Page:Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome - William Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax (1909).djvu/21

 Rh for them: not unreasonable too to look with some special sentiment on brothers and sisters, even when manhood has drifted them away from our lives and their aspirations, since in years past we were living with them in such familiarity when they and we were innocent and undeveloped. But what relation does this light and easy yoke of sentiment bear to the iron chain of conventional sham duty which all of us, even the boldest, are oppressed by so sorely: a chain too that is broken amidst various circumstances of real and conventional disgrace whenever necessity, as to-day understood, that is, commercial necessity, compels it? In short, the family professes to exist as affording us a haven of calm and restful affection and the humanising influences of mutual help and consideration, but it ignores quietly its real reason for existence, its real aim, namely, protection for individualist property by means of inheritance, and a nucleus for resistance to the outside world, whether that take the form of other families or the public weal, such as it may be.

But this shows after all but the best