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CHAPTER 29 The Apotheosis ofPolitics How science could dispense with politics in the traditional sense Beatrice Potter discovered after becoming Mrs. Sidney Webb.1 From early on one of SidneyWebb's favourite arguments for socialism had been that nations should be thought of as social organisms engaged in a struggle for survival. In his contribution to the Fabian Essays, "The Historic Basis of Socialism," he warned Englishmen that, "The cultivated Athenians, Saracens, and Proven!j:als 1. She met Sidney in 1890 and married him in 1892, after her father's death. She hesitated at first but in the end could not resist Sidney's "resolute, patient affection, his honest care for mywelfare...." There was consolation, too, in the thought: "But if I marry-though I shall be drawn to it by affection and gratitude-it will be an act of renunciation of self, and not an indulgence of self as it would have been in the other case" (May 22, 1891). The differences between Sidney and Beatrice Webb are aptly summed up in her comment on their tastes in conversation with their friends: "The relation ofman's mind to the Universe is constantly present as a background in my own thought and with some of our more intimate acquaintances-with Harvey, Masterman, Haldane, Russell-I have long talks. But the subject bores Sidney as leading nowhere and as not capable of what he considers valid discussion-exactly as he dislikes discussing what train you will go by, before he has got hold of the Bradshaw. He prefers reading a statistical abstract of LCC agenda." She had dedicated herself in this marriage to an exclusively "brainworking" life but continued to think of "motherhood" as a woman's true vocation: "First and foremost I should wish a woman I loved to be a mother.... From the first I would impress on her the holiness of motherhood.... But for the sake of that very motherhood I would teach her that she must be an intellectual being-that without a strong deliberate mind she is only capable of the animal office of bearing children, not of rearing them. It pains me to see a fine intelligent girl, directly she marries, putting aside intellectual things as no longer pertinent to her daily life ... " (July 25, 1894). "And yet, the other alternative,so often nowadays chosen by intellectual women-of deliberately foregoing motherhood seems to me to thwart all the purposes of their nature. I myself-or rather we-chose this course on our marriage-but then I had passed the age when it is easy and natural for a woman to become a child bearer.... If I were again a young woman and had the choice between a brainworking profession and motherhood, I would not hesitate which life to choose (as it is I sometimes wonder whether I had better not have risked it and taken my chance)" (July 28, 1894). 402 Beatrice Webb went down in the struggle for existence before their respective competitors, who, individually inferior, were in possession ofa, at that time, more valuable social organisation." The Germans had defeated the French, he explained, "not because the average German was an inch and a halftaller than the average Frenchman, or because he had read five more books, but because the German social organism was, for the purposes of the time, superior in efficiency to the French." If Englishmen wished to hand down their influence, and not merely leave the memory of their excellence, they had better remember that it was even more important "to improve the social organism of which we form part, than to perfect our individual developments." They had to realize that the interests of the individual unit often clashed with those of the whole and that the latter must take precedence. And Webb offered the same consolation that Ritchie had-in yielding to the whole, the individual realized his highest capacities, for "the perfect and fitting development of each individual " consisted in filling "in the best possible way, of his humble function in the great social machine."1 The Webbs never deduced rules of social organization from the social organism , and in general preferred to deny the propriety ofbiological analogies. Nevertheless, the "social organism" was more than an image pressed into service for polemical purposes. It summed up for them the nature of society and made possible clear-cut, scientific answers to political problems that otherwise seemed difficult. Questions such as whether the empire was to be preferred...

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