Page:Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome - William Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax (1909).djvu/18

 4 the middle of the 19th century, and would reduce painting and sculpture to the production of petticoated dolls without bodies. All this, which seems so refined and humane, is but the effect of the distant view of the fleshless grinning skull of civilisation seeming to offer an escape to the helpless castaways, but destined on its nearer approach to suffocate them with, the stench of its corruption, and then to vanish aimlessly into the void, leaving them weltering on the ocean of life which its false hope has rendered more dreadful than before.

Let us then go through some of the forms through which this universal hypocrisy of modern society, which is its special characteristic, manifests itself. Our present family of blood relationship, based on assumed absolute monogamy, recognises feeble responsibility outside itself, and professes to regulate the degrees of affection to be felt between different persons according to the amount of kinship between them, so that, for instance, the brotherhood of blood would almost extinguish the sense of duty in that other brotherhood of inclination or