New worlds for old - 1908 Author:Herbert George Wells Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. THE SECOND MAIN GENERALISATION OF SOCIALISM. We have considered the Socialist criticism of the present state of affairs in relation to the most i... more »mportant of all public questions, the question of the welfare and upbringing of the next generation. We have stated the general principle of social reconstruction that emerges from that criticism. We have now to enter upon the question of ways and means, the economic question. We have to ask whether the vision we have conjured up of a whole population well fed, well clad, well educated —in a word, well brought-up—is, after all, only an amiable dream. Is it true that humanity is producing all that it can produce at the present time, and managing everything about as well as it can be managed; that, as a matter of fact, there isn't enough of food and care to go round, and hence the unavoidable anxiety in the life of everyone (except in the case of a small minority of exceptionally secure people), and the absolute wretchedness of vast myriads of the poorer sort? The Socialist says, No! He asserts that our economic system is as chaotic and wasteful as our system of rearing children—is only another aspect of the same plan- lessness—-that it does its work with a needless excess offriction, that it might be far simpler and almost infinitely more productive than it is. Let us detach ourselves a little from our everyday habits of thinking in these matters; let us cease to take customary things for granted, and let us try and consider how our economic arrangements would strike a disinterested intelligence that looked at them freshly for the first time. Let us take some matter of primary economic importance, such as the housing of the population, and do our best to criticise it in this spirit of personal aloofness. In order t...« less