Socialism and the Family

In this paper I am anxious to define and discuss the relationship between three distinct things:

(1) Socialism, i.e. a large, a slowly elaborating conception of a sane and organized state and moral culture to replace our present chaotic way of living,

The first is to me a very great thing indeed, the form and substance of my ideal life, and all the religion I possess. Let me make 6my confession plain and clear. I am, by a sort of predestination, a Socialist. I perceive, I cannot help talking and writing about Socialism, and shaping and forwarding Socialism. I am one of a succession—one of a growing multitude of witnesses, who will continue. It does not—in the larger sense—matter how many generations of us must toil and testify. It does not matter, except as our individual concern, how individually we succeed or fail, what blunders we make, what thwartings we encounter, what follies and inadequacies darken our private hopes and level our personal imaginations to the dust. We have the light. We know what we are for, and that the light that now glimmers so dimly through us must in the end prevail. To us Socialism is no piece of political strategy, no economic opposition of class to class; it is a plan for the reconstruction of human life, for the replacement of a disorder by order, for the making of a state in which mankind shall live bravely and beautifully beyond our present imagining.