Well, it may seem ungracious to sneer at the grotesque formulation of an idea profoundly wise, at the hurried, wrong, arithmetical method of rendering that collective spirit a community undoubtedly can and sometimes does possess--I myself am the profoundest believer in democracy, in a democracy awake intellectually, conscious and self-disciplined--but so long as this mystic faith in the crowd, this vague, emotional, uncritical way of evading the immense difficulties of organizing just government and a collective will prevails, so long must the Socialist project remain not simply an impracticable but, in an illiterate, badly-organized community, even a dangerous suggestion. I as a Socialist am not blind to these possibilities, and it is foolish because a man is in many ways on one's side that one should not call attention to his careless handling of a loaded gun. Social-Democracy may conceivably become a force that in the sheer power of untutored faith may destroy government and not replace it. I do not know how far that is not already the case in Russia. I do not know how far this may not ultimately be the case in the United States of America. The Marxist teaching, great as was its advance on the dispersed chaotic Socialism that preceded it, was defective in other directions as well as in its innocence of any scheme of State organization. About women and children, for example, it was ill-informed; its founders do not seem to have been inspired either by educational necessities or philoprogenitive passion. No biologist--indeed no scientific mind at all--seems to have tempered its severely "economic" tendencies. It so over-accentuates the economic side of life that at moments one might imagine it dealt solely with some world of purely "productive" immortals, who were never born and never aged, but only warred for ever in a developing industrial process. Now reproduction and not production is the more central fact of social life. Women and children and education are things in the background of the Marxist proposal--like a man's dog, or his private reading, or his pet rabbits. They are in the foreground of modern Socialism. The Social Democrat's doctrines go little further in this direction than the Liberalism that founded the United States, which ignored women, children and niggers, and made the political unit the adult white man. They were blind to the supreme importance of making the next generation better than the present as the aim and effort of the whole community. Herr Bebel's book, _Woman_, is an ample statement of the evils of woman's lot under the existing _régime_, but the few pages upon the Future of Woman with which he concludes are eloquent of the jejune insufficiency of the Marxist outlook in this direction. Marriage, which modern Socialism tends more and more to sustain, was to vanish--at least as a law-made bond; women were to count as men so far as the State is concerned....