Social Forces in England and AmericaWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Social Forces in England and America
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
England -- Social conditions -- 20th century; Social problems; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
He will be good to his wife and children as he will be good to his
friend, but he will be no partisan for wife and family against the
common welfare. His solicitude will be for the welfare of all the
children of the community; he will have got beyond blind instinct; he
will have the intelligence to understand that almost any child in the
world may have as large a share as his own offspring in the parentage of
his great-great-grandchildren. His wife he will treat as his equal; he
will not be “kind” to her, but fair and frank and loving, as one equal
should be with another; he will no more have the impertinence to pet and
pamper her, to keep painful and laborious things out of her knowledge,
to “shield” her from the responsibility of political and social work,
than he will to make a Chinese toy of her and bind her feet. He and she
will love that they may enlarge and not limit one another.
Consciously and deliberately the ideal citizen will seek beauty in
himself and in his way of living. He will be temperate rather than
harshly abstinent, and he will keep himself fit and in training as an
elementary duty. He will not be a fat or emaciated person. Fat, panting
men, and thin, enfeebled ones cannot possibly be considered good
citizens any more than dirty or verminous people. He will be just as
fine and seemly in his person as he can be, not from vanity and
self-assertion, but to be pleasing and agreeable to his fellows. The
ugly dress and ugly bearing of the “good man” of to-day will be as
incomprehensible to him as the filth of a palæolithic savage is to us.
He will not speak of his “frame,” and hang clothes like sacks over it;
he will know and feel that he and the people about him have wonderful,
delightful and beautiful bodies.
And—I speak of the ideal common citizen—he will be a student and a
philosopher. To understand will be one of his necessary duties. His
mind, like his body, will be fit and well clothed. He will not be too
busy to read and think, though he may be too busy to rush about to get
ignorantly and blatantly rich. It follows that, since he will have a
mind exercised finely and flexible and alert, he will not be a secretive
man. Secretiveness and secret planning are vulgarity; men and women need
to be educated, and he will be educated out of these vices. He will be
intensely truthful, not simply in the vulgar sense of not misstating
facts when pressed, but truthful in the manner of the scientific man or
the artist, and as scornful of concealment as they; truthful, that is to
say, as the expression of a ruling desire to have things made plain and
clear, because that so they are most beautiful and life is at its
finest....
And all that I have written of him is equally true and applies word for
word, with only such changes of gender as are needed, to the woman
citizen also.
SOME POSSIBLE DISCOVERIES
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