Now the home or family lives of the citizens of any race or nation owe their points of identity to essentially the same causes. They result from propensities in a vast multitude of men which, although they are similar, are independent. The structure of the family differs amongst different races. Amongst some it is based on polygamy; amongst others on monogamy; but no matter what its details in either case may be, the government, however autocratic, accommodates itself to the family life of the people; not the family life of the people to the laws and the dictation of the government. It will be enough to confine ourselves to the Western or progressive races, amongst whom family life has its basis in monogamy. Advocates of socialism often distinctly say, and the principles of socialism beyond all doubt require, that the family, as now existing, shall be practically broken up; and that whilst the union of the parents is {232} made terminable with an ease unapproached at present, the multiplication of children shall be regulated by State authority, and that the children themselves shall be reared by the State rather than by the parents. For both these arrangements there are many obvious arguments, which are from the point of view of the socialist quite unanswerable. If the State binds itself to provide for all the children that are born, it is bound to claim some control over the number of them that shall be thrown on its hands. If the State is to be the sole employer and sole director of labour, it must settle the number of children that shall be educated for each branch of industry. If the solidarity of feeling requisite to make socialism possible is ever to be obtained, it can be obtained only by fusing into one those family groups now so obstinately separate. But here the socialists encounter one of their great stumbling-blocks.‡ In theory the advocates of the extremest and most complete democracy, they are baffled by the habits and character of the very masses to whom they address themselves. There may be unhappy homes, and there may be unnatural parents, but the masses, as a whole, will not listen to any proposal for invading the privacy of the home or for tampering with the parental tie. Any average {233} mother would, when it came to the point, tear out the eyes of any socialist legislator who, under pretext of increasing her weekly wages, should seriously attempt to snatch her children out of her arms. Similar resistance would be offered to any attempt to modify, beyond certain limits, the institution of marriage, or to interfere in any way with the habits of a people’s home life. These habits give rise to legislation by the few, but they do not originate in it. The legislation of the few, on the contrary, has so to shape itself as to protect those modes of life and institutions which these habits naturally produce; and the laws that do this, no matter who devises and administers them, come into being under genuinely democratic dictation.