matter. I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease. I
want to see women come in, free and fearless, to a full
participation in the collective purpose of mankind. Women, Iam
convinced, are as fine as men; they can be as wise as men; they are
capable of far greater devotion than men. I want to see them
citizens, with a marriage law framed primarily for them and for
their protection and the good of the race, and not for men's
satisfactions. I want to see them bearing and rearing good children
in the State as a generously rewarded public duty and service,
choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no way
enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen. The social
consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched
mine of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world. I want to
change the respective values of the family group altogether, and
make the home indeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner
and responsible guardian of her children.
It is no use pretending that this is not novel and revolutionary; it
is. The Endowment of Motherhood implies a new method of social
organization, a rearrangement of the social unit, untried in human
expericnce-as untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800.
Of course, it may work out to modify men's ideas of marriage
profoundly. To me that is a secondary consideration. I do not
believe that particular assertion myself, because Iam convinced
that a practical monogamy is a psychological necessity to the mass
of civilised people. But even if I did believe it I should still
keep to my present line, because it is the only line that will
prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending in biological
decay. The public Endowment of Motherhood is the only possible way
which will ensure the permanently developing civilised state at
which all constructive minds are aiming. A point is reached in the
life-history of a civilisation when either this reconstruction must
be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population prove
insufficient for the needs of the developing organisation. It is
not so much moral decadence that will destroy us as moral
inadaptability. The old code fails under the new needs. The only
alternative to this profound reconstruction is a decay in human
quality and social collapse. Either this unprecedented
rearrangement must be achieved by our civilisation, or it must
presently come upon a phase of disorder and crumble and perish, as
Rome perished, as France declines, as the strain of the Pilgrim
Fathers dwindles out of America. Whatever hope there may be in the
attempt therefore, there is no alternative to the attempt.
6
I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price
of constructive realities. These questions were no doubt
monstrously dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a
politician alive who didn't look scared at the mention of "The
Family," but if raising these issues were essential to the social
reconstructions on which my life was set, that did not matter. It
only implied that I should take them up with deliberate caution.
There was no release because of risk or difficulty.
The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project
in this direction was going on in my mind concurrently with my
speculations about a change of party, like bass and treble in a
complex piece of music. The two drew to a conclusion together. I
would not only go over to Imperialism, but I would attempt to
biologise Imperialism.
I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous uphill task.
But as I came to look into the possibilities of the matter, a strong
persuasion grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislative
proposals affecting the family basis was excessive, that things were
much riper for development in this direction than old-experienced
people out of touch with the younger generation imagined, that to
phrase the thing in a parliamentary fashion, "something might be
done in the constituencies" with the Endowment of Motherhood
forthwith, provided only that it was made perfectly clear that
anything a sane person could possibly intend by "morality" was left
untouched by these proposals.
I went to work very carefully. I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE
and Burkett of the DIAL to try over a silly-season discussion of
State Help for Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics,
upon the fall in the birth-rate, and similar topics in the BLUE
WEEKLY, leading up to a tentative and generalised advocacy of the
public endowment of the nation's children. I was more and more
struck by the acceptance won by a sober and restrained presentation
of this suggestion.
And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came the
Handitch election, and I was forced by the clamour of my antagonist,
and very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test. I
returned triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of
Motherhood as part of my open profession and with the full approval
of the party press. Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me
on my way to the table between the whips.
That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of new
members, but salient, an event, a symbol of profound changes and new
purposes in the national life.
Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my book
ends altogether. For the rest is but to tell how I was swept out of
this great world of political possibilities. I close this Third
Book as I opened it, with an admission of difficulties and
complexities, but now with a pile of manuscript before me I have to
confess them unsurmounted and still entangled.
Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growing
realisation that the essential quality of all political and social
effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay
of individual lives. That is the collective human reality, the
basis of morality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives must
be given, from that will come the perpetual fresh release and
further ennoblement of individual lives…
I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this
book the part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE. I have