It is possible to believe that so far as the middle classes are concerned this discretion has been carried altogether too far. Socialists would have forwarded their cause better if they had been more outspoken. It has led to preposterous misunderstandings; and among others to the charge that Socialism implied free-love.... The middle-class family, I am increasingly convinced, is a group in a state of tension. I believe that a modest but complete statement of the Socialist criticism of the family and the proposed Socialist substitute for the conventional relationships might awaken extraordinary responses at the present time. The great terror of the eighties and early nineties that crushed all reasonable discussion of sexual relationship is, I believe, altogether over. The whole of the present system is riddled with discontents. One factor is the enhanced sense of the child in middle-class life: the old sentiment was that the parent owned the child, the new is that the children own the parents. There has come an intensified respect for children, an immense increase in the trouble, attention and expenditure devoted to them—and a very natural and human accompaniment in the huge fall in the middle-class birth-rate. It is felt that to bear and rear children is the most noble and splendid and responsible thing in life, and an increasing number of people modestly evade it. People see more clearly the social service of parentage, and are more and more inclined to demand a recognition from the State for this service. The middle-class parent might conceivably be horrified if you suggested the State should pay him for his offspring, but he would have no objection whatever to being indirectly and partially paid by a differential income tax graduated in relation to the size of his family.