What, apart from their economic conse-
quences, will be the effect of doles and sub-
sidies like these ? Inevitably the home will
be destroyed. The parents will be relieved
of their responsibility for the welfare and ,
care of their children, which is among the
best influences in the formation of the character

5*



68 A NATION ON PIECE WORK

of a people. The children, equally, will learn
to be dependent on, and amenable to, not
the authority of the father or mother, but
to that ubiquitous and omniscient State
which it is the ideal of the State Socialist
to impose upon us ; where every man is a
proletariat, where there is only one employer,
where the individual withers and the official
flourishes in an overtaxed land. Under his
dispensation it will not only be the home and
the family that disappear, but private enter-
prise, initiative, commerce and property. From
feeding children and mothers and regulating
industry and retarding trade, the State will
go on to usurp other functions until the country
has become one vast nursery, " bossed " by
an overpaid and irremovable bureaucracy.
We shall not have solved the question of
poverty, because everybody will then be poor.
