If the present isolated family of private competition is still the social unit, it seems improbable that there will be any greater natural increase than there is in France.

Will the growing idea of a closer social organisation have developed by that time to the possibility of some collective effort in this matter?  Or will that only come about after the population of the world has passed through a phase of absolute recession?  The peculiar constitution of the United States gives a remarkable freedom of experiment in these matters to each individual state, and local developments do not need to wait upon a national change of opinion; but, on the other hand, the superficial impression of an English visitor is that any such profound interference with domestic autonomy runs counter to all that Americans seem to hold dear at the present time.  These are, however, new ideas and new considerations that have still to be brought adequately before the national consciousness, and it is quite impossible to calculate how a population living under changing conditions and with a rising standard of education and a developing feminine consciousness may not think and feel and behave in a generation’s time.  At present for all political and collective action America is a democracy of untutored individualist men who will neither tolerate such interference between themselves and the women they choose to marry as the Endowment of Motherhood implies, nor view the “kids” who will at times occur even in the best-regulated families as anything but rather embarrassing, rather amusing by-products of the individual affections.

I find in the London New Age for August 15th, 1908, a description by Mr. Jerome K. Jerome of “John Smith,” the average British voter.  John Smith might serve in some respects for the common man of all the modern civilisations.  Among other things that John Smith thinks and wants, he wants: 

“a little house and garden in the country all to himself.  His idea is somewhere near half an acre of ground.  He would like a piano in the best room; it has always been his dream to have a piano.  The youngest girl, he is convinced, is musical.  As a man who has knocked about the world and has thought, he quite appreciates the argument that by co-operation the material side of life can be greatly improved.  He quite sees that by combining a dozen families together in one large house better practical results can be obtained.  It is as easy to direct the cooking for a hundred as for half a dozen.  There would be less waste of food, of coals, of lighting.  To put aside one piano for one girl is absurd.  He sees all this, but it does not alter one little bit his passionate craving for that small house and garden all to himself.  He is built that way.  He is typical of a good many other men and women built on the same pattern.  What are you going to do with them?  Change them—­their instincts, their very nature, rooted in the centuries?  Or, as an alternative, vary Socialism to fit John Smith?  Which is likely to prove the shorter operation?”

That, however, is by the way.  Here is the point at issue: