There is in this passage one particularly valuable idea, the idea of an
association of people to guarantee the welfare of their children in
common. I will follow that a little, though it takes me away from my
main line of thought. It seems to me that such an association might be
found in many cases a practicable way of easing the conflict that so
many men and women experience, between their individual public service
and their duty to their own families. Many people of exceptional gifts,
whose gifts are not necessarily remunerative, are forced by these
personal considerations to direct them more or less askew, to divert
them from their best application to some inferior but money-making use;
and many more are given the disagreeable alternative of evading
parentage or losing the freedom of mind needed for socially beneficial
work. This is particularly the case with many scientific investigators,
many sociological and philosophical workers, many artists, teachers and
the like. Even when such people are fairly prosperous personally they do
not care to incur the obligation to keep prosperous at any cost to their
work that a family in our competitive system involves. It gives great
ease of mind to any sort of artistic or intellectual worker to feel free
to become poor. I do not see why a group of such people should not
attempt a merger of their family anxieties and family adventures, insure
all its members, and while each retains a sufficient personal
independence for freedom of word and movement, pool their family
solicitudes and resources, organize a collective school and a common
maintenance fund for all the children born of members of the
association. I do not see why they should not in fact develop a
permanent trust to maintain, educate and send out all their children
into the world, a trust to which their childless friends and associates
could contribute by gift and bequest, and to which the irregular good
fortune that is not uncommon in the careers of these exceptional types
could be devoted. I do not mean any s rt of charity but an enlarged