in the history of
literature who had a singular and extraordinary charm for me, of whom
the thought was tender and comforting, who indeed helped me through
shames and humiliations as though he held my hand. This person was
Oliver Goldsmith. His blunders and troubles, his vices and vanities,
seized and still hold my imagination. The slights of Boswell, the
contempt of Gibbon and all his company save Johnson, the exquisite
fineness of spirit in his "Vicar of Wakefield," and that green suit of
his and the doctor's cane and the love despised, these things together
made him a congenial saint and hero for me, so that I thought of him as
others pray. When I think of that youthful feeling for Goldsmith, I know
what I need in a personal Saviour, as a troglodyte who has seen a candle
can imagine the sun. But the Christian Christ in none of his three
characteristic phases, neither as the magic babe (from whom I am cut off
by the wanton and indecent purity of the Immaculate Conception), nor as
the white-robed, spotless miracle worker, nor as the fierce unreal
torment of the cross, comes close to my soul. I do not understand the
Agony in the Garden; to me it is like a scene from a play in an unknown
tongue. The la t cry of despair is the one human touch, discordant with
all the rest of the story. One cry of despair does not suffice. The
Christian's Christ is too fine for me, not incarnate enough, not flesh
enough, not earth enough. He was never foolish and hot-eared and
inarticulate, never vain, he never forgot things, nor tangled his
miracles. I could love him I think more easily if the dead had not risen
and if he had lain in peace in his sepulchre instead of coming back more
enhaloed and whiter than ever, as a postscript to his own tragedy.

When I think of the Resurrection I am always reminded of the "happy
endings" that editors and actor managers are accustomed to impose upon
essentially tragic novels and plays...

You see how I stand in this matter, puzzled and confused by the
Christian presentation of Christ. I know there are many will answer--as
I suppose my friend the Rev. R.J. Campbell would answer--that what
confuses me is the overlaying of the personality of Jesus by stories and
superstitions and conflicting symbols; he will in effect ask me to
disentangle the Christ I need from the accumulated material, choosing
and rejecting. Perhaps one may do that. He does, I know, so present Him
as a man inspired, and strenuously, inadequately and erringly presenting
a dream of human brotherhood and the immediate Kingdom of Heaven on
earth and so blundering to his failure and death. But that will be a
recovered and restored person he would give me, and not the Christ the
Christians worship and declare they love, in whom they find their
Salvation.

When I write "declare they love" I throw doubt intentionally upon the
universal love of Christians for their Saviour. I have watched men and
nations in this matter. I am struck by the fact that so many Christians
fall back upon more humanized figures, upon the tender figure of Mary,
upon patron saints and such more erring creatures, for the effect of
mediation and sympathy they need.

You see it comes to this: that I think Christianity has been true and is
for countless people practically true, but that it is not true now for
me, and that for most people it is true only with modifications. Every
believing Christian is, I am sure, my spiritual brother, but if
systematically I called myself a Christian I feel that to most men I
should imply too much and so tell a lie.

2.14. OF OTHER RELIGIONS.

In the same manner, in varying degree, I hold all religions to be in a
measure true. Least comprehensible to me are the Indian formulae,
because they seem to stand not on common experience but on those
intellectual assumptions my metaphysical analysis destroys.
Transmigration of souls without a continuing memory is to my mind utter
foolishness, the imagining of a race of children. The aggression,
discipline and submission of Mahommedanism makes, I think, an
intellectually limited but fine and honourable religion--for men. Its
spirit if not its formulae is abundantly present in our modern world.
Mr. Rudyard Kipling, for example, manifestly preaches a Mahommedan God,
a modernised God with a taste for engineering. I have no doubt that in
devotion to a virile, almost national Deity and to the service of His
Empire of stern Law and Order, efficiently upheld, men have found and
will find Salvation.

All these religions are true for me as Canterbury Cathedral is a true
thing and as a Swiss chalet is a true thing. There they are, and they
have served a purpose, they have worked. Men and women have lived in and
by them. Men and women still do. Only they are not true for me to live
in them. I have, I believe, to live in a new edifice of my own
discovery. They do not work for me.

These schemes are true, and also these schemes are false! in the sense
that new things, new phrasings, have to replace them.

2.15.

Such are the essential beliefs by which I express myself. But now comes
the practical outcome of these things, and that is to discuss and show
how upon this metaphysical basis and these beliefs, and in obedience to
the ruling motive that arises with them, I frame principles of conduct.

BOOK THE THIRD. OF GENERAL CONDUCT.

3.1. CONDUCT FOLLOWS FROM BELIEF.

I hold that the broad direction of conduct follows necessarily from
belief. The believer does not require rewards and punishments to direct
him to the right. Motive and idea are not so separable. To believe truly
is to want to do right. To get salvation is to be unified by a
comprehending idea of a purpose and by a ruling motive.

The believer wants to do right, he naturally and necessarily seeks to do
right. If he fails to do right, if he finds he has done wrong instead of
right, he is not greatly distressed or terrified, he naturally and
cheerfully does his best to correct his error. He can be damned only by
the fading and loss of his belief. And naturally he recurs to and
refreshes his belief.

I write in phrases that the evangelical Christianity of my childhood
made familiar to me, because they are the most expressive phrases I have
ever met for the psychological facts with which I am dealing.

But faith, though it banishes fear and despair and brings with it a real
prevailing desire to know and do the Good, does not in itself determine
what is the Good or supply any simple guide to the choice between
alternatives. If it did, there would be nothing more to be said, this
book upon conduct would be unnecessary.

3.2. WHAT IS GOOD?

It seems to me one of the heedless errors of those who deal in
philosophy, to suppose all things that have simple names or unified
effects are in their nature simple and may be discovered and isolated as
a sort of essence by analysis. It is natural to suppose--and I think it
is also quite wrong to suppose--that such things as Good and Beauty can
be abstracted from good and beautiful things and considered alone. But
pure Good and pure Beauty are to me empty terms. It seems to me that
these are in their nature synthetic things, that they arise out of the
coming together of contributory things and conditions, and vanish at
their dispersal; they are synthetic just as more obviously Harmony is
synthetic. It is consequently not possible to give a definition of Good,
just as it is not possible to give a definition of that other something
which is so closely akin to it, Beauty. Nor is it to be maintained that
what is good for one is good for another. But what is good of one's
general relations and what is right in action must be determined by the
nature of one's beliefs about the purpose in things. I have set down my
broad impression of that purpose in respect to me, as the awakening and
development of the consciousness and will of our species, and I have
confessed my belief that in subordinating myself and all my motives to
that idea lies my Salvation. It follows from that, that the good life is
the life that most richly gathers and winnows and prepares experience
and renders it available for the race, that contributes most effectively
to the collective growth.

This is in general terms my idea of Good. So soon as one passes from
general terms to the question of individual good, one encounters
individuality; for everyone in the differing quality and measure of
their personality and powers and possibilities, good and right must be
different. We are all engaged, each contributing from his or her own
standpoint, in the collective synthesis; whatever one can best do, one
must do that; in whatever manner one can best help the synthesis, one
must exert oneself; the setting apart of oneself, secrecy, the service
of secret and personal ends, is the waste of life and the essential
quality of Sin.

That is the general expression for right living as I conceive it.

3.3. SOCIALISM.

In the study of what is Good, it is very convenient to make a rough
division of our subject into general and particular. There are first the
interests and problems that affect us all collectively, in which we have
a common concern and from which no one may legitimately seek exemption;
of these interests and problems we may fairly say every man should do so
and so, or so and so, or the law should be so and so, or so and so; and
secondly there are those other problems in which individual difference
and the interplay of one or two individualities is predominant. This is
of course no hard and fast classification, but it gives a method of
approach. We can begin with the generalized person in ourselves and end
with individuality.

In the world of ideas about me, I have found going on a great social and
political movement that correlates itself with my conception of a great
synthesis of human purpose as the aspect towards us of the universal
scheme. This movement is Socialism. Socialism is to me no clear-cut
system of theories and dogmas; it is one of those solid and extensive
and synthetic ideas that are better indicated by a number of different
formulae than by one, just as one only realizes a statue by walking
round it and seeing it from a number of points of view. I do not think
it is to be completely expressed by any one system of formulae or by any
one man. Its common quality from nearly every point of view is the
subordination of the will of the self-seeking individual to the idea of
a racial well-being embodied in an organized state, organized for every
end that can be obtained collectively. Upon that I seize; that is the
value of Socialism for me.

Socialism for me is a common step we are all taking in the great
synthesis of human purpose. It is the organization, in regard to a great
mass of common and fundamental interests that have hitherto been
dispersedly served, of a collective purpose.

I see humanity scattered over the world, dispersed, conflicting,
unawakened... I see human life as avoidable waste and curable confusion.
I see peasants living in wretched huts knee-deep in manure, mere
parasites on their own pigs and cows; I see shy hunters wandering in
primaeval forests; I see the grimy millions who slave for industrial
production; I see some who are extravagant and yet contemptible
creatures of luxury, and some leading lives of shame and indignity; tens
of thousands of wealthy people wasting lives in vulgar and unsatisfying
trivialities, hundreds of thousands meanly chaffering themselves, rich
or poor, in the wasteful byways of trade; I see gamblers, fools, brutes,
toilers, martyrs. Their disorder of effort, the spectacle of futility,
fills me with a passionate desire to end waste, to create order, to
develop understanding... All these people reflect and are part of the
waste and discontent of my life, and this co-ordination of the species
to a common general end, and the quest for my personal salvation, are
the social and the individual aspect of essentially the same desire...

And yet dispersed as all these people are, they are far more closely
drawn together to common ends and common effort than the filthy savages
who ate food rotten and uncooked in the age of unpolished stone. They
live in the mere opening phase of a synthesis of effort the end of which
surpasses our imagination. Such intercourse and community as they have
is only a dawn. We look towards the day, the day of the organized
civilized world state. The first clear intimation of that conscious
synthesis of human thought to which I look, the first edge of the
dayspring, has arisen--as Socialism, as I conceive of Socialism.
Socialism is to me no more and no less than the awakening of a
collective consciousness in humanity, a collective will and a collective
mind out of which finer individualities may arise forever in a perpetual
series of fresh endeavours and fresh achievements for the race.

3.4. A CRITICISM OF CERTAIN FORMS OF SOCIALISM.

It is necessary to point out that a Socialism arising in this way out of
the conception of a synthesis of the will and thought of the species
will necessarily differ from conceptions of Socialism arrived at in
other and different ways. It is based on a self-discontent and
self-abnegation and not on self-satisfaction, and it will be a scheme of
persistent thought and construction, essentially, and it will support
this or that method of law-making, or this or that method of economic
exploitation, or this or that matter of social grouping, only
incidentally and in relation to that.

Such a conception of Socialism is very remote in spirit, however it may
agree in method, from that philanthropic administrative socialism one
finds among the British ruling and administrative class. That seems to
me to be based on a pity which is largely unjustifiable and a pride that
is altogether unintelligent. The pity is for the obvious wants and
distresses of poverty, the pride appears in the arrogant and aggressive
conception of raising one's fellows. I have no strong feeling for the
horrors and discomforts of poverty as such, sensibilities can be
hardened to endure the life led by the "Romans" in Dartmoor jail a
hundred years ago (See "The Story of Dartmoor Prison" by Basil Thomson
(Heinemann--1907).), or softened to detect the crumpled rose-leaf; what
disgusts me is the stupidity and warring purposes of which poverty is
the outcome. When it comes to the idea of raising human beings, I must
confess the only person I feel concerned about raising is H.G. Wells,
and that even in his case my energies might be better employed. After
all, presently he must die and the world will have done with him. His
output for the species is more important than his individual elevation.

Moreover, all this talk of raising implies a classification I doubt. I
find it hard to fix any standards that will determine who is above me
and who below. Most people are different from me I perceive, but which
among them is better, which worse? I have a certain power of
communicating with other minds, but what experiences I communicate seem
often far thinner and poorer stuff than those which others less
expressive than I half fail to communicate and half display to me. My
"inferiors," judged by the common social standards, seem indeed
intellectually more limited than I and with a narrower outlook; they are
often dirtier and more driven, more under the stress of hunger and
animal appetites; but on the other hand have they not more vigorous
sensations than I, and through sheer coarsening and hardening of fibre,
the power to do more toilsome things and sustain intenser sensations
than I could endure? When I sit upon the bench, a respectable
magistrate, and commit some battered reprobate for trial for this lurid
offence or that, or send him or her to prison for drunkenness or
such-like indecorum, the doubt drifts into my mind which of us after all
is indeed getting nearest to the keen edge of life. Are I and my
respectable colleagues much more than successful evasions of THAT?
Perhaps these people in the dock know more of the essential strains and
stresses of nature, are more intimate with pain. At any rate I do not
think I am justified in saying certainly that they do not know...

No, I do not want to raise people using my own position as a standard, I
do not want to be one of a gang of consciously superior people, I do not
want arrogantly to change the quality of other lives. I do not want to
interfere with other lives, except incidentally--incidentally, in this
way that I do want to get to an understanding with them, I do want to
share and feel with them in our commerce with the collective mind. I
suppose I do not stretch language very much when I say I want to get rid
of stresses and obstacles between our minds and personalities and to
establish a relation that is understanding and sympathy.

I want to make more generally possible a relationship of communication
and interchange, that for want of a less battered and ambiguous word I
must needs call love.

And if I disavow the Socialism of condescension, so also do I disavow
the Socialism of revolt. There is a form of Socialism based upon the
economic generalizations of Marx, an economic fatalistic Socialism that
I hold to be rather wrong in its vision of facts, rather more distinctly
wrong in its theory, and altogether wrong and hopeless in its spirit. It
preaches, as inevitable, a concentration of property in the hands of a
limited number of property owners and the expropriation of the great
proletarian mass of mankind, a concentration which is after all no more
than a tendency conditional on changing and changeable conventions about
property, and it finds its hope of a better future in the outcome of a
class conflict between the expropriated Many and the expropriating Few.
Both sides are to be equally swayed by self-interest, but the toilers
are to be gregarious and mutually loyal in their self-interest--Heaven
knows why, except that otherwise the Marxist dream will not work. The
experience of contemporary events seems to show at least an equal power
of combination for material ends among owners and employers as among
workers.

Now this class-war idea is one diametrically opposed to that
religious-spirited Socialism which supplies the form of my general
activities. This class-war idea would exacerbate the antagonism of the
interests of the many individuals against the few individuals, and I
would oppose the conceiving of the Whole to the self-seeking of the
Individual. The spirit and constructive intention of the many to-day are
no better than those of the few, poor and rich alike are
over-individualized, self-seeking and non-creative; to organize the
confused jostling competitions, over-reachings, envies and hatreds of
to-day into two great class-hatreds and antagonisms will advance the
reign of love at most only a very little, only so far as it will
simplify and make plain certain issues. It may very possibly not advance
the reign of love at all, but rather shatter the order we have.
Socialism, as I conceive it, and as I have presented it in my book, "New
Worlds for Old," seeks to change economic arrangements only by the way,
as an aspect and outcome of a great change, a change in the spirit and
method of human intercourse.

I know that here I go beyond the limits many Socialists in the past, and
some who are still contemporary, have set themselves. Much Socialism
to-day seems to think of itself as fighting a battle against poverty and
its concomitants alone. Now poverty is only a symptom of a profounder
evil and is never to be cured by itself. It is one aspect of divided and
dispersed purposes. If Socialism is only a conflict with poverty,
Socialism is nothing. But I hold that Socialism is and must be a battle
against human stupidity and egotism and disorder, a battle fought all
through the forests and jungles of the soul of man. As we get
intellectual and moral light and the realization of brotherhood, so
social and economic organization will develop. But the Socialist may
attack poverty for ever, disregarding the intellectual and moral factors
that necessitate it, and he will remain until the end a purely economic
doctrinaire crying in the wilderness in vain.

And if I antagonize myself in this way to the philanthropic Socialism of
kindly prosperous people on the one hand and to the fierce class-hatred
Socialism on the other, still more am I opposed to that furtive
Socialism of the specialist which one meets most typically in the Fabian
Society. It arises very naturally out of what I may perhaps call
specialist fatigue and impatience. It is very easy for writers like
myself to deal in the broad generalities of Socialism and urge their
adoption as general principles; it is altogether another affair with a
man who sets himself to work out the riddle of the complications of
actuality in order to modify them in the direction of Socialism. He
finds himself in a jungle of difficulties that strain his intellectual
power to the utmost. He emerges at last with conclusions, and they are
rarely the obvious conclusions, as to what needs to be done. Even the
people of his own side he finds do not see as he sees; they are, he
perceives, crude and ignorant.

Now I hold that his duty is to explain his discoveries and intentions
until they see as he sees. But the specialist temperament is often not a
generalizing and expository temperament. Specialists are apt to measure
minds by their speciality and underrate the average intelligence. The
specialist is appalled by the real task before him, and he sets himself
by tricks and misrepresentations, by benevolent scoundrelism in fact, to
effect changes he desires. Too often he fails even in that. Where he
might have found fellowship he arouses suspicion. And even if a thing is
done in this way, its essential merit is lost. For it is better, I hold,
for a man to die of his disease than to be cured unwittingly. That is to
cheat him of life and to cheat life of the contribution his
consciousness might have given it.

The Socialism of my beliefs rests on a profounder faith and broader
proposition. It looks over and beyond the warring purposes of to-day as
a general may look over and beyond a crowd of sullen, excited and
confused recruits, to the day when they will be disciplined, exercised,
trained, willing and convergent on a common end. It holds persistently
to the idea of men increasingly working in agreement, doing things that
are sane to do, on a basis of mutual helpfulness, temperance and
toleration. It sees the great masses of humanity rising out of base and
immediate anxieties, out of dwarfing pressures and cramped surroundings,
to understanding and participation and fine effort. It sees the
resources of the earth husbanded and harvested, economized and used with
scientific skill for the maximum of result. It sees towns and cities
finely built, a race of beings finely bred and taught and trained, open
ways and peace and freedom from end to end of the earth. It sees beauty
increasing in humanity, about humanity and through humanity. Through
this great body of mankind goes evermore an increasing understanding, an
intensifying brotherhood. As Christians have dreamt of the New Jerusalem
so does Socialism, growing ever more temperate, patient, forgiving and
resolute, set its face to the World City of Mankind.

3.5. HATE AND LOVE.

Before I go on to point out the broad principles of action that flow
from this wide conception of Socialism, I may perhaps give a section to
elucidating that opposition of hate and love I made when I dealt with
the class war. I have already used the word love several times; it is an
ambiguous word and it may be well to spend a few words in making clear
the sense in which it is used here. I use it in a very broad sense to
convey all that complex of motives, impulses, sentiments, that incline
us to find our happiness and satisfactions in the happiness and sympathy
of others. Essentially it is a synthetic force in human affairs, the
merger tendency, a linking force, an expression in personal will and
feeling of the common element and interest. It insists upon resemblances
and shares and sympathies. And hate, I take it, is the emotional aspect
of antagonism, it is the expression in personal will and feeling of the
individual's separation from others. It is the competing and destructive
tendency. So long as we are individuals and members of a species, we
must needs both hate and love. But because I believe, as I have already
confessed, that the oneness of the species is a greater fact than
individuality, and that we individuals are temporary separations from a
collective purpose, and since hate eliminates itself by eliminating its
objects, whilst love multiplies itself by multiplying its objects, so
love must be a thing more comprehensive and enduring than hate.

Moreover, hate must be in its nature a good thing. We individuals exist
as such, I believe, for the purpose in things, and our separations and
antagonisms serve that purpose. We play against each other like hammer
and anvil. But the synthesis of a collective will in humanity, which is
I believe our human and terrestrial share in that purpose, is an idea
that carries with it a conception of a secular alteration in the scope
and method of both love and hate. Both widen and change with man's
widening and developing apprehension of the purpose he serves. The
savage man loves in gusts a fellow creature or so about him, and fears
and hates all other people. Every expansion of his scope and ideas
widens either circle. The common man of our civilized world loves not
only many of his friends and associates systematically and enduringly,
but dimly he loves also his city and his country, his creed and his
race; he loves it may be less intensely but over a far wider field and
much more steadily. But he hates also more widely if less passionately
and vehemently than a savage, and since love makes rather harmony and
peace and hate rather conflict and events, one may easily be led to
suppose that hate is the ruling motive in human affairs. Men band
themselves together in leagues and loyalties, in cults and organizations
and nationalities, and it is often hard to say whether the bond is one
of love for the association or hatred of those to whom the association
is antagonized. The two things pass insensibly into one another. London
people have recently seen an edifying instance of the transition, in the
Brown Dog statue riots. A number of people drawn together by their
common pity for animal suffering, by love indeed of the most
disinterested sort, had so forgotten their initial spirit as to erect a
monument with an inscription at once recklessly untruthful, spiteful in
spirit and particularly vexatious to one great medical school of London.
They have provoked riots and placarded London with taunts and irritating
misrepresentatin of the spirit of medical research, and they have
infected a whole fresh generation of London students with a bitter
partizan contempt for the humanitarian effort that has so lamentably
misconducted itself. Both sides vow they will never give in, and the
anti-vivisectionists are busy manufacturing small china copies of the
Brown Dog figure, inscription and all, for purposes of domestic
irritation. Here hate, the evil ugly brother of effort, has manifestly
slain love the initiator and taken the affair in hand. That is a little
model of human conflicts. So soon as we become militant and play against
one another, comes this danger of strain and this possible reversal of
motive. The fight begins. Into a pit of heat and hate fall right and
wrong together.

Now it seems to me that a religious faith such as I have set forth in
the second Book, and a clear sense of our community of blood with all
mankind, must necessarily affect both our loving and our hatred. It will
certainly not abolish hate, but it will subordinate it altogether to
love. We are individuals, so the Purpose presents itself to me, in order
that we may hate the things that have to go, ugliness, baseness,
insufficiency, unreality, that we may love and experiment and strive for
the things that collectively we seek--power and beauty. Before our
conversion we did this darkly and with our hate spreading to persons and
parties from the things for which they stood. But the believer will hate
lovingly and without fear. We are of one blood and substance with our
antagonists, even with those that we desire keenly may die and leave no
issue in flesh or persuasion. They all touch us and are part of one
necessary experience. They are all necessary to the synthesis, even if
they are necessary only as the potato-peel in the dust-bin is necessary
to my dinner.

So it is I disavow and deplore the whole spirit of class-war Socialism
with its doctrine of hate, its envious assault upon the leisure and
freedom of the wealthy. Without leisure and freedom and the experience
of life they gave, the ideas of Socialism could never have been born.
The true mission of Socialism is against darkness, vanity and cowardice,
that darkness which hides from the property owner the intense beauty,
the potentialities of interest, the splendid possibilities of life, that
vanity and cowardice that make him clutch his precious holdings and fear
and hate the shadow of change. It has to teach the collective
organization of society; and to that the class-consciousness and intense
class-prejudices of the worker need to bow quite as much as those of the
property owner. But when I say that Socialism's mission is to teach, I
do not mean that its mission is a merely verbal and mental one; it must
use all instruments and teach by example as well as precept. Socialism
by becoming charitable and merciful will not cease to be militant.
Socialism must, lovingly but resolutely, use law, use force, to
dispossess the owners of socially disadvantageous wealth, as one coerces
a lunatic brother or takes a wrongfully acquired toy from a spoilt and
obstinate child. It must intervene between all who would keep their
children from instruction in the business of citizenship and the lessons
of fraternity. It must build and guard what it builds with laws and with
that sword which is behind all laws. Non-resistance is for the
non-constructive man, for the hermit in the cave and the naked saint in
the dust; the builder and maker with the first stroke of his foundation
spade uses force and opens war against the anti-builder.

3.6. THE PRELIMINARY SOCIAL DUTY.

The belief I have that contributing to the development of the collective
being of man is the individual's general meaning and duty, and the
formulae of the Socialism which embodies this belief so far as our
common activities go, give a general framework and direction how a man
or woman should live. (I do throughout all this book mean man or woman
equally when I write of "man," unless it is manifestly inapplicable.)

And first in this present time he must see to it that he does live, that
is to say he must get food, clothing, covering, and adequate leisure for
the finer aspects of living. Socialism plans an organized civilization
in which these things will be a collective solicitude, and the gaining
of a subsistence an easy preliminary to the fine drama of existence, but
in the world as we have it we are forced to engage much of our energy in
scrambling for these preliminary necessities. Our problems of conduct
lie in the world as it is and not in the world as we want it to be.
First then a man must get a living, a fair civilized living for himself.
It is a fundamental duty. It must be a fair living, not pinched nor mean
nor strained. A man can do nothing higher, he can be no service to any
cause, until he himself is fed and clothed and equipped and free. He
must earn this living or equip himself to earn it in some way not
socially disadvantageous, he must contrive as far as possible that the
work he does shall be constructive and contributory to the general
well-being.

And these primary necessities of food, clothing and freedom being
secured, one comes to the general disposition of one's surplus energy.
With regard to that I think that a very simple proposition follows from
the broad beliefs I have chosen to adopt. The general duty of a man, his
existence being secured, is to educate, and chiefly to educate and
develop himself. It is his duty to live, to make all he can out of
himself and life, to get full of experience, to make himself fine and
perceiving and expressive, to render his experience and perceptions
honestly and helpfully to others. And in particular he has to educate
himself and others with himself in Socialism. He has to make and keep
this idea of synthetic human effort and of conscious constructive effort
clear first to himself and then clear in the general mind. For it is an
idea that comes and goes. We are all of us continually lapsing from it
towards individual isolation again. He needs, we all need, constant
refreshment in this belief if it is to remain a predominant living fact
in our lives.

And that duty of education, of building up the collective idea and
organization of humanity, falls into various divisions depending in
their importance upon individual quality. For all there is one personal
work that none may evade, and that is thinking hard, criticising
strenuously and understanding as clearly as one can religion, socialism
and the general principle of one's acts. The intellectual factor is of
primary importance in my religion. I can see no more reason why
salvation should come to the intellectually incapable than to the
morally incapable. For simple souls thinking in simple processes,
salvation perhaps comes easily, but there is none for the intellectual
coward, for the mental sloven and sluggard, for the stupid and obdurate
mind. The Believer will think hard and continue to grow and learn, to
read and seek discussion as his needs determine.

Correlated with one's own intellectual activity, part of it and growing
out of it for almost everyone, is intellectual work with and upon
others. By teaching we learn. Not to communicate one's thoughts to
others, to keep one's thoughts to oneself as people say, is either
cowardice or pride. It is a form of sin. It is a duty to talk, teach,
explain, write, lecture, read and listen. Every truly religious man,
every good Socialist, is a propagandist. Those who cannot write or
discuss can talk, those who cannot argue can induce people to listen to
others and read. We have a belief and an idea that we want to spread,
each to the utmost of his means and measure, throughout all the world.
We have a thought that we want to make humanity's thought. And it is a
duty too that one should, within the compass of one's ability, make
teaching, writing and lecturing possible where it has not existed
before. This can be done in a hundred ways, by founding and enlarging
schools and universities and chairs, for example; by making print and
reading and all the material of thought cheap and abundant, by
organizing discussion and societies for inquiry.

And talk and thought and study are but the more generalized aspects of
duty. The Believer may find his own special aptitude lies rather among
concrete things, in experimenting and promoting experiments in
collective action. Things teach as well as words, and some of us are
most expressive by concrete methods. The Believer will work himself and
help others to his utmost in all those developments of material
civilization, in organized sanitation for example, all those
developments that force collective acts upon communities and collective
realizations into the minds of men. And the whole field of scientific
research is a field of duty calling to everyone who can enter it, to add
to the permanent store of knowledge and new resources for the race.

The Mind of that Civilized State we seek to make by giving ourselves
into its making, is evidently the central work before us. But while the
writer, the publisher and printer, the bookseller and librarian and
teacher and preacher, the investigator and experimenter, the reader and
everyone who thinks, will be contributing themselves to this great
organized mind and intention in the world, many sorts of specialized men
will be more immediately concerned with parallel and more concrete
aspects of the human synthesis. The medical worker and the medical
investigator, for example, will be building up the body of a new
generation, the body of the civilized state, and he will be doing all he
can, not simply as an individual, but as a citizen, to ORGANIZE his
services of cure and prevention, of hygiene and selection. A great and
growing multitude of men will be working out the apparatus of the
civilized state; the organizers of transit and housing, the engineers in
their incessantly increasing variety, the miners and geologists
estimating the world's resources in metals and minerals, the mechanical
inventors perpetually economizing force. The scientific agriculturist
again will be studying the food supply of the world as a whole, and how
it may be increased and distributed and economized. And to the student
of law comes the task of rephrasing his intricate and often quite
beautiful science in relation to modern conceptions. All these and a
hundred other aspects are integral to the wide project of Constructive
Socialism as it shapes itself in my faith.

3.7. WRONG WAYS OF LIVING.

When we lay down the proposition that it is one's duty to get one's
living in some way not socially disadvantageous, and as far as possible
by work that is contributory to the general well-being and development,
when we state that one's surplus energies, after one's living is gained,
must be devoted to experience, self-development and constructive work,
it is clear we condemn by implication many modes of life that are
followed to-day.

For example, it is manifest we condemn living in idleness or on
non-productive sport, on the income derived from private property, and
all sorts of ways of earning a living that cannot be shown to conduce to
the constructive process. We condemn trading that is merely speculative,
and in fact all trading and manufacture that is not a positive social
service; we condemn living by gambling or by playing games for either
stakes or pay. Much more do we condemn dishonest or fraudulent trading
and every act of advertisement that is not punctiliously truthful. We
must condemn too the taking of any income from the community that is
neither earned nor conceded in the collective interest. But to this last
point, and to certain issues arising out of it, I will return in the
section next following this one.

And it follows evidently from our general propositions that every form
of prostitution is a double sin, against one's individuality and against
the species which we serve by the development of that individuality's
preferences and idiosyncracies.

And by prostitution I mean not simply the act of a woman who sells for
money, and against her thoughts and preferences, her smiles and
endearments and the secret beauty and pleasure of her body, but the act
of anyone who, to gain a living, suppresses himself, does things in a
manner alien to himself and subserves aims and purposes with which he
disagrees. The journalist who writes against his personal convictions,
the solicitor who knowingly assists the schemes of rogues, the barrister
who pits himself against what he perceives is justice and the right, the
artist who does unbeautiful things or less beautiful things than he
might, simply to please base employers, the craftsman who makes
instruments for foolish uses or bad uses, the dealer who sells and
pushes an article because it fits the customer's folly; all these are
prostitutes of mind and soul if not of body, with no right to lift an
eyebrow at the painted disasters of the streets.

3.8. SOCIAL PARASITISM AND CONTEMPORARY INJUSTICES.

These broad principles about one's way of living are very simple; our
minds move freely among them. But the real interest is with the
individual case, and the individual case is almost always complicated by
the fact that the existing social and economic system is based upon
conditions that the growing collective intelligence condemns as unjust
and undesirable, and that the constructive spirit in men now seeks to
supersede. We have to live in a provisional State while we dream of and
work for a better one.

The ideal life for the ordinary man in a civilized, that is to say a
Socialist, State would be in public employment or in private enterprise
aiming at public recognition. But in our present world only a small
minority can have that direct and honourable relation of public service
in the work they do; most of the important business of the community is
done upon the older and more tortuous private ownership system, and the
great mass of men in socially useful employment find themselves working
only indirectly for the community and directly for the profit of a
private owner, or they themselves are private owners. Every man who has
any money put by in the bank, or any money invested, is a private owner,
and in so far as he draws interest or profit from this investment he is
a social parasite. It is in practice almost impossible to divest oneself
of that parasitic quality however straightforward the general principle
may be.

It is practically impossible for two equally valid sets of reasons. The
first is that under existing conditions, saving and investment
constitute the only way to rest and security in old age, to leisure,
study and intellectual independence, to the safe upbringing of a family
and the happiness of one's weaker dependents. These are things that
should not be left for the individual to provide; in the civilized
state, the state itself will insure every citizen against these
anxieties that now make the study of the City Article almost a duty. To
abandon saving and investment to-day, and to do so is of course to
abandon all insurance, is to become a driven and uncertain worker, to
risk one's personal freedom and culture and the upbringing and
efficiency of one's children. It is to lower the standard of one's
personal civilization, to think with less deliberation and less
detachment, to fall away from that work of accumulating fine habits and
beautiful and pleasant ways of living contributory to the coming State.
And in the second place there is not only no return for such a sacrifice
in anything won for Socialism, but for fine-thinking and living people
to give up property is merely to let it pass into the hands of more
egoistic possessors. Since at present things must be privately owned, it
is better that they should be owned by people consciously working for
social development and willing to use them to that end.

We have to live in the present system and under the conditions of the
present system, while we work with all our power to change that system
for a better one.

The case of Cadburys the cocoa and chocolate makers, and the practical
slavery under the Portuguese of the East African negroes who grow the
raw material for Messrs. Cadbury, is an illuminating one in this
connection. The Cadburys, like the Rowntrees, are well known as an
energetic and public-spirited family, their social and industrial
experiments at Bournville and their general social and political
activities are broad and constructive in the best sense. But they find
themselves in the peculiar dilemma that they must either abandon an
important and profitable portion of their great manufacture or continue
to buy produce grown under cruel and even horrible conditions. Their
retirement from the branch of the cocoa and chocolate trade concerned
would, under these circumstances, mean no diminution of the manufacture
or of the horrors of this particular slavery; it would merely mean that
less humanitarian manufacturers would step in to take up the abandoned
trade. The self-righteous individualist would have no doubts about the
question; he would keep his hands clean anyhow, retrench his social
work, abandon the types of cocoa involved, and pass by on the other
side. But indeed I do not believe we came into the mire of life simply
to hold our hands up out of it. Messrs. Cadbury follow a better line;
they keep their business going, and exert themselves in every way to let
light into the secrets of Portuguese East Africa and to organize a
better control of these labour cruelties. That I think is altogether the
right course in this difficulty.

We cannot keep our hands clean in this world as it is. There is no
excuse indeed for a life of fraud or any other positive fruitless
wrong-doing or for a purely parasitic non-productive life, yet all but
the fortunate few who are properly paid and recognized state servants
must in financial and business matters do their best amidst and through
institutions tainted with injustice and flawed with unrealities. All
Socialists everywhere are like expeditionary soldiers far ahead of the
main advance. The organized state that should own and administer their
possessions for the general good has not arrived to take them over; and
in the meanwhile they must act like its anticipatory agents according to
their lights and make things ready for its coming.

The Believer then who is not in the public service, whose life lies
among the operations of private enterprise, must work always on the
supposition that the property he administers, the business in which he
works, the profession he follows, is destined to be taken over and
organized collectively for the commonweal and must be made ready for the
taking over; that the private outlook he secures by investment, the
provision he makes for his friends and children, are temporary,
wasteful, though at present unavoidable devices to be presently merged
in and superseded by the broad and scientific previsions of the
co-operative commonwealth.

3.9. THE CASE OF THE WIFE AND MOTHER.

These principles give a rule also for the problem that faces the great
majority of thinking wives and mothers to-day. The most urgent and
necessary social work falls upon them; they bear, and largely educate
and order the homes of, the next generation, and they have no direct
recognition from the community for either of these supreme functions.
They are supposed to perform them not for God or the world, but to
please and satisfy a particular man. Our laws, our social conventions,
our economic methods, so hem a woman about that, however fitted for and
desirous of maternity she may be, she can only effectually do that duty
in a dependent relation to her husband. Nearly always he is the
paymaster, and if his payments are grudging or irregular, she has little
remedy short of a breach and the rupture of the home. Her duty is
conceived of as first to him and only secondarily to her children and
the State. Many wives become under these circumstances mere prostitutes
to their husbands, often evading the bearing of children with their
consent and even at their request, and "loving for a living." That is a
natural outcome of the proprietary theory of the family out of which our
civilization emerges. But our modern ideas trend more and more to regard
a woman's primary duty to be her duty to the children and to the world
to which she gives them. She is to be a citizen side by side with her
husband; no longer is he to intervene between her and the community. As
a matter of contemporary fact he can do so and does so habitually, and
most women have to square their ideas of life to that possibility.

Before any woman who is clear-headed enough to perceive that this great
business of motherhood is one of supreme public importance, there are a
number of alternatives at the present time. She may, like Grant Allan's
heroine in "The Woman Who Did," declare an exaggerated and impossible
independence, refuse the fetters of marriage and bear children to a
lover. This, in the present state of public opinion in almost every
existing social atmosphere, would be a purely anarchistic course. It
would mean a fatherless home, and since the woman will have to play the
double part of income-earner and mother, an impoverished and struggling
home. It would mean also an unsocial because ostracized home. In most
cases, and even assuming it to be right in idea, it would still be on
all fours with that immediate abandonment of private property we have
already discussed, a sort of suicide that helps the world nothing.

Or she may "strike," refuse marriage and pursue a solitary and childless
career, engaging her surplus energies in constructive work. But that
also is suicide; it is to miss the keenest experiences, the finest
realities life has to offer.

Or she may meet a man whom she can trust to keep a treaty with her and
supplement the common interpretations and legal insufficiencies of the
marriage bond, who will respect her always as a free and independent
person, will abstain absolutely from authoritative methods, and will
either share and trust his income and property with her in a frank
communism, or give her a sufficient and private income for her personal
use. It is only fair under existing economic conditions that at marriage
a husband should insure his life in his wife's interest, and I do not
think it would be impossible to bring our legal marriage contract into
accordance with modern ideas in that matter. Certainly it should be
legally imperative that at the birth of each child a new policy upon its
father's life, as the income-getter, should begin. The latter provision
at least should be a normal condition of marriage and one that the wife
should have power to enforce when payments fall away. With such
safeguards and under such conditions marriage ceases to be a haphazard
dependence for a woman, and she may live, teaching and rearing and free,
almost as though the co-operative commonwealth had come.

But in many cases, since great numbers of women marry so young and so
ignorantly that their thinking about realities begins only after
marriage, a woman will find herself already married to a man before she
realizes the significance of these things. She may be already the mother
of children. Her husband's ideas may not be her ideas. He may dominate,
he may prohibit, he may intervene, he may default. He may, if he sees
fit, burthen the family income with the charges of his illegitimate
offspring.

We live in the world as it is and not in the world as it should be. That
sentence becomes the refrain of this discussion.

The normal modern married woman has to make the best of a bad position,
to do her best under the old conditions, to live as though she was under
the new conditions, to make good citizens, to give her spare energies as
far as she can to bringing about a better state of affairs. Like the
private property owner and the official in a privately owned business,
her best method of conduct is to consider herself an unrecognized public
official, irregularly commanded and improperly paid. There is no good in
flagrant rebellion. She has to study her particular circumstances and
make what good she can out of them, keeping her face towards the coming
time. I cannot better the image I have already used for the thinking and
believing modern-minded people of to-day as an advance guard cut off
from proper supplies, ill furnished so that makeshift prevails, and
rather demoralized. We have to be wise as well as loyal; discretion
itself is loyalty to the coming State.

3.10. ASSOCIATIONS.

In the previous section I have dealt with the single individual's duty
in relation to the general community and to law and generally received
institutions. But there is a new set of questions now to be considered.
Let us take up the modifications that arise when it is not one isolated
individual but a group of individuals who find themselves in
disagreement with contemporary rule or usage and disposed to find a
rightness in things not established or not conceded. They too live in
the world as it is and not in the world as it ought to be, but their
association opens up quite new possibilities of anticipating coming
developments of living, and of protecting and guaranteeing one another
from what for a single unprotected individual would be the inevitable
consequences of a particular line of conduct, conduct which happened to
be unorthodox or only, in the face of existing conditions, unwise.

For example, a friend of mine who had read a copy of the preceding
section wrote as follows:--

"I can see no reason why even to-day a number of persons avowedly united
in the same 'Belief' and recognizing each other as the self-constituted
social vanguard should not form a recognized spiritual community
centering round some kind of 'religious' edifice and ritual, and agree
to register and consecrate the union of any couples of the members
according to a contract which the whole community should have voted
acceptable. The community would be the guardian of money deposited or
paid in gradually as insurance for the children. And the fact of the
whole business being regular, open and connected with a common
intellectual and moral ritual and a common name, such for example as
your name of 'The Samurai,' would secure the respect of outsiders, so
that eventually these new marriage arrangements would modify the old
ones. People would ask, 'Were you married before the registrar?' and the
answer would be, 'No, we are Samurai and were united before the Elders.'
In Catholic countries those who use only the civil marriage are
considered outcasts by the religiously minded, which shows that
recognition by the State is not as potent as recognition by the
community to which one belongs. The religious marriage is considered the
only one binding by Catholics, and the civil ceremony is respected
merely because the State has brute force behind it."

There is in this passage one particularly valuable idea, the idea of an
association of people to guarantee the welfare of their children in
common. I will follow that a little, though it takes me away from my
main line of thought. It seems to me that such an association might be
found in many cases a practicable way of easing the conflict that so
many men and women experience, between their individual public service
and their duty to their own families. Many people of exceptional gifts,
whose gifts are not necessarily remunerative, are forced by these
personal considerations to direct them more or less askew, to divert
them from their best application to some inferior but money-making use;
and many more are given the disagreeable alternative of evading
parentage or losing the freedom of mind needed for socially beneficial
work. This is particularly the case with many scientific investigators,
many sociological and philosophical workers, many artists, teachers and
the like. Even when such people are fairly prosperous personally they do
not care to incur the obligation to keep prosperous at any cost to their
work that a family in our competitive system involves. It gives great
ease of mind to any sort of artistic or intellectual worker to feel free
to become poor. I do not see why a group of such people should not
attempt a merger of their family anxieties and family adventures, insure
all its members, and while each retains a sufficient personal
independence for freedom of word and movement, pool their family
solicitudes and resources, organize a collective school and a common
maintenance fund for all the children born of members of the
association. I do not see why they should not in fact develop a
permanent trust to maintain, educate and send out all their children
into the world, a trust to which their childless friends and associates
could contribute by gift and bequest, and to which the irregular good
fortune that is not uncommon in the careers of these exceptional types
could be devoted. I do not mean any s rt of charity but an enlarged
family basis.

Such an idea passes very readily into the form of a Eugenic association.
It would be quite possible and very interesting for prosperous people
interested in Eugenics to create a trust for the offspring of a selected
band of beneficiaries, and with increasing resources to admit new
members and so build up within the present social system a special
strain of chosen people. So far people with eugenic ideas and people
with conceptions of associated and consolidated families have been too
various and too dispersed for such associations to be practicable, but
as such views of life become more common, the chance of a number of
sufficiently homogeneous and congenial people working out the method of
such a grouping increases steadily.

Moreover, I can imagine no reason to prevent any women who are in
agreement with the moral standards of the "Woman who Did" (standards I
will not discuss at this present point but defer for a later section)
combining for mutual protection and social support and the welfare of
such children as they may bear. Then certainly, to the extent that this
succeeds, the objections that arise from the evil effects upon the
children of social isolation disappear. This isolation would be at worst
a group isolation, and there can be no doubt that my friend is right in
pointing out that there is much more social toleration for an act
committed under the sanction of a group than for an isolated act that
may be merely impulsive misbehaviour masquerading as high principle.

It seems to me remarkable that, to the best of my knowledge, so obvious
a form of combination has never yet been put in practice. It is
remarkable but not inexplicable. The first people to develop novel
ideas, more particularly of this type, are usually people in isolated
circumstances and temperamentally incapable of disciplined cooperation.