Anna Garlin Spencer The Family and it's Members 
 
 
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 INTRODUCTION Pg 2 
   
 =A Threefold Aim.=--This book is based upon three theses--namely, 
 first, that the monogamic, private, family is a priceless inheritance 
 from the past and should be preserved; second, that in order to 
 preserve it many of its inherited customs and mechanisms must be 
 modified to suit new social demands; and third, that present day 
 experimentation and idealistic effort already indicate certain 
 tendencies of change in the family order which promise needed 
 adjustment to ends of highest social value. 
   
 Many learned books have been written concerning the evolution of sex, 
 the history of matrimonial institutions and the development of the 
 family. This volume is not an attempted rival of any of these. The 
 work of Havelock Ellis, of Le Tourneau, of Otis T. Mason, of Geddes 
 and Thompson, and others building upon the foundations laid by the 
 great pioneers in the study of the family, constitute a sufficient 
 mine of historical information and scientific analysis and evaluation. 
 The studies and suggestions of Olive Schreiner, Mrs. Clews Parsons, 
 Mrs. Helen Bosanquet, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ellen Key and others 
 indicate the tendency of modern inquiry into the just basis of the 
 family order. The work of Professors Howard, Giddings, Thomas, Boss, 
 Goodsell, Calhoun, Patten, Dealey, Cooley, Ellwood, Todd and others in 
 college fields, shows the importance of the family and the necessity 
 of giving all that concerns it the most serious attention. 
   
 This book aims to begin where many of these students leave off and to 
 turn specific attention to the problems of personal and ethical 
 decision which now face men and women who would make their own married 
 life and parenthood successful. The past experience of the race is 
 drawn upon only in so far as it seems to explain present conditions 
 and point the way to future social and personal achievements. 
   
 =Basic Principles Underlying All Socially Useful Changes.=--A 
 fundamental principle in democracy is the right and duty of every 
 human being to develop a strong, noble and distinctive individuality. 
 For such development it is necessary that a person be self-supporting, 
 free of despotic control by others, and able and willing to bear equal 
 part with every other human being in the social order to which he or 
 she belongs. 
 
 
 
 INTRODUCTION Pg 3 
   
 This implies that no human being should be wholly sacrificed in 
 personal development to the service or welfare of any other human 
 being, or group of human beings, either inside or outside the family 
 circle. On the other hand, after temporary excursions into an extreme 
 individualism that ordained a free-for-all competition in every walk 
 of life, society is now keenly alive to the need for control of 
 personal desire and individual activity within channels of social 
 usefulness. It is beginning to be clearly seen that society has a 
 right to demand from any person or class of persons that form of 
 community service which definitely inheres in the social function 
 which is assumed by, or which devolves upon, such person or class of 
 persons. In the old days of "status," when each and every person found 
 himself in a place set for him and from which he could not depart, 
 there was only the duty of being content and useful in the "sphere of 
 life to which he was called." In the new condition of "contract," in 
 which each and every person in a democratic community finds himself at 
 liberty to use all common opportunities in the interest of his own 
 achievement, there is the duty of choice along every avenue of purpose 
 and of activity. This gives the new double call to the intelligence 
 and conscience; the call to become the best personality one can make 
 of oneself and the call to serve the common life to ends of social 
 well-being. 
   
 =The Sense of Kind and the Sense of Difference.=--Doctor Giddings 
 declares in fine summary "we may conceive of society as any plural 
 number of sentient creatures more or less continuously subjected to 
 common stimuli, to differing stimuli and to inter-stimulation, and 
 responding thereto in like behaviour, concerted activity or 
 coöperation, as well as in unlike or competitive activity; and 
 becoming, therefore, with developing intelligence, coherent through a 
 dominating consciousness of kind while always sufficiently conscious 
 of difference to insure a measure of individual liberty." Democracy 
 tends to enlarge the area of those who, while conscious of kind that 
 unites, are also keen in desire to develop in liberty any natural 
 difference which can make their personality felt as distinctive or 
 powerful. The individual differences among women were wholly ignored 
 in the past. They were never in reality all alike, as they were 
 commonly thought to be. The usual designation of a subject class lumps 
 all together as if all were the same. It is the mark of emergence from 
 the mass to the class, and from the class to the individual, that more 
 and more defines differences between persons. Women have now, for the 
 first time in the civilization called Christian, arrived at a point in 
 which differences between members of their sex can claim social 
 recognition. They are, therefore, now called upon as never before to 
 balance by conscious effort the personal desire and the social claim. 
 The family, more than any other inherited institution, feels the 
 oscillations between the individual demand for personal achievement 
 and the response to the social need for large service within group 
 relationships which now, for the first time, stir in the consciousness 
 of average women. 
   
 =The Family as We Know It Is the Central Nursery of Character.=--The 
 inevitable outcome of the new freedom, education and economic 
 opportunity of women gives us the problem of the modern family.  
 
 
 
 INTRODUCTION Pg 4 
   
 The 
 ideal of the democracy we are trying to achieve is higher personality 
 in all the mass of the people. The method of democracy so far as we 
 can see is education, perfected and universalized, by which all the 
 children of each generation may be developed physically, mentally, 
 morally, and vocationally to their utmost excellence and power. The 
 family, as we have inherited it, is so far the central nursery and 
 school in this development. So far in the history of the race or in 
 its present social manifestation no rival institution, even the formal 
 school, offers an adequate substitute for the family in this beginning 
 of the educative process. The intimate and vital care and nurture of 
 the individual life still depends for the mass of the people upon the 
 private, monogamic, family. This intimate and vital care of the 
 children of each generation has so far in human experience cost women 
 large expenditure of time and strength; so large expenditure that 
 personal achievement has been wholly and is even now largely 
 subordinated to the social service implied in home-making. The deepest 
 problems of the modern family inhere in the effort to adjust the new 
 freedom of women, and its new demands for individual development in 
 customary lines of vocational work, to the ancient family claim. New 
 adjustments are called for not only in the family itself but in all 
 the educational, political, economic, and social arrangements of life 
 to accommodate this new demand of women to be achieving persons 
 whether married or single. Women have entered, as newly emerging from 
 status to contract, into a man-made social organization, a man-made 
 school, a man-made industrial order, and a man-made state. 
 Achievement, individual and successful, means to most of them, as to 
 any newly enfranchised class, the type of distinctive activity and 
 accomplishment which their elder brothers have outlined. The 
 antithesis, therefore, which now works toward acute problems in the 
 minds of both men and women is between the sort of achievement which 
 men have sought after and attained, and the sort of social service 
 which the past conditions required of women. Slowly it is being 
 perceived that in the actual family service, as it is now aided by 
 social mechanisms surrounding the household, is place and economic 
 opportunity for high personal achievement by competent women. Still 
 more slowly is it being apprehended that in the new adjustments of 
 economic and professional life there is or may be opportunity for 
 married women and mothers to serve the family in high measure and also 
 attain outside some distinctive vocational pride and satisfaction of 
 craftsmanship. Most slowly of all is it being understood that the 
 future calls for such modification of specialization in outside work 
 that men and women alike may serve the generations in family devotion 
 to the sort of work fathers and mothers have to do and yet cherish 
 some personal and ideal vocational effort which may sweeten and enrich 
 their lives. 
   
 =Vital Changes in All the Basic Institutions of Society.=--There are 
 five basic institutions in modern social organization. They may be 
 named the family, the school, the church, the industrial order, and 
 the state. They have all come to us as parts of our social inheritance 
 from time too remote to reckon. They have mingled and intermingled 
 their tendencies of control and influence in varieties of social 
 functioning too numerous to mention. They are now emerging to 
 distinctness only to be engaged in new forms of interaction that make 
 the highest ideals of each and all seem fundamentally akin. 
 
 
 
 INTRODUCTION Pg 5 
   
 The main tendency of development in all these institutions is, 
 however, identical and one clearly perceived. It is the tendency from 
 status to contract, from fixed order to flexible adjustment, from 
 static to dynamic condition, already noted in regard to the family. 
   
 In the school we have moved and are now moving from an aristocracy of 
 command, by which ancient life was reproduced, to a democracy of 
 comradeship in which it is aimed to make each generation improve upon 
 its predecessor. In the church, as it has moved from the family ritual 
 at the domestic fireside to the self-chosen altar of each worshipper 
 in the world's cathedrals, the reactionaries have held on to "the 
 faith once delivered to the saints" and the progressive minds have 
 moved to some new prophecy of the truth and right; until to-day, as 
 Professor Coe well says, "the aim of the modern church is to give 
 education in the art of brotherhood," and to evoke "faith in a 
 fatherly God and in a human destiny that outreaches all the accidents 
 of our frailty." In the industrial order, still in the trial stage of 
 conflict between the fixed status of the "hand" and the "master" and 
 the contract of equal partners in a coöperative enterprise, the 
 movement is steadily toward the social requirement of equality, 
 justice, and good-will. In the state we have achieved mechanical 
 expression of complete democracy. We still lack, and in our own 
 country woefully lack, the "spirit within the wheels" that can move 
 with power toward an actual government by the people, for the people, 
 and truly of the people. Yet by fire and sword and through blood and 
 suffering the handwriting of equality, justice, and fraternity has 
 been set in our Constitutions and Bills of Right. What remains to be 
 done is the socializing of the political mechanisms. That means simply 
 that we shall learn to live our democracy and be no longer content to 
 merely write it in law. The difficulty now is not so much to get a 
 good statement of democratic right as to make it work effectively in 
 common action. This fact makes it of doubtful wisdom that men and 
 women so often concentrate effort on the eighteenth-century 
 doctrinaire position of appeal for Constitutional Amendments and 
 blanket state legislation as if of themselves these could secure 
 actual personal liberty and social welfare. The objection that some 
 forward-looking persons have to the demand of the "National Woman's 
 Party," so called, for a Federal Amendment that shall "abolish all sex 
 discriminations in law" is not that its principle is too radical, but 
 that its method is too antiquated. 
   
 The business of the present and the immediate future is to so adjust 
 the family life to "two heads" as to keep love and to balance duties. 
 The next job is to adjust the family order itself to a contract system 
 of industry that gives each member of the family a free and often a 
 separating access to daily work and to its return in wages or salary, 
 in such manner as to retain family unity and mutual aid while giving 
 freedom and opportunity for each of its members. The pressing 
 political duty is to use the new voters, the women recently 
 enfranchised, for needed emancipation from partisan and selfish 
 political despotism in the interest of effective choices for the 
 public good. The ever-growing demand of the school is for some 
 translation of freedom of self-development in terms of respect for 
 social order and in the spirit of social service. The family life, in 
 the United States, at least, stands not so much in need of manifestoes 
 of equality of rights between men and women as of delicate and 
 discriminating adjustments of that equality to the social demands upon 
 husbands and wives and upon fathers and mothers. This book aims to 
 suggest some of the changes in external customs and inherited ways of 
 living which may lead toward a firmer hold upon social idealism within 
 the family, as well as within all other inherited institutions, while 
 new bases of democratic freedom are being firmly installed. 
 
 
 
 INTRODUCTION Pg 6 
   
 =Coveted Uses of the Book.=--This volume is intended to meet the needs 
 of college and teacher-training school students; of university 
 extension classes; of study groups in Women's Clubs, Consumers' 
 Leagues, Leagues of Women Voters and Church Classes. It is also hoped 
 that it may form the basis for private study by groups within the 
 home. 
   
 The book is written with a poignant sense of the breaking up of old 
 social foundations in the agony and terror of the Great War. It is 
 sent forth with a keen understanding of the spirit of youth that 
 to-day challenges every inherited institution and ideal, even to the 
 bone and marrow of the church, the state, the industrial order, the 
 educative process, and even the family itself. It issues from an 
 abiding faith that "above all things Truth beareth away the victory" 
 and hence that no fearless inquiry can harm the essential values of 
 life. It confesses a clear trust in "the Spirit that led us hither and 
 is leading us onward." It would sound a call to hold all that has 
 dowered the race at the sources of life sacred and of worth. It would 
 echo all that bids us move onward to higher and better things. 
   
 The greatest ambition herein recorded is to serve as one who opens 
 doors of insight into the House of the Interpreter. 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER I (THE FAMILY) 
   
   "The family is the heart's fatherland; the fatherland is the 
   cradle of humanity."--MAZZINI. 
   
   "The family has two functions; as a smaller group it affords 
   opportunity for eliciting qualities of affection and character 
   which cannot be displayed in a larger group; and in the second 
   place it is a training for future members of the larger group in 
   the qualities of disposition and character which are essential to 
   citizenship. Marriage converts an attachment between man and woman 
   into a deliberate, permanent, responsible, intimate union for a 
   common end of mutual good. Modern society requires that the 
   husband and wife contemplate lifelong companionship, and the 
   affection between husband and wife is enriched by the relation of 
   parents to the children which are their care. The end of the 
   family is not economic profit but mutual aid and the continuance 
   and progress of the race."--PROFESSOR TUFTS, in _Ethics_, by Dewey 
   and Tufts. 
   
   =Social Work and Family Conservation.=--"By whatever name they may 
   be called, the most essential elements of social work are those 
   which seek to conserve the family life; to strengthen or 
   supplement the home; to give children in foster homes or elsewhere 
   the care of which tragic misfortune has deprived them in their 
   natural homes; to provide income necessary in the proper care of 
   their children; to restore broken homes; to discover and, if 
   possible, remove destructive influences which interfere with 
   normal home life and the reasonable discharge of conjugal and 
   parental obligations. The institutions which exist for the benefit 
   of those individuals who have no home or who need care of a kind 
   that cannot well be supplied in the home, only emphasize the 
   importance of conserving family life when its essential elements 
   are present."--EDWARD T. DEVINE. 
   
   "Human nature has achieved the consciousness that existence has an 
   aim. Human life, therefore, is a mission; the mission of reaching 
   that aim, by incessant activity upon the path toward it and 
   perpetual warfare against the obstacles opposed to it."--MAZZINI. 
   
     The Home: 
   
         "For something that abode endued 
         With temple-like repose; an air 
         Of life's kind purposes pursued 
         With ordered freedom, sweet and fair; 
         A tent, pitched in a world not right, 
         It seemed, whose inmates, every one, 
         On tranquil faces bore the light 
         Of duties beautifully done." 
                       --COVENTRY PATMORE. 
   
   
 =The Experience of the Past.=--By many experiments, over many 
 differing "folk-ways," the modern family has arrived. We name it now 
 "monogamic," and mean by the name the union of one man and one woman, 
 in aim at least for life, and their children. Whereas once it was the 
 rule of a tribe or clan which determined every detail of 
 sex-relationship, a rule represented either by the mother or the 
 father, it is now an individualistic choice of two adult persons only, 
 socially legalized by a required certificate and ceremony. Whereas 
 once it was the basis of all social order and mutual aid, it is now 
 one of several institutions inherited from the past, and is itself 
 subject to the state, which is the chief heir to our social 
 inheritance. The family, however, is now, as it has always been, the 
 interior, vital, and so far indispensable social relationship, 
 beginning, as it does, at first hand the training of each individual 
 toward membership in society-at-large. In the past, under the 
 mother-rule, the social elements of the family were emphasized, since 
 her power was one delegated by the group of which she and her children 
 were a part and closely related to peaceful ways and to primitive 
 industrial arts. Under the father-rule, the political and legal 
 elements of the family were emphasized, since his was an autocratic 
 and personal control of wife and children, even of adult sons, and in 
 many cases of his own mother, and marked the beginning and worked 
 toward the power of the modern state. In all cases, however, it was as 
 a representative of the group-ideal and the group-control that the 
 parents held sway over the family; and if the family is to persist in 
 the future as an institution it will hold its authority over 
 individual lives as trustee of society-at-large. Name, line of 
 inheritance, rights and duties of one member toward other members and 
 to the family group as a whole, must all be determined in the last 
 analysis by the "mores" of the people and the time concerned. 
   
 =New Ideals Affecting the Family.=--To-day the ideal of equality of 
 rights for men and women, and the ideal of ministration to childhood's 
 needs, are stronger than the ideal of family control. The social 
 demand is, therefore, for standardization of family life and of 
 child-care on a high plane of physical, mental, and moral development 
 of each individual life rather than for an autocratic representation 
 of the power of what Professor James called "the collectivity that 
 owns us." Hence certain problems which have never before been clear in 
 social consciousness are now arising to enter all debates on family 
 stability and family success. 
   
 =The Headship of the Father.=--During the middle ages of our 
 civilization and for centuries of our later past the headship of the 
 family rested securely in the father. Now the ideal of "Two heads in 
 council; Two beside the hearth; Two in the tangled business of the 
 world" is working toward democratization of the family. This leads 
 toward a legal status and an economic adjustment in which the relation 
 of husband and wife may be equalized toward each other and toward 
 their children. In this new process, which is a part of the general 
 movement we call democracy, there are special difficulties of 
 modification peculiar to the family relation. The monogamic ideal and 
 practice demands permanency, solidarity of interest and unity of 
 control both within and without the family circle, at least until all 
 the children of a marriage have reached maturity. The ideal of the 
 rightful individuation of women, and even of minor children, works 
 against that legal solidarity and obvious unity. The old way of 
 obtaining these elements of family stability, a method still in vogue 
 in many places and still defended by some persons, was to place all 
 power of control in the hands of the husband and father, and thus make 
 the wife a perpetual minor and leave the children wholly under 
 patriarchal bondage. The modern ideal of women as entitled to 
 self-ownership and self-control even when married, and the social 
 need, just beginning to be understood, for women as for men to fully 
 develop their powers and capacities militates against the legal 
 headship of the father. To-day there is a demand, growing in 
 insistency, that we accept the right of each member of the family 
 circle to individual development and work toward its realization. 
 There is also the demand that we retain inviolate the social means for 
 successful family life. Some do not hesitate to say that to fulfil 
 both these demands is not within human power. 
   
 =Is It Possible to Democratize the Family?=--The witty writer who 
 declares that "the democratization of the family is impossible, since 
 the family is by nature an autocracy and ruled by the worst 
 disposition in it," is not without endorsers. There are also those, 
 more serious in intent, who claim that the family as an inherited 
 institution is by virtue of its inmost quality inimical to the 
 personal freedom of its members, and hence that the state, which is 
 now standardizing child-care, must undertake the practical duties 
 involved and leave both parents free to change marital relationship at 
 will before or after the birth of children and maintain their separate 
 bachelor or spinster freedom. 
   
 =Mating and Parenthood.=--This latter view is stated definitely by one 
 writer who believes that a new morality will "separate entirely, 
 mating from parenthood" in the interest of a more effective social 
 arrangement--"mating," or the free union of a man and a woman in 
 sex-relationship, to be in that case "solely a private matter with 
 which no one but the parties involved have any concern." "Parenthood," 
 on the other hand, having relation, as it must, to society, requires, 
 so this writer declares, from either the father or the mother, as 
 inclination and capacity indicate, or from both parents if such should 
 be the wish of both, a "contract with the state" binding to an 
 upbringing of the child in accordance with accepted standards of 
 physical, mental, moral, and vocational demands. Such a contract with 
 the state in respect to child-care and the training of youth might 
 give far better results, be it confessed, than follow the utterly 
 ignorant and careless breeding of the young of the human race by those 
 on lowest levels of thought and action. Few, however, think such a 
 contract would meet all essentials of child-development. 
   
 =What Is the Modern Ideal in Child-care?=--What is the ideal of those 
 most advanced in knowledge of childhood's needs and most sincere in 
 devotion to the welfare and happiness of the young? It is certainly 
 not one which ignores or minimizes the influence of the private home 
 or one which includes the belief that one parent, however wise or 
 good, can do as much for a child as two parents working in harmony 
 over a long period of years can accomplish. 
   
 Nor can the influence of such a proposed separation of mating and 
 parenthood upon the sex-relationship itself be ignored in any proposed 
 new ways of living together. Some of the critics of the family, as we 
 know it, may put "duty" in quotation marks when dealing with 
 sex-relationship in the effort to put "love" on the throne, but 
 experience shows that in all the intimate relationships of life some 
 stay from without the individual desire is needed to restrain from 
 impulsive change and lessen frictional expression of temperamental 
 weakness. On reason and a sense of obligation are based all successful 
 human arrangements, and these need social support. 
   
 =Modern Ideals in Sex-relationship.=--To so separate mating and 
 parenthood as to make it the business of no one but the two chiefly 
 concerned when or how often such mating became a personal experience, 
 and to make it a matter of social indifference whether one or two 
 parents contracted with society for the right upbringing of the child 
 or children involved (with no troublesome questions asked about either 
 parent not in evidence in the contract), would certainly blur the 
 social outline of the family, as we know it, to the point of legal 
 nullification. There might, indeed, grow up in such an imagined 
 condition a form of contract between two persons mating, as well as 
 one between parents and state, in respect to parenthood's social 
 responsibilities, and where such personal contract was broken redress 
 from the courts might be sought and obtained. The effect, however, of 
 such a plan as that proposed would inevitably be to leave the nobler, 
 the more loving and less selfish of the men and women involved, more 
 surely even than is now the case, the victims of the weaker, the more 
 grasping, and the more selfish of the twain. 
   
 =Ellen Key and Her Gospel.=--Indeed, the high priestess of the gospel 
 of freedom from legal bondage in sex-relation, Ellen Key, declares 
 that "a higher culture in love can be attained only by correlating 
 self-control with love and parental responsibility," a correlation she 
 believes would "follow as a consequence when love and parental 
 responsibility were made the sole conditions of sex-relations." She 
 also says that "in all cases where there is an affinity of souls and 
 the sympathy of friendship, love is what it always was and always will 
 be, the coöperation of the father with the mother in the education of 
 the children as well as the coöperation of the mother with the father 
 in all great social works." She thus links her ideal of true freedom 
 for the choices of love with social obligations and hence again with 
 what is best in inherited family life. 
   
 In addition, however, to the claim that love should be freed from 
 legal restraints in the interest of self-expression and 
 self-development (whether or not from Ellen Key's high standpoint of 
 parental responsibility) we have another attack upon the legal 
 autonomy of the family, as we know it, in the demand of some radical 
 feminists that "illegitimacy should be abolished." 
   
 =What is Meant by This Demand?=--A crusade against all sex-association 
 that may result in children born out of wedlock is understandable but 
 is surely not the counsel of perfection in sex-control intended by 
 those making this demand. What is meant seems rather that we should 
 take ground against any legal distinction between the status of 
 children born within and those born outside of legal marriage. What 
 would that be likely to mean in respect to the monogamic family? The 
 hard conditions attaching to both unmarried motherhood and unfathered 
 childhood, often in the past wholly cruel and unsocial, have been much 
 ameliorated during the last fifty years and largely through the 
 efforts of those who held firmly to the value of legal marriage and 
 the accepted family system in general. Laws have been passed and 
 firmly executed to find the shirking father and bring him to marriage 
 with the woman involved; or if such marriage is not possible or 
 feasible to compel him to make financial contribution toward the 
 support and education of the child. 
   
 =The Legitimation of Children Born Out of Wedlock.=--If marriage 
 occurs, then the child otherwise illegitimate may come within the 
 legal family through appropriate laws which the most conservative now 
 advocate. In such cases the belated acceptance within the family bond 
 does not count seriously against the child. If marriage does not 
 occur, and there are many cases of irregular sex-relationship where 
 that is not the right solution of the problems involved in 
 illegitimacy, then the unmarried mother is helped to establish herself 
 with her child where cruel stigma and useless curiosity may be best 
 avoided. To aid in her protection she is encouraged by many agencies 
 and persons to take the title of "Mrs.," since that is a conventional 
 term at best and may be given according to age (as in the older 
 custom) or come to attach itself to motherhood as justly as to 
 wifehood. More and more society is reaching out through law and wise 
 philanthropy to fasten mutual responsibility for child-care and 
 nurture upon both parents even where they are not legally married. 
 This movement must go on until the handicap of the child born out of 
 wedlock is reduced to its lowest possible terms.[1] 
   
 =Philanthropic Tendencies Respect Legal Marriage.=--These tendencies, 
 however, are not in the direction, intentionally at least, of making 
 legal condition and status in respect to name, inheritance of family 
 property from a father whose parental relationship is not legally 
 established, and public recognition of parenthood, identical in the 
 case of children born within and without the legal family circle. Is 
 such an identical status and condition desirable? If so, in what way 
 could this goal be accomplished? 
   
 If men and women become fathers and mothers without benefit of clergy 
 or state license and later marry, then the children born before and 
 those born after the wedding ceremony may, usually do, and always 
 should, become one flock. In many countries where legal marriage is 
 difficult because of expense involved or distance from officials, such 
 cases often occur and with no apparent social harm where there is real 
 affection and true loyalty between the men and women involved. Many 
 illegitimate conceptions are similarly taken care of by the enforced 
 or assisted marriage of the parties concerned just before the birth of 
 the child. In many cases, however, in our own country doubtless the 
 great majority, the father concerned has an illicit connection with 
 some girl quite outside his own social circle and later, as in the 
 famous "Kallikak" case, marries a woman of his own class and has a 
 family of recognized children. What would be advised in such a case by 
 those advocating the legal abolition of illegitimacy? Should a 
 searching investigation of the whole previous life of every 
 prospective bridegroom be made, and wherever a previous relationship 
 can be found which involves parenthood a legal prohibition work 
 automatically to prevent a second relationship? This seems to be the 
 plan proposed by Mrs. Edith Houghton Hooker in her recent book, _The 
 Laws of Sex_, as in her program of "measures designed to minimize 
 extra-marital sex relationships and to check the commercialization of 
 vice," she lays down the principle "the common parentage of an 
 illegitimate child to constitute marriage or if either of the parents 
 was previously married, bigamy." This would, of course, carry out her 
 next item of the social program, namely, "place the illegitimate child 
 on the same plane as the legitimate," but that plane would be a very 
 low one in the cases that would legally become those of bigamy. In the 
 case of very unequal partners in an illicit sex-relationship, a legal 
 union that was based on the fact of equal responsibility for a child 
 born out of wedlock, and made a legal necessity only because of that 
 mutual relationship, could surely be good neither for the men and 
 women involved nor for any child or children thus legitimatized by 
 force of arms, as it were. 
   
 =Illicit Unions of Men and Women in Divergent Social Position.=--On 
 the other hand, in cases where the illegitimate parenthood is the 
 fruit of a union between a man of a high and a woman or girl of a very 
 low grade of intelligence and of social position a legal prohibition 
 which would work automatically to prevent any later and legal marriage 
 with a woman of higher grade (because of the existence of a child by 
 the extra-marital relation) would not be wholly satisfactory. 
 Although such a regulation would prevent any legitimate children being 
 born of that father, it would not necessarily legitimatize the child 
 or children of the first relation. The social value of either of these 
 plans is extremely doubtful. 
   
 =Shall We Return to Polygamy?=--Again, in such cases as have been 
 indicated, should the first mother be ignored and the child or 
 children of the irregular union be adopted into the legal home of the 
 father and added to the registered children of the second mother? Some 
 such plan has been adopted in some countries and at certain periods of 
 family development. Such a course undertaken now, however, in modern 
 conditions would, in addition to the possible suffering of the adopted 
 children, be most unjust to the unmarried mother. Or, again, would it 
 be advised that the first mother with her child or children be 
 accepted as a legal part of the home in which the second mother is 
 legally installed? That would be a frank return to polygamy in cases 
 where there have been irregular pre-marital relations outside of the 
 monogamic bond. Or do all those who advocate the abolition of 
 illegitimacy take the ground, which some of them definitely do, that 
 the monogamic family is obsolete and that the state in its corporate 
 capacity should take full charge of all children? Or, when the demand 
 is sifted to its ultimate elements, is it merely that the unjust 
 conditions attending the lives of children born out of wedlock must be 
 ameliorated by a larger charity of feeling, a better understanding of 
 human weakness and the effect of bad social conditions, and the 
 constant effort to give all children as nearly equal chance at the 
 best things of life as can be made possible by social feeling and wise 
 social care? 
   
 =All Children Entitled to Best Development Possible.=--If the latter 
 is all that is meant, the phrase the "abolition of illegitimacy" is 
 unfortunate and the real agreement among philanthropists, educators 
 and all right-thinking people on the just claim of all children 
 (however they may chance to arrive on this troubled planet) to the 
 best development possible, should be emphasized in the slogan. It is 
 well to remember that only a minority of children in any country, and 
 in many countries a very small minority, are involved directly in this 
 problem of the right treatment of children born outside the legal 
 family. It would seem the part of social wisdom, therefore, in this, 
 as in all other matters of social control, to ask ourselves the 
 question, What rule on the whole gives the best condition for the 
 largest number of persons?--and on the answer to that question base 
 our law and custom, then add considerate treatment for the minority 
 who must in the nature of things have some handicap if the rule is 
 obeyed by the majority. 
   
 =The Work of the Children's Bureau.=--To lessen this handicap, the 
 Federal Children's Bureau in Washington, D.C., began in 1915 an 
 inquiry into illegitimacy as a child welfare problem, causing studies 
 to be made of laws in different States of the Union. The results of 
 this study were published in 1919 in Bureau Publication No. 42. In 
 1920 conferences were held under the auspices of the Bureau to 
 consider standards of protection which might be embodied in laws. A 
 Committee appointed to draft suggestions arrived at and to recommend 
 the same made a Report, which is published in Bureau Publication No. 
 77. 
   
 The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws on 
 request formed a Committee on Status and Protection of Illegitimate 
 Children which reported at length to the Thirty-first Annual Meeting 
 of that body in August, 1921. This report formed the basis of 
 discussion by legal experts, and in the meeting at San Francisco of 
 recent date a revised program for "Uniform State Legislation for 
 Children Born Out of Wedlock" was accepted and recommended. The title 
 used is itself an advance upon old ideas. 
   
 =The Suggested Uniform Law.=--It is less harsh to speak of "those born 
 out of wedlock" than of the "illegitimate." Moreover, the 
 recommendations include a suggestion that in future in all reference 
 in legal papers or official notices to a child born out of wedlock it 
 "shall be sufficient for all purposes to refer to the mother as the 
 parent having the sole custody of the child or to the child as being 
 in the sole custody of the mother, no explicit reference being made to 
 illegitimacy except in birth certificates or records of judicial 
 proceedings in which the question of birth out of wedlock is at 
 issue." The general law in the States of our Union legitimatizes a 
 child born out of wedlock by the subsequent inter-marriage of the 
 parents. This makes it easy for men and women to repair an injury if 
 they can marry after the birth of their child. In any case the 
 recommendations for uniform State laws make it clear that the tendency 
 is strong to bring legal pressure to bear upon the father of a child 
 by an unwedded mother to pay the expenses of her confinement, to 
 support the child under the laws requiring "support of poor relatives" 
 or under statutes specifically obligating recognition of parental 
 responsibility outside the marriage bond; and this obligation, it is 
 held, should continue in recognition and enforcement until the child 
 is sixteen years of age. 
   
 Although there is strong demand on the part of many to give the child 
 born out of wedlock the "right to inherit from the father's estate 
 even though not legitimated," the Committee of the Commissioners on 
 Uniform State Laws do not so recommend. Their statement concerning 
 Liability of the Father's Estate is as follows: "The obligation of the 
 father where his paternity has been judicially established in his 
 lifetime or has been acknowledged by him in writing or by the part 
 performance of his obligations is enforceable against his estate in 
 such an amount as the court may determine, having regard to the age of 
 the child, the ability of the mother to support it, the amount of 
 property left by the father, the number, age, and financial condition 
 of the lawful issue, if any, and the rights of the widow, if any." 
   
 To this writer this covers the just obligation if rightly administered 
 and by leaving still a distinction in law between the rights of 
 children born within and those born outside the marriage bond helps to 
 preserve the interests of the majority of children. 
   
 In any case the preservation of such distinctions as are left in the 
 milder and more humane laws advocated should help in making men and 
 women anxious to give all the children for which they may be 
 responsible a legal right to both parents by due process of marriage. 
   
 =Have Unmarried Women a Social Right to Motherhood?=--It is not alone 
 philanthropic interest in the welfare of a class of children now 
 handicapped by birth outside of legal family bonds, that has issued 
 the call to "abolish illegitimacy." The slogan is also an expression 
 of a new demand that women fit to bear and rear children and deeply 
 desiring that personal experience and the social obligation which it 
 implies, should be given a social right to become mothers whether or 
 not the fitting permanent mate be found for a life-union under the 
 law. This demand is reaching a critical poignancy in those countries 
 in which the Great War has added to a long-increasing "surplus of 
 women" an astounding total of millions of women fit to marry whose 
 rightful mates are buried on the fields of conflict. Shall these 
 women, it is asked, be denied motherhood as well as wifehood? Shall 
 the state lose the children these women, child-loving and noble and 
 wise, might bear to help make good the horrible losses that war has 
 entailed? 
   
 Moreover, women everywhere are discerning the shallow inconsistency 
 between the ideal so long preached of motherhood as woman's chief if 
 not her only contribution to normal life and genuine social usefulness 
 and the abnormal economic conditions and double ethical standards 
 which doom so many women to single life. Still deeper in the hearts of 
 women, now for the first time free to give voice to inner questionings 
 of the inherited organization of society which has bound them to 
 conventions written solely by men in statute and custom, rises the 
 query, Is the present fashion of courtship and wedding favorable for 
 installing fit women as mothers or keeping to single life those least 
 capable of that social function? 
   
 =Ellen Key's Estimate of Motherhood.=--Ellen Key expresses this 
 feeling that fitness for a task so tremendous as parenthood is more 
 important than any mechanism by which parenthood is secured when she 
 says, "It is solely from one moral point of view that motherhood 
 without marriage, as well as the right of free divorce, must be 
 judged. Irresponsible motherhood is always sin with or without 
 marriage; responsible motherhood is always sacred with or without 
 marriage." And again she says, "The one necessary thing is to make 
 ever greater demands upon the men and women who take to themselves the 
 right to give humanity new beings." Ellen Key has also much to say 
 about the superior value of what women can do in and through their 
 race-service as mothers to anything they can do outside of that 
 office, except perhaps as teachers helping mothers. Her feeling on 
 this matter is echoed by not a few women who ask for the social right 
 to motherhood even when denied or not desiring ordinary family life. 
 She declares that "It is an indisputable fact that if the majority of 
 women no longer had the calm and repose to abide at the source of life 
 but wanted to navigate all the seas with men, the sex contrasts would 
 resolve themselves not into harmony but into monotony. Until women 
 come to realize this it must still be insisted that the gain to 
 society is nothing if millions of women do the work that men could do 
 better and evade or fulfil poorly the greater tasks of life and 
 happiness, the creation of men and the creation of souls." To fulfil 
 these tasks properly she insists that women require the same human 
 rights as men but they should use their new power of choice "in the 
 field of life, in those provinces in which imponderable values are 
 created, values that cannot be reduced to figures and yet are the sole 
 values capable of transforming humanity; for it is not utilities but 
 complete human beings that elevate life." The same feeling that she 
 expresses animates many women who desire fit women to be mothers, even 
 if unmarried, at whatever cost to old forms of family autonomy. 
   
 =Monogamic Marriage Does Not Work Inerrantly.=--Certainly no one can 
 contend that monogamic marriage has worked inerrantly to give women 
 who are "born mothers" a chance for their natural career, or to keep 
 from physical motherhood within legal marriage all the women unfit for 
 the spiritual tasks of parenthood. It is certain that in present 
 conditions many women most needed for the transmission of both 
 physical and social inheritance in finest form are side-tracked from 
 the central roadway of life, and the race suffers thereby. 
   
 Any custom, however, which should make it a negligible matter whether 
 or not a permanent "houseband" were enlisted with a "housewife" in 
 building a home in which to place a child desired must tend toward a 
 reversion, not an advance, in social organization. Or so it seems to 
 many students of the evolution of the family. 
   
 The mother and child made the first social grouping in which love and 
 trust could work. The father, as we know him, is a later asset of 
 social progress. He has taken into the home many things we want now to 
 get rid of, as, for example, a social tendency toward masculine 
 monopolies. His genius for organization in political and economic 
 fields has in many ways worked against the right alignment of men and 
 women in family relations. But can we do without the father 
 altogether, save for a brief hour of service as a "biologic 
 necessity"? Still more, can we have for mothers that "calm and repose" 
 which Ellen Key bespeaks for them unless they have fathers of 
 efficiency and character to help them in their peculiar task of 
 life-creation? Is not the alternative to the father's partnership in 
 family life the creation of a class of "state mothers" or the social 
 endowment of all mothers by public grant? 
   
 =New Demand that Motherhood Have Social Support.=--In point of fact, 
 all the demands for new freedom in respect to motherhood rest 
 primarily upon the recognition by society-at-large of a claim upon it, 
 financial as well as spiritual, for the benefit of all who are allowed 
 to be mothers, in right of their own fitness for the function. And 
 this recognition of the social value of mothers is emphasized by many 
 who hold firmly to the monogamic family. It is not clear that any 
 sweeping changes away from the private family should be made to meet a 
 condition that may be changed by less drastic means. 
   
 =Local Discrepancies in Numbers of Men and of Women.=--Fit men and 
 women are not always together in the same place. To have more men in a 
 given locality than can possibly have wives or more women than can 
 possibly marry under the monogamic system is to derange its workings. 
 Is it conceivable that we shall always be so stupid and clumsy in 
 economic adjustment that such conditions shall continue, now that we 
 are able to be more easily mobile and flexible every decade? The mere 
 mechanical maladjustment caused by serious discrepancies in numbers of 
 the two sexes; in cities and in older countries more women, in 
 manufacture and pioneer agriculture more men; certainly creates 
 serious conditions. Social engineering is needed for remedy. We may 
 not, as so long ago was done in Virginia, transport hundreds of 
 "attractive damsels" from crowded towns, where women most do 
 congregate, to a new country, to be eagerly accepted wives on landing 
 from the ships. We are told, however, that many girls are being 
 assisted to emigrate from England to places where their service is 
 needed and where there are so many surplus men that they do marry in 
 short order. We shall find that nature and economic adjustments will 
 unite to more and more even up the two sides of life. It is a 
 sinister condition of modern life that forbids early marriage to so 
 many men and all chance of suitable marriage to so many women who 
 really desire that relationship with all their hearts. We must go 
 about its remedy with open eyes, and from frankly accepted reasons, 
 for the sake of better family conditions. 
   
 =The Increasing Tendency of Women Toward Celibate Life.=--There is, 
 however, another condition, many-sided and complex, often operating 
 upon the persons most involved unconsciously and seldom treated with 
 clarity or frankness, which works against the family as an 
 institution. This condition is the increasing tendency of many of the 
 ablest women to marry very late or to refuse to marry at all. These 
 are not the women who feel defrauded that they are not mothers in 
 their own person, still less that life has cheated them in not 
 furnishing a husband. They are usually those who in youth began some 
 specialized form of vocational service which holds their interest and 
 leads toward pecuniary profit and social recognition. 
   
 They are the modern spinsters, happy and busy, who often feed their 
 motherly instincts by caring for other people's children and feel a 
 sense of relief that it is a voluntary service, which they may rightly 
 indulge in vacations, and not a bond that never releases from duty. 
 They are the maiden aunts who spend affection and money upon the 
 families of their relatives; who help their younger brothers and 
 sisters through college; who take care of the aged and invalid in the 
 family connection, and act often as stay and prop to all the weaker 
 and more burdened of their kin. What many families would do without 
 this type of unmarried woman is hard to tell. They are often grateful 
 for their release from wearing domestic cares and enjoy their sense of 
 power in general serviceableness to those they love while at the same 
 time appreciating with keen satisfaction their own joy of 
 craftsmanship in some chosen profession. Except for a brief hour now 
 and then, when sister has a new baby or brother takes a new wife, they 
 feel anything but troubled over their condition of single blessedness 
 until, perhaps, a premonition of lonely old age stirs regret. 
   
 =The Demand of Eugenists.=--From the point of view of the eugenists, 
 who demand more fecundity on the higher and less on the lower levels 
 of life, one of the most sinister of all influences inimical to family 
 life is this large and increasing band of superior and happy single 
 women who are not even discontented and make no demand for any closer 
 touch with life than is now given them. If it is bad for the family 
 for a large number of women unable to find suitable permanent mates to 
 be so eager for motherhood that they claim social permission for that 
 public service whatever their marital position, it may be still worse 
 for the family for a large number of highly superior women to cease to 
 care greatly for intimate comradeship with men or for the actual 
 experience of motherhood. Many women working and living in solitary 
 fashion until too old to risk the chances of marriage, and able to 
 find highest comradeship and largest comfort in other women's 
 companionship, have been so held by family burdens in youth that this 
 result has been inevitable. Society has, therefore, a task to prevent 
 the weight of past generations, falling now so heavily upon some young 
 men and upon far more young women, from operating against the 
 well-being of the generations to come. We should make it our social 
 business to share more justly the burdens due to old age and chronic 
 invalidism. 
   
 =Women Can Not be Forced Back to Compulsory Marriage.=--It is too late 
 in the day to pass laws forbidding women from gaining economic freedom 
 and social power in professional careers so that all the best of them 
 shall again be obliged to marry as a "means of support." Few persons 
 would do this if they could. But we can and should make haste to bring 
 together, as the State Universities of our country do so helpfully, 
 those who should be the fathers and mothers of the future, in that 
 period of life when love will take chances for the future. 
 "Propinquity," the old adage declares, is the "best incentive to 
 courtship," and it should be made to work more effectively. 
   
 In our own country, eugenists may be comforted to learn, it is still 
 fashionable to marry, even in the best families. We are told by our 
 census that more people marry in the thousand and marry young in the 
 United States than in other countries.[2] And although it may be 
 claimed that the older Americans and the finest types do not reproduce 
 so freely as social well-being requires, there is much hope that 
 movements of population, so much freer here than elsewhere among the 
 educated and competent, will lead to better sex-adjustments and to the 
 absorbing of more first-class women in family life. 
   
 =A Few Believe in a "Third Sex."=--There are those, however, although 
 but a few, who do not view with alarm the modern increase of unmarried 
 women of types most needed for motherhood. These believe that in the 
 present time, and perhaps in a long future, our complex social needs 
 cannot be met by holding the best blood and breeding within the family 
 bond, but that there must be a reserve of celibates, a few men and 
 many women, to carry on the school and to work for social amelioration 
 and social progress. This point of view, which has been sometimes 
 characterized as "defense of a third sex," is based on two premises: 
 namely, first, that all of a married woman's time and strength 
 throughout her whole adult life must go into strictly family service 
 in order for the family to be maintained; and, second, that those men 
 and women who specialize in some vocation in such extreme degree that 
 they cannot marry and have children are thereby, by reason of that 
 celibate concentration, better able to function socially in their 
 chosen work. It is the object of this book to disprove both these 
 assumptions. 
   
 =Most Social Students Advocate Marriage.=--Celibate concentration upon 
 a specific task, however valuable that task may be, is open, we 
 contend, to serious social dangers, as history amply proves. And 
 family life has now such varied and efficient aids from commerce, 
 manufacture, educational provisions in school and recreation centres, 
 in summer camps and special organizations of youthful energy toward 
 social serviceableness, that men and women can marry and rear 
 families, if they really desire so to do, more easily than ever 
 before, provided they are willing to pay the price of simplicity in 
 the home and in individual mastery of the technic of new ways of 
 living. What is needed for the best development of the family under 
 modern conditions is not more celibates, men and women of high ability 
 and noble consecration to undertake wholesale service in its behalf, 
 but rather that more of the best and the best-balanced men and women 
 be absorbed, to necessary degree, and at the right period of life, in 
 the task of actual transmission of their quality and tendency through 
 the living tissues of the social organism in the vital process of 
 parenthood. What is needed to secure that result is not only a new 
 ideal of social obligation but also, and definitely, such skill in 
 economic and domestic adjustments as will more and more leave a margin 
 of strength and energy for a chosen vocation not wholly mortgaged to 
 family uses, in the case of women as of men. It is quite time that 
 some of the rightly honored "maiden aunts of society," as our leading 
 spinsters have been called, used some of their wisest thought and 
 their most self-sacrificing service toward securing such economic and 
 domestic adjustments as will work toward the diminution of their own 
 kind! 
   
 Again it must be insisted that what society-at-large now needs most is 
 not celibates, however wise and good, working along one line, without 
 close touch with the main experiences of birth and death and common 
 social relationship, but rather the deepening and broadening of common 
 human relations through the reaction of the wise and good upon all the 
 fundamental ties that bind the race and the generations together. The 
 loss to society of those who might have been fathers and mothers and 
 chose to be so devoted to religious orders as to stand apart from 
 their race-life is an admitted calamity in the view of most people who 
 study mediæval history. 
   
 =Dangers of Extreme Specialization.=--Moreover, the tendency now in 
 all departments of industry and professional service is toward a 
 specialization which often defeats its own end and lessens rather than 
 increases the usefulness of its own department. "We want not workers," 
 says Emerson, "but men working." We want not specialists in the 
 extreme sense but all-round students devoting themselves to one sphere 
 of research or activity with a constant sense of its relation to all 
 other spheres of thought and action. Particularly in social service we 
 want not so much those who in early life specialize in one or another 
 form of social pathology or social therapeutics but rather those 
 mature and rounded in personal experience who elect some particular 
 service with full realization of its place in the network of common 
 human relationship. Especially is this true of all social work which 
 deals directly with individuals. 
   
 The higher development of the family and the wider range of social 
 service, therefore, alike, demand that a much greater proportion of 
 the moral and intellectual élite of the race pay their debt to the 
 generations through the family. 
   
 =Industrial Exploitation of Childhood and Youth.=--There is another 
 condition of modern life which must be noted as inimical to the 
 stability and the efficiency of the family, a condition which works 
 from the bottom upward through the lower levels of society as others 
 which have been noted work from the top down through the higher 
 levels. It is the condition which leads toward the misuse of young 
 girls in wage-earning tasks. There is a difference of opinion among 
 the wisest in regard to the social usefulness of forms of protective 
 labor legislation for adult women which are not shared by men. There 
 can be none in respect to the social harm of using the vitality, the 
 charm, the strength, the happiness of minors, especially of potential 
 mothers, to carry on the processes of machine-dominated systems of 
 manufacture and business. It takes so little physical strength or 
 mental power to become a cog in these rapidly revolving wheels. It 
 means such a waste to thus use the years of youth, meant for education 
 and development and meant to attract toward successful family life 
 rather than away from it. 
   
 The wrong and injustice of child-labor is equal for both sexes and no 
 law can be too stringent or too severely enforced against it. The 
 social waste of using youth exclusively in wage-earning pursuits can 
 easily be proved, in the case of girls, to extend to years older than 
 in the case of boys. The family cannot be maintained in stable 
 condition, and certainly can not progress in social value, unless the 
 majority of young girls are given the right attitude toward it and 
 time to prepare for its opportunities and responsibilities. If, as is 
 generally now believed, the legal majority and voting age for boys and 
 girls should be the same, namely, twenty-one years, then the girls, as 
 potential mothers, must have a distinct and specialized protection up 
 to that legal majority from all that harms health, prevents 
 safeguarded recreation, or turns life-currents away from the home to 
 the factory. The death-rate of babies when mothers work in factories 
 or shops with no provision for special rest is one testimony to the 
 social improvidence of our present industrial use of older women. The 
 life-long invalidism of many women, the childlessness of multitudes, 
 the statistics of home conditions revealed by Children's Courts 
 furnish testimony of like character. The unknown toll of loss of 
 personal aptitude for family life leading to broken homes, or to 
 hopeless struggles against invasions by poverty of the right of common 
 men and women to a home, are proof positive that a change in economic 
 conditions is demanded in the interest of family life. 
   
 =Social Measures Needed to Prevent These Evils.=--These social evils 
 connected with child-labor and the neglect in the industrial world of 
 youth and its needs are not to be mended by helps to individuals 
 alone. More radical measures are required for the protection of 
 society's most precious asset, the health, happiness and leisure of 
 all its children. 
   
 "Education," says the ancient sage, "is the ladder that every child 
 must climb in order to become all that he is meant to become; and 
 therefore children are made unfit for other employments in order that 
 they may have leisure to learn." To this may be added, the type of 
 education that fits the average girl for high usefulness as a 
 housemother is an absolute need if the average home life is to be made 
 a centre of freedom and of happiness. Those, therefore, who are 
 working against child-labor and against the unrestricted use of 
 mothers of young children and of potential mothers, in wage-earning 
 industry, are working directly, and with great power, for the 
 preservation and stability of the family. Those also who are working 
 through the formal education of the schools for the insertion of study 
 and practice along lines of home-making are making a complementary and 
 valuable contribution toward the inner unity and the outer success of 
 the family. 
   
 =The Attack upon the Family by Reactionaries.=--One more and most 
 important attack upon the family as it exists to-day must be noted in 
 this list of elements in modern society which work against this 
 inherited institution. It is an attack which, however mistaken, is 
 ostensibly, and often honestly in intent, a movement for the 
 protection and improvement of the family order. It is the effort to 
 turn the history of that institution back upon itself and make the 
 family again, as in the past, a legal unity with one representative, 
 the husband and father, through whom alone the wife and children have 
 distinct relationship to society-at-large. It is an effort to return 
 to mediæval thought and practice and to reaffirm in legal outline the 
 headship of the husband and father, the permanent minority of the wife 
 and mother, and the complete subordination of the children. It is even 
 an effort to rescind such laws as have given married women independent 
 contract-power and property rights, the equal guardianship of their 
 children, the full use of educational provisions, and individual 
 relationship to the state through the franchise. Voices are not 
 wanting to insist that only through a return to this old domestic 
 order of kingship of the man can the family be preserved. 
   
 A recent book claiming intellectual authority and endorsed by many men 
 in high positions states this opinion clearly, and seeks to strengthen 
 it by the use of scientific half-truths used not scientifically but as 
 a support for a metaphysical theory of masculine and feminine quality. 
 Every step that has been taken from the male despotism within marriage 
 and parenthood has met such appeals to stay the progress of democracy 
 toward the hearth-stone lest the family order be wholly destroyed. 
 Most people, however, believe that the steps which have been taken 
 away from that family despotism are too many to be retraced. Women 
 will not be put back into perpetual legal minority when once they have 
 become adults under the law. They will not consent to lose property 
 rights and the power of guardianship over their own children. They 
 will not consent to their own disfranchisement or to the loss of 
 opportunities of education and of economic independence. It is as 
 futile as it is stupid to expect that in this matter history will go 
 backward. To oppose measures already accomplished which are in the 
 direction of democratic adjustment of social relations, even by those 
 who think certain measures "a reform against nature," is not only idle 
 in effect but shows that the opposer is out of touch with "whatsoever 
 forces draw the ages on." 
   
 There are many elements in the restlessness of a period too rapidly 
 changing to be always sure of its ground that needlessly confuse the 
 issues of family obligation and personal loyalty to accepted tasks. 
 There are many tendencies toward extreme individualism which need 
 balancing by clearer ideals of social serviceableness. Especially is 
 this true in the case of women somewhat intoxicated by the belated 
 freedom and power which came to them after too prolonged a struggle 
 against inherited bonds. There are many economic and educational 
 requirements yet to be met in order to protect and maintain the 
 accepted ideal of monogamic marriage. But of all the ideas inimical to 
 the family in our modern life, the demand for its return to 
 aristocratic and outgrown forms is the most absurd and the most 
 harmful. All history shows that those who try to put a law, a 
 political system, an economic method, a rule of morality, or a 
 religious ideal back into a form discarded by the majority of those 
 who constitute the ethical and intellectual élite directly work toward 
 the chaos of revolution. To try to force the family ideal or its legal 
 bond or social outline back into the patriarchal form is to do the 
 utmost possible to bring on a catastrophic struggle between the new 
 and the old. The evil wrought by such reactionary teaching is in the 
 exact ratio of its power of influence. Whatever we may try to do, as 
 balance, through evolutionary methods at points where changes in form 
 have not been as yet made safe and sane by required adjustments of the 
 individual life to the new order, we should make haste to attempt. No 
 person, however, who is in actual touch with the movement of social 
 progress can hope to turn any great democratic tendency back upon 
 itself and "make that which hath been as if it were not." No truly 
 just person will wish to do so. 
   
 =The Prevalence of Divorce.=--Many urge reactionary attitudes toward 
 present family ideals and practice because of the divorce problem. The 
 omission of this from the list of causes for the modern instability of 
 the family and for its too frequent lack of success may have been 
 already noted and condemned by the reader of these pages. The fact of 
 divorces, however, whether they be many or few, is to the writer a 
 symptom, not a cause, the legal expression of a social disease, not 
 the disease itself. Bad diagnosis, or inadequate treatment on the 
 basis of a symptom, may increase the disease; and the facts concerning 
 divorce are of so serious a nature that a separate chapter has been 
 assigned to them under the heading: The Broken Family. The prevalence 
 of divorce, however, it must here be said, demonstrably proves two 
 things--one that men and women now feel themselves at moral and social 
 liberty to seek divorce when longer living together seems to them 
 intolerable, and that women are using their new freedom and economic 
 independence to make marriage conditions more to their liking. They 
 are setting a standard respecting desirable husbands, not always 
 wisely, often selfishly, but in the long run and large way to ends of 
 greater equality of demand in the marriage relation. The tendency on 
 the whole is toward a higher conception of what marriage should be and 
 what it should do for both parties in the bond. The statistics of 
 illegitimacy, of commercialized prostitution, of venereal disease, of 
 infant mortality, of early death or life-long invalidism of wives and 
 mothers, of marital unhappiness and parental neglect which are found 
 by honest investigation in states and nations in which no divorce is 
 allowed do not lead to the belief that legal permanence of the 
 marriage bond secures socially helpful family life. On the contrary, 
 such facts already show that divorce in the civilization we have 
 inherited comes as a result of bad conditions which worked infinite 
 harm before divorces could be obtained. 
   
 =Old Institutions Need New Sanctions.=--We must now ask of any laws 
 concerning any institution not what did ancient "folk-ways" ordain but 
 what do modern conditions require? No form of human association, 
 however old and whatever its contribution to the social inheritance, 
 but is on trial to-day before all free minds. That trial must be 
 openly conducted. No "secret diplomacy" to reinstate old ideals or 
 laws against the common belief; no "boring from within" to propagate 
 new schemes the object of which is to gratify personal wish without 
 regard to public good; but "open covenants" with the future "openly 
 arrived at" in an ethically consecrated present. What shall be our 
 guide in such a free and frank consideration of the present and the 
 future of the family? 
   
 =The Monogamic Family Justifies Itself by Social Usefulness.=--In the 
 first place, one must accept the fact that it is presumptive evidence 
 of the continued worth and value of any inherited institution if it 
 can be proved that it has served vital social needs which still 
 operate and that no other existing institution is able or ready to 
 take its place for the special social service which it was designed to 
 render. To the present writer it seems clear that the monogamic family 
 holds its title clear to social preservation on both these points. The 
 family preceded individualistic marriage as we know it and was 
 developed for the purpose of giving to oncoming generations a share in 
 the race-life, whatever the ideals concerning that race-life may have 
 been at any period of social order. Even in its present undeveloped 
 form, with its cramping limitations of past autocracy and with its 
 crude attempts at an as yet half-understood democracy, we may well 
 count the private monogamic family as a priceless inheritance and work 
 toward its better organization and larger service to social life. No 
 other institution yet developed has shown in history or now shows in 
 present life a worthy substitute for its functioning in child-care and 
 child-development. Many also believe that no form of sex-association 
 secures such possibilities of moral discipline and personal 
 satisfaction as does the guarded relationship of monogamic marriage. 
   
 =The Inherited Family Order Demands New Social Adjustments.=--There 
 are, therefore, no reasons for welcoming the decline of the private 
 family. There are many that demand imperatively some adjustments in 
 inner comradeship and in mechanical arrangements surrounding the 
 household, in order to hold firm its spiritual values during changes 
 in social conditions. How far these changes of detail may go or what 
 will be the end of some present clearly outlined tendencies no one can 
 prophesy. The duty of the hour is, however, to set this treasure of 
 social inheritance in a clear light; to show its actual and potential 
 social value as at present perceived; and to try by all simple 
 measures open to our intelligence to aid in its evolution toward a 
 more perfect expression of the love of man and woman each for the 
 other and of the protection and care of both for the children of that 
 love. The basic test of all proposed changes in any inherited 
 institution is from henceforward, we must believe, that which inheres 
 in the spiritual essence of democracy. What is that essence of 
 democracy which must be applied as test within the family, as within 
 the state and within the industrial order? It is the fundamental 
 belief in the worth and dignity of every human being and the equal 
 right of each and all to personality. No man, as in the older days, 
 must be obliged to be husband and father, but may choose, if he deems 
 it essential to his own being, to remain in a solitary path outside 
 the current of the generations. No woman must be obliged to live 
 solely to serve a family. She, too, has right to self-development in 
 some chosen way. No married couple must be forced to add to the 
 children already here; they may justly be protected in living and 
 working together in some comradeship that has no family limitations 
 save those of mutual loyalty and mutual service. No child is to be 
 justly held so much under family control as to have his nature stifled 
 or warped, and no child shall be made a pecuniary asset to the family 
 regardless of his own needs. No family autonomy is henceforth to be 
 secured by fiat of law enthroning one "head" as the legal despot or 
 economic ruler. The family must be democratized in that sense in which 
 each individual within its bond shall be sustained in seeking and in 
 maintaining the conditions of personality. No one human being to live 
 solely for others' service or to have his or her value estimated in 
 terms of contribution to other lives, but all to seek the utmost 
 perfection of individual life as a contribution to the common life; 
 this is the democratic ideal. 
   
 =The Family as an Aid to Spiritual Democracy.=--There seems to be no 
 other inherited institution in which this spiritual essence of 
 democracy can be so clearly and so well realized as it may be and 
 to-day often is in the private monogamic family. The permanent and 
 successful family offers a unique centre of personal development at 
 the heart of all other social groups. Founded as it is in selective 
 affection, and in aim at least permanently secure, it offers a refuge 
 in every distress and a help in every trouble of each of its members. 
 There was never a time when such a mutual resistance of a small and 
 intimate group to the complex pressure of the world upon each 
 individual life was more sorely needed. The confusing social currents 
 of this changing era set free from ancient moorings many who can find 
 no clear chart for newer voyaging in thought and action. These need 
 what the family more than any other inherited institution can still 
 give--something of the simplicity of the blood bond and something of 
 the strength of clan membership, and more of the partial affection 
 which sets each personality in its best light and gives each a chance 
 to better its own world achievement in the appreciation of its 
 dearest. 
   
 =The Family the Nursery of Personality.=--The family in this sense of 
 comforting and developing the individual nature has as yet no rival. 
 Says Browning, "Every man has two soul sides--one to face the world 
 with and one to show a woman when he loves her." There are those who 
 blame the family relationship for its exclusiveness and partiality, 
 and there are countless instances where the ego is so extended into 
 the blood group that selfish disregard of all others becomes a mark of 
 family affection. Yet is it profoundly true that just as the baby 
 needs some one to whom its little life is all-important in order to 
 gain strength of will to achieve its difficult beginnings of 
 consciousness, so all of us need a small group in which our well-being 
 and our happiness are of greater concern than those of any one person 
 can be to all the world of persons. No truly enlightened person 
 believes that he or she is as wise or as good as the best friend 
 thinks; and no truly enlightened person believes that the affection of 
 one's family is a just gauge of the value of one's life to the world. 
 We all need, however, and children particularly need, some inner 
 circle of love which comes to us by virtue simply of our being, to 
 help us when we make excursions of moral and affectional adventure in 
 the world outside, in a world in which we are valued only for what we 
 can achieve. 
   
 =Life, Not Theory About Life, Teaches Us.=--Let no one believe, 
 however, that any theory about or claim for the family really 
 indicates its value. We live before we can interpret our life, and 
 what is already achieved by those in the forward ranks shows what all 
 may yet become. We are not left to chance or imagination or to 
 argument or affirmation of principles to visualize the family as it is 
 or as it may be. We may look about us and see what it is and can do 
 for men and women. Few, perhaps, are standing on the heights of their 
 own being when they build the family altar. Yet in the love and 
 sacrifice of plain and unknown fathers who cheerfully toil for their 
 loved ones, in the patient endurance of simple-hearted mothers who 
 give so much of their lives in ready service to husband and family, in 
 the frolic-joy and eager activity of ordinary children whose only 
 dower is the free and happy service of their parents, is the fruit and 
 the promise of the human family. 
   
 =The Moral Elite in the Modern Family.=--Above all, we have to-day a 
 growing number who live in the spirit of a true marriage and a noble 
 cradle of infancy and show by actual example what the family is meant 
 to be. These prophesy a marriage that demands each of the other that 
 a perfect life shall perfect their love. These give a new pattern and 
 type of parenthood, woven of the tears and joy, the aspiration and the 
 service of those who call children from the storehouse of universal 
 life, not in response to careless passion but in the solemn joy of 
 creative purpose. These are the men and women who shall yet build from 
 the home as the heart's centre, a wiser school, a more righteous 
 state, a juster industry, and a purer worship of the ideal. 
   
 It is in the new comradeship of men and women on all the levels of 
 life that such auspicious promise of better social life is found. It 
 is on the new basis of reverence of each personality for every other, 
 not only for the person that other is but for the person he or she may 
 become if given fair chance for best achievement, that the new social 
 ethics rests. It is on that basis that we may build a faith assured 
 and strong that the family will not be lost in the time that needs it 
 most but will shape itself to finer issues and more useful service. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON THE FAMILY 
   
 What has been the general trend of development in Matrimonial 
 
      Institutions? 
   
 Has the monogamic family, as now outlined and legalized, any 
 
      elements inherently inimical to a democratic order of society? 
      If so, what are those elements? If not, what stand should be 
      taken in regard to proposals for fundamental changes in the 
      inherited family system? 
   
 If the inherited family system should be preserved and 
 
      maintained, what, if any, changes in form, or practical 
      adjustments to the new freedom of woman and new ideals of 
      education of youth, are demanded for its present stability and 
      future success? 
   
 In _Taboo and Genetics: A Study of the Biological, 
 
      Sociological, and Psychological Foundation of the Family_, by 
      M.M. Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Blanchard, it is 
      claimed that "The chief interest of society should be in the 
      eugenic value of the children born into it." Is that true, and 
      if so, how can this social interest be best excited and 
      maintained? 
   
 Dr. Edward T. Devine advocates social insurance for sickness 
 
      and widowhood, but not out-door relief or widow's pensions; 
      also advocates physical investigation and home visiting for 
      school children, but not school lunches, eye-glasses or 
      clothing as a free gift. His conclusion is that "the state 
      should enforce a minimum standard of child-care, but the 
      expense of providing it should fall on parents or on some 
      insurance fund to which parents have contributed." Is this 
      sound American doctrine? If so, should proposed legislation be 
      gauged by it? 
   
 Read chapter, "The Family," in _A Social Theory of Religious 
 
      Education_, by G.A. Coe. Is the emphasis laid upon equality in 
      this statement justified? 
   
   
 FOOTNOTES: 
   
 [1] See _Children Born Out of Wedlock_, by George B. Mangold, Ph.D., 
 University of Missouri, 1921. 
   
 [2] See Chapter V, "The Home," in _The Normal Life_, by Edward T. 
 Devine. 
   
 
 
 
 CHAPTER II (THE MOTHER) 
   
   
   
     "Strength and dignity are her clothing; 
     She openeth her mouth with wisdom; 
     And the law of kindness is on her tongue. 
     She looketh well to the ways of her household, 
     And eateth not the bread of idleness. 
     The heart of her husband trusteth in her; 
     Her children rise up and call her blessed; 
     Give her of the fruit of her hands; 
     And let her works praise her in the gates." 
                     --PROVERBS. 
   
     "A being breathing thoughtful breath, 
     A traveller betwixt life and death; 
     The reason firm, the temperate will, 
     Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill; 
     A perfect woman, nobly plann'd, 
     To warn, to comfort, and command; 
     And yet a spirit still and bright, 
     With something of an angel light." 
                     --WORDSWORTH. 
   
     "Yet in herself she dwelleth not, 
       Although no home were half so fair; 
     No simplest duty is forgot; 
     Life hath no dim and lowly spot 
     That doth not in her sunshine share." 
                     --LOWELL. 
   
     "I loved the woman; there was one through whom I loved her, one 
     Not learned, save in gracious household ways, 
     Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants, 
     No angel, but a dearer being, interpreter between the gods and men. 
   
     "Happy he with such a mother! Faith in womankind 
     Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high 
     Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall, 
     He shall not blind his soul with clay." 
                     --TENNYSON. 
   
   
 =Antiquity of the Mother-instinct.=--The mother-instinct of protection 
 of offspring, of care of weakness and of sacrifice for the young, came 
 to high power before the human was reached in the scale of beings. It 
 must never be forgotten that humbler sisters set the fashion of 
 motherhood's devotion too long ago to reckon the time and in types of 
 organism too remote to be always recognized as kin to the human beings 
 we know to-day. This is the greatest and most racially useful of all 
 the biological assets stored up for us in the prehuman struggle toward 
 what we now call civilization. Nor should we fail to give full value 
 to the testimony of primitive human life that the mother and child 
 formed the first social group within the loose association of the 
 herd. It was the first group to develop, by virtue of its conscious 
 relationship, the sense of trust and the habit of service of the 
 stronger to the weaker, thus leading toward mutual aid within an area 
 of affection and good-will. These facts give basic assurance that 
 mother-love will last, no matter what changes in form of its 
 expression may be called for by changes in social order. 
   
 The reason why the relationship of mother and child was able thus to 
 lead the way toward social organization for the common good is 
 obvious. The intimate physical tie, the easily understood claim of the 
 child upon its mother, the prolongation of human infancy instituting a 
 habit of continuous service of the young and hence a tendency toward a 
 settled home and peaceful industries, all made it easy for woman to 
 become care-taker of children. These also made it easy for the early 
 social order to hold mothers to the task and, in growing measure, 
 protect them in it. What have been the recognized essentials in that 
 care-taking of motherhood? What are the permanent elements in the 
 mother's devotion to offspring which persist under all changes in 
 social conditions? 
   
 =The Recognized Essentials in Child-care.=--The more important items 
 in a program of child-care may be summed up as follows: 
   
     First--Protection of infancy and childhood from threatening 
           dangers. 
   
     Second--Providing food, clothing, and shelter for the young. 
   
     Third--Drilling children in physical habits and manner of 
           personal behavior demanded by the family rule of time and 
           place of birth. 
   
     Fourth--Teaching the child to talk, to walk, to obey, to 
           imitate. 
   
     Fifth--Interpreting to each newcomer the group morals which 
           govern the family and the educational process in the 
           period and locality into which he is born. 
   
     Sixth--For ages untold, the more formal education of all girls 
           and of all little boys in the folk-lore, the vocational 
           skill, the ways of living together and the methods of 
           social arrangement both within and without the tribe or 
           state or nation into which they were born. 
   
 Are any of these essential elements of motherhood's ancient devotion 
 to child-life lifted wholly from her obligation? Careful study of the 
 family needs and conditions, and the effect upon them of modern social 
 control and social organization, indicates that not one of these 
 ancient obligations is taken bodily from the modern mother's service. 
   
 =The Protective Function.=--The protective function has indeed been 
 considered for many centuries peculiarly the father's duty. Ever since 
 man was bound to family obligations he has been charged with repelling 
 enemy attacks upon the group of which his own family was a part and 
 with the task of standing guard over wife and child as against all 
 physical dangers. Man has developed under this social pressure a sense 
 of chivalry and a tendency to "save women and children first" which 
 give noble examples of courage and self-sacrifice to fire the 
 imagination of each new generation. Has the father-office developed 
 such many-sided and adequate protective service to childhood that 
 mothers have been able to "lay down their arms" and rest content in 
 the knowledge that their children are shielded from every danger? It 
 seems not. In the days when women were ignorant of all outside their 
 homes they may have felt so secure because not understanding the cause 
 of many family tragedies. In the days when they had no power to change 
 conditions affecting the home from without they may have felt excused 
 from the protective function of early motherhood, since men had taken 
 over physical defense and economic support and the relationship of the 
 family group to the social whole. No open-eyed woman in a country 
 giving women social, economic, and political power can so think 
 to-day. 
   
 It is a far cry from the savage mother, beating back some beast of the 
 jungle or the plain, to the modern mother whose physical protection 
 and that of her children is amply provided not alone by the husband 
 and father concerned but by organized society with its police power, 
 its courts and laws. The dangers that threaten child-life to-day in 
 the more civilized communities are not the same that threatened the 
 young of the herd-pack or the early lives of primitive men and women. 
 Then the mother had sometimes to defend her child against its own 
 father, especially her girl-babies against the social fiat of death 
 executed by the father's will. Ancient folk-lore and myth show us many 
 a struggle, intense and cruel, between mother-love and this 
 group-sentence of death upon some of its young. In case of war also 
 the ancient mother had to protect her virgin daughters against outrage 
 and capture, albeit so feebly and to so disastrous an end. And war, 
 since it is always and by its nature must be a return to savage 
 conditions, now leads to the sacrifice of women and children in much 
 the ancient manner; and faced by its horrors at close touch, the 
 mother-instinct essays the old task to the same bitter defeat. 
   
 In peaceful periods, however, in the long ages when the father-rule 
 was a despotism tempered only by natural affection and the skill of 
 women in securing advantages while simulating submission, mothers had 
 large use of their protective function in easing family discipline and 
 in gaining relief from harsh conditions affecting childhood. Theirs 
 was then no open fight for the well-being of their offspring, and 
 often not a wise effort to that end, but ancient song and story all 
 show that childhood and youth depended upon the mother-love in crises 
 of family experience and that without such refuge many young lives 
 would have been utterly sacrificed. 
   
 =Social Elements in Modern Protection of Children.=--To-day the 
 dangers to which babies and children are exposed are more subtle in 
 form and more complex in action. They are less within than without the 
 average home. They are those that give the high death-rate of infants, 
 the crippled limbs of children, the weakness of body and defectiveness 
 of mind and feebleness or perversion of moral nature that make so many 
 human beings unequal to life's demands. They are the dangers, personal 
 and social, summed up in the antitheses of "health" and "disease," of 
 "normal" and "abnormal." Not that the dangers so indicated are new but 
 rather that we are newly aware of them. Not that savage or early 
 civilized life had conditions more favorable to health and normality 
 but that the easier modern conditions save alive many who in harsher 
 times would have died in babyhood. Moreover, we are beginning at last 
 to set a standard, in ever-clearer outline, of what is health and of 
 what is normality in physical, mental, and moral human life. Moreover, 
 we are seeing as never before that the dangers that beset the child 
 to-day are not those from which the mother alone, or the individual 
 father and mother working together, can adequately protect. They are 
 dangers that only society can prevent and that society alone can 
 abolish. 
   
 =Women's Leadership in Social Protection.=--Why, then, do we say that 
 the protective function of individual motherhood is still demanded and 
 still a large part of the modern mother's obligation? Because she is 
 to-day the one most clearly required, in our own country at least, to 
 summon the social forces to lessen or abolish those dangers to which 
 children are exposed. The action of the solitary, primitive mother 
 fighting off the despoiler of her child does not much resemble the 
 banding together of modern women by the hundreds and by the thousands 
 to abolish typhoid fever in some city in which it has become endemic 
 through the greed of manufacturers who pollute the water supply. It 
 is, however, the same spirit in both; and in the modern instance it 
 wakes, first, the fathers to their protective duty, and then the 
 guardians of the public health, and then educates the public mind, and 
 at last accomplishes the desired result through appropriate laws, 
 well enforced. It is a long step from the indirect "influence," the 
 often deceitful cunning, the appeal to sex-attraction and the pleading 
 of weakness by which for ages women sought to protect their children 
 against harsh punishments, their daughters against marriage to those 
 whom they loathed, and their sons to apprenticeship to work they could 
 not choose, to the openly exercised power of the modern mother. In the 
 days when wives and mothers had no legal rights which society was 
 bound to respect, appeal was woman's only weapon; now the modern 
 mother has command of her protective function and exercises it 
 fearlessly. The same spirit is in all the long process of change, 
 however, and women to-day banding openly together and joining also 
 with men on equal terms, to secure laws protecting children from 
 cruelty even against their own parents; to raise the "age of consent" 
 in order to prevent the unwitting moral suicide of little girls; to 
 sweep the streets free from vicious allurements that young boys may be 
 preserved from debauchery and disease; to place trustees of society's 
 power of public protection as chaperones in every place of moral 
 danger; these modern women are near of kin to all motherhood of any 
 past. So also are those of the same spirit as the ancient mother who 
 band themselves together, again with men on equal terms, but oftenest, 
 perhaps, with men whom their own social interest has summoned to the 
 task, for the establishment of "Health Centres", of adequate and 
 efficient clinics and dispensaries; for securing necessary education 
 and care of mothers before the birth of their children, and for 
 mothers and babies alike needing good, fresh air, rest and comfort 
 after birth; for the raising of standards of physical well-being all 
 along the line of life from youth to age. The ancient mother was too 
 ignorant and had too little power to save her children and family from 
 physical ills, but she did her best. The modern mother is able to 
 learn about requirements and to act with power for the better health 
 and better training of every child. Is she always ready for and equal 
 to the task? 
   
 At least we can claim this for the mother devotion in modern times, 
 that it shows, and in exact proportion of its increasing social power, 
 an alertness and a moral earnestness in all that concerns the welfare 
 of children that have perpetuated and extended the protective 
 functions of society as no other agency has done. Much of the modern 
 legislation and social work directed toward the physical and moral 
 safeguarding of the young has been instituted and is carried out in 
 detail largely by women. The passage of the so-called Maternity Bill 
 by our National Congress, at the recognized instigation of women of 
 the United States, and the call it makes for a large staff of women 
 workers to carry out its provisions, is a case in point. This 
 protective work for mothers and babies is not always done by women who 
 are themselves mothers. Perhaps too often its details are in charge of 
 those lacking deep experience of life, and hence not able to interpret 
 new laws of social control to parents of ancient ideals and backward 
 social culture. But women in any case are called for in large numbers 
 to translate the ancient personal duty of protective care of the young 
 in terms of social obligations. 
   
 =The Provision of Food, Clothing, and Shelter.=--The second recognized 
 ancient duty of mothers is in respect to the provision of food, 
 clothing, and shelter for the young. This duty has undergone great 
 changes of method during the last century, and in the large centres of 
 population has altered almost past recognition. These changes seem to 
 many to minimize the individual mother's responsibility in these 
 matters to the vanishing point. 
   
 It is indeed an almost immeasurable distance from the primitive mother 
 scratching the soil with her sharpened stick, her baby bound to her 
 bended back, in order to plant a few seeds for a tiny harvest to save 
 the life of her child when the hunt should be poor, to the modern 
 mother whose food supply for her family comes to the table from all 
 parts of the earth at the call of her telephone. Is the modern mother, 
 then, released from all obligations as to that food supply? It is a 
 long step also from the primitive mother making slowly with her thorn 
 needle the only garment her child may wear, and even a long step from 
 the home spinning, weaving and dyeing of later handicraft, to the 
 modern use of the "ready-made" shop and the division of all 
 garment-making into innumerable specialties of labor. Is the modern 
 mother thereby released from care concerning the family clothing? 
   
 For the modern housing of families do we not all have to depend upon 
 the architect, the builder, the real estate broker, the speculator in 
 land, the laws concerning boundaries, taxes and title deeds, rent and 
 landlords' powers, and press all one upon another for a chance for a 
 home when we elect to live where many other people want also to live? 
 Is, then, the shelter of the family no longer the mother's care? 
   
 =The Woman in Rural Life.=--The country-woman, dealing at first hand 
 with rural conditions, has many of the same problems of personal 
 devotion in the provision of food, clothing, and shelter with which 
 her ancient ancestor struggled. She has, it is true, "scientific 
 farming" of men to raise the harvests that ancestor's heroic but 
 feeble efforts could not secure. She has mechanical and commercial 
 aids as housemother such as the primitive woman never imagined. She 
 has been released from much of the drudgery which burdened her 
 grandmother in the domestic stage of industry. She is under social 
 protection such as no previous woman enjoyed in the solitary household 
 of the past. And in the United States the Federal Government is 
 offering her aids.[3] It is, however, true that the housemother in 
 rural communities still feels many of the obligations of the ancient 
 woman. The three-meal-a-day routine, the actual preparation of raw 
 material of food for the table, the personal offices of housework, 
 washing, ironing, mending, making, sweeping, dusting, cleaning, in all 
 their varied details, keep her in active sympathy with the past. This 
 fact furnishes the main reason why "Women's Columns" and "Magazines 
 for Women" reach such large circulation in rural districts, where they 
 help toward lessening the domestic burden by showing how to carry it 
 more easily. 
   
 The farm woman, however, is moving, many thousand strong, with men as 
 many, to mitigate the isolation of the solitary household, to bring 
 the home nearer to the neighbors, the school, the church and the 
 store, by massing rural homes in villages and forming the habits of 
 the men-folk to go further afield for their own work. This movement, 
 which is of all social reforms most needed because affecting larger 
 classes than any other and also because affecting the basic industry 
 of all countries, that of agriculture, is working toward making 
 farm-life once more attractive to young men and capable of winning 
 young women to the life of the farmer's wife. 
   
 Meanwhile, the higher forms of social organization possible in cities 
 and in closely settled towns and villages are working to lessen 
 house-keeping burdens to an unprecedented degree. It is noticeable 
 that all schemes for so specializing woman's work and so easing the 
 domestic burden as to make, as one writer puts it, "the home a rest 
 place for women as for men," have their imaginary seat in great cities 
 or closely built suburbs. The farm-women we know can combine and 
 coöperate to a greater extent than they now do and the town and city 
 women may take far better advantage of the agencies of household 
 assistance now at their doors. How far this movement to relieve the 
 home of household work may go we do not know. 
   
 =Modern Demand for Standardization.=--Is there any plan yet proposed, 
 however, which can relieve the mother of her primary and ancient 
 obligation to see that her family is well nourished, suitably clothed 
 and healthfully sheltered? Some one must attend to the needs of each 
 family in these vital particulars which underlie all problems of 
 public and private health. Shall the state do it? So far the 
 experience of state institutions and even of private "homes" do not 
 encourage hope along that line. So far the physical and affectional 
 needs of children and youth, and of husbands and wives, and of fathers 
 and mothers have not been met by any substitute for the private home. 
 And in the private home, under any plan, there must go on certain 
 processes which have to cost some one member of the family a great 
 deal of thought, much personal effort and constant attention. For most 
 families in average condition that person is naturally the 
 housemother. If the husband and father is the chief or only 
 wage-earner in "gainful occupations," then his health and strength are 
 of primary concern to all the family and must be secured by adequate 
 and healthful provision of food and clothing, and the home must give 
 him what he vitally needs for maintaining power of economic service to 
 his family. If the mother, also, is a wage-or salary-earner we have 
 the dictum of economists that her inherited and usual place in the 
 family machinery must be filled, if at all successfully, by trained 
 and congenial helpers at a cost in present conditions prohibitive for 
 the average family income. The estimate of Mr. Taber, in his excellent 
 book, _The Business of the Household_, is that unless for causes of 
 illness or special emergency "no family having an income of less than 
 three thousand dollars has any right to maintain a maid." This 
 estimate seems not only economically correct but shows why so few 
 families have incomes that can release the housemother from housework. 
 It also shows why only the exceptionally trained and competent 
 vocational worker, if a married woman and mother of young children, 
 can earn enough to release herself from the miscellaneous tasks of the 
 private household without loss to the family treasury. The easing of 
 the burden of housework, almost unbearable as it has been and 
 responsible, as we have good reason to believe, for much ill-health of 
 women and much unhappiness in marriage, is coming fast and from quite 
 other directions than is often perceived. The commercial aids of 
 wholesale preparation of food and clothing, and the new fashions in 
 house-building and household management are alike working toward such 
 a reduction of private household service as may enable the average 
 woman to meet the family needs, even where there are several young 
 children, if she is strong in body and trained in efficient ways of 
 working, and yet have considerable time left for other activities. 
   
 The apartment house has set the fashion of simplification and 
 reduction of necessary personal service in the home. The apartment 
 house, with its continuous hot water, its ready heat and its relief 
 from care of sidewalks, halls and stairs, and with its hour-service at 
 command is obviously becoming a favorite place to live in. Especially 
 do women like it. The multiple house, however, does not seem the best 
 place for children after the earliest months of infancy, and in many 
 such houses they are openly "not wanted." The multiple house has also 
 many disadvantages from the social side in the lack of home 
 associations which support family affection. They are also for the 
 most part in localities where people are brought together without plan 
 or friendship and hence can not cultivate that neighborliness which, 
 so far in the history of the race, has been a nursery of the community 
 spirit. 
   
 =The Apartment House and the Family.=--The apartment house seems to be 
 the best place for those families in which all the adult members are 
 busy at some vocation, and in which the children are of age to profit 
 by educational opportunities usually found only in cities. In such 
 families the burdens of the person who is in command of the family 
 comfort as to food and raiment and house-keeping are reduced to the 
 lowest terms. If to the usual apartment house provisions for aids to 
 the housemother are added, what is now offered in some places, namely, 
 the "Auto-Service for Meals," whereby the principal meal, at least, 
 the dinner, is brought to the door ready to place on the table and all 
 cooking dishes hard to wash are returned to the centre of supply to be 
 prepared for another service, then, indeed, can all the members take 
 turns in rendering the small offices for family comfort still required 
 and each go about his or her special vocation at will. This seems to 
 be the goal of many progressive minds, although personal taste is 
 seldom satisfied by "coöperative" cooking. 
   
 It must be remembered by all, that the sort of family pictured above 
 has in it no children of ages requiring freedom of motion and constant 
 attention (unless, indeed, "the boarding-school in the country" for 
 all over four or five years is contemplated). It has in it no aged 
 whose needs in diet and in physical comfort vary from the usual. It 
 has in it no chronic invalids and no convalescents, no blind or lame 
 or specially weak requiring special help. It is for the particular 
 benefit, at least, of families of a particular type, of which the 
 cities, with their more varied facilities, contain an unusual 
 proportion. For the family of the ordinary type, with its many 
 differing needs and its variety of claim upon some one person for its 
 central direction and service, the various aids from without which 
 have been indicated serve rather to relieve from excessive burdens 
 than to remove altogether the special obligations of the woman-head of 
 the family. 
   
 Moreover, the time left to the average housemother from the old 
 housework by the new helps in that work is, in part at least, 
 mortgaged in advance to social effort to make the new commercial aids 
 to family service actual helps and not hindrances to family health and 
 comfort. The food supply drawn upon must be sharply investigated lest 
 it contain deleterious substances or be denuded of nourishing quality. 
 The ready-made clothing must be bought with knowledge and constant 
 vigilance against cheating in material or in construction or in sins 
 of fashion against health and beauty. The labor-saving devices of 
 every sort must be put to intelligent test and require specific 
 training for most efficient use. The family budget must be more 
 carefully planned and more heroically maintained at prudent levels. 
 The public service of markets, transportation facilities and functions 
 of "middlemen" must be understood and controlled as never before. 
 Above all, the pressure of uniformity must be resisted if the offered 
 supply of the essentials of life prove inadequate to the deepest 
 needs, or the scale of living be too ambitiously set by the housing 
 facilities adjusted to the ideas and claims of landlords rather than 
 to the needs of family life. 
   
 Hence we may say that the old forms of effort by which mothers fed and 
 clothed and sheltered their children led directly to absorption of 
 interest, energy and conscientious labor within the house. The new 
 forms of effort by which these essentials of healthful and comfortable 
 living are secured lead directly to all manner of coöperative social 
 adjustments of supply to demand. The standard of demand, however, let 
 it never be forgotten, is made and maintained within the intimate 
 family circle itself, and the personal intelligence and ethical 
 maturity of the housemothers, who form the major purchasing class of 
 every civilized community, determine that standard. For that great 
 enterprise of high standardization the same personal devotion to the 
 central demands of life is required in the average modern woman which 
 made the ancient mother so great a leader in primitive culture. The 
 new aids to the housemother's task may give her a better chance than 
 any women ever had before to see the real social significance of the 
 personal offices of home life. The poets have seen it all through the 
 centuries and have pictured the myth goddesses bringing the cup and 
 the bread and the fruit and weaving the web of ceremonial or of simple 
 garment in household poetry. All human need for sustenance and the 
 nurture of our physical being has made the wife the loaf-giver and the 
 mother a nourisher of the young, and as such artists have portrayed 
 her. 
   
 We may say "our father-land," but we always say "our mother-earth." To 
 those who see clearly the value of the ancient family rite of the 
 meal alone together, to which it may well be every member of the 
 family has made a distinct contribution; to those to whom the private 
 table still appeals and who still appreciate the taste and quality of 
 every purchase made for each individual member of the intimate group 
 (things taking time and thought most often of the mother), the 
 individual home has meanings that are not lost but rather are growing 
 in spiritual importance as the drudgery of the household is lessened. 
   
 =New Uses of Electric Power.=--To-day another great contribution to 
 the spiritual value of the private household ministrations is offered 
 in the new uses of electric power. Already the "servantless house" is 
 widely advertised. Already the grave difficulties in household 
 adjustment made by the growing unwillingness of competent girls and 
 women to do anything in the households of strangers, and thereby 
 giving rise to the serious "servant-girl problem" for people of 
 limited means, are being mitigated by the new devices of this modern 
 wizard of electricity. It seems to many of us that had this magician 
 been discovered before the invention of steam-power-driven machinery 
 the whole tendency of modern industry would have been turned not so 
 absolutely, if at all, toward the factory. Such modifications of 
 domestic manufacture and handicraft as right use of electricity could 
 have initiated, might have prevented some of the social and economic 
 evils of our present labor world. However that may be, it is clear 
 that now the modern housewife has at her hand the means of easy 
 control of her special family duties such as no ancient woman could 
 have conceived. The movement henceforward, therefore, we must believe, 
 is toward such lessening of household burdens by mechanical means, and 
 such simplification of household requirements by new family ideals as 
 will make every woman of ordinary strength and of even moderate 
 capacity and training so sure a master of essentials in that field 
 that she can dispense with the "help" that so often now hinders the 
 real family life and make the home more truly the private shrine of 
 affection and of mutual aid than it has ever been before. 
   
 =Certain Duties the Mother Cannot Delegate= if she would hand on the 
 torch of life the brighter for her handling. Doctor Devine has well 
 said that "the only satisfactory method of getting babies safely 
 through the first years of life is the strictly individualistic plan 
 of attention to each one by its own mother." The proof of this is in 
 the death-rate of infants in foundling asylums and in other forms of 
 communal care even where scientific knowledge has been invoked and 
 humane feeling exercised. To keep babies alive and well is a 
 prerequisite to all later development, and happiness seems to be a 
 necessary foundation for such preservation of their life and health. 
 So far in human experience babies have declined with one accord to be 
 happy unless some one person was constantly devoted to their welfare. 
 That person may be a "hired expert," it is true, but the successful 
 nurse must have the mother-feeling. Moreover, it is now agreed that 
 the best physical stamina is secured by mothers breast-feeding their 
 own babies, and all manner of incentives, even to state subsidies, are 
 being used to lead women to this personal office. 
   
 If mothers thus nurse their babies they must come close to them in 
 affectional contact, and it is through affectional contact more than 
 in any other way that babies seem to thrive. No one can claim that 
 ability to care for and bring up children "comes by nature." The 
 affectional tie does, however, give an added earnestness to the desire 
 to learn how to minister wisely and well to the needs of the child. 
 That same affectional tie on the part of the mother is shown in a 
 return of affection from the child. Such personal ministrations of the 
 mother to the child have also a great effect in forming the whole 
 character in later life. One may worship from a distance, and the 
 capacity to justly estimate excellence grows with maturity. But the 
 child knows best those who serve his needs most intimately and gives 
 his love to that person. 
   
 =The Mother's Compensation for Personal Service.=--There is much 
 compensation, therefore, for the woman who gives herself to her child 
 in old-fashioned ways of personal service. She gets the charm and the 
 allurement of the growing bud on life's tree. If she misses that she 
 loses something of her birthright and some "substitute-mother" gets 
 something of satisfaction from the child that she does not. 
   
 =Early Drill in Personal Habits.=--The third essential of the 
 inherited obligation of mothers to their children is the early drill 
 in personal habits that are required for health and decency and 
 propriety in any given time and place. For this it is an absolute 
 necessity that either the mother so serve herself or that she secure 
 some substitute-mother of refinement, knowledge, affection and 
 devotion which make her an equal in the family circle. How many nurses 
 fulfil that demand? Many, even of those least recognized by their 
 employers as entitled to special gratitude and appreciation. The point 
 to be noted is, however, that even if experts for "hour-service" as 
 nursery governess could be had in sufficient numbers and even if the 
 majority of families could financially meet the expense of those fully 
 competent, such service would not, as a rule, meet the needs of 
 children under three or four years. It is a constant task, not, 
 indeed, requiring every minute of time, but requiring constant 
 readiness to serve at need both day and night to start an infant along 
 the required rules of daily habit. And that task does not lend itself 
 to the conditions of group-teaching or to the schedule of shared 
 service of visiting experts. Some one must be on the job all the time 
 or it is not accomplished with success, although skilled personal 
 care-takers can get fine results in gradually lessened attention by 
 the time the baby becomes the child. 
   
 If there are several children in a family, however, the most competent 
 mother, or substitute-mother, has the process to repeat with each 
 newcomer, so that for every child we may reckon at least two years of 
 very constant attention if the bodily habits of health and propriety 
 and the first steps in social training for agreeable membership in the 
 family are to be well taken. The public school is full of children for 
 whom the teachers heroically try to make up for lacks in this intimate 
 home-training. It may be that some people view with pleasure a "movie 
 picture" in which large numbers of children go through a "toothbrush 
 drill," but to some of us it is a sorry exhibit. When Booker 
 Washington opened Tuskegee he required only a toothbrush as entrance 
 fee and equipment, and the use of that implement had to be explained 
 and almost all other agencies for personal neatness and physical care 
 of the body to be offered and their use enforced. This was the step of 
 a whole race toward civilization, a step which the slave condition had 
 not made possible before for the field-hands of the South. The people 
 coming to us from all the peasant classes of Europe and the East have 
 many of them lacked also the chance to be drilled in the things that 
 belong to private and personal habit demanded by our civilization. It 
 may be that for such the public school is the only medium for the 
 belated acquirement of such habits; but if publicity in drill and lack 
 of reserve and modesty be the price paid for wholesale instruction it 
 may injure those with good breeding at command in their own homes by 
 lowering their standards, even while it helps upward those who need 
 the school baths and the school treatment of heads and throats and 
 teeth and all manner of personal care. It is not easy to get what 
 children require in these particulars in the crowded tenement. It may 
 be impossible in the congested quarters of a great city. But the need 
 thus pathetically shown in the children of many social strata in the 
 United States indicates that not only should there be own mothers or 
 substitute-mothers for every little child to start each aright along 
 the way of life but every own mother or substitute-mother should have 
 a decent place to live in so that all needed drill may be conducted in 
 dignified privacy and in an atmosphere required for right results. The 
 housing problem reaches back to the primal need to have a suitable 
 living-place into which to put every home. 
   
 =Early Practice in Walking, Talking, Obedience, and Imitation.=--The 
 fourth obligation which the past has laid upon the modern mother is to 
 teach the little child to walk, to talk, to obey, and to imitate. All 
 these are a part of the habit-drill of the very earliest years. They 
 are bound up with the acquirement of those personal habits of health 
 and propriety before indicated. It is not for nothing that women from 
 the oldest time have been noted for their power of speech and habit of 
 talking. They have had to give every little child the start toward 
 that most indispensable key to all knowledge, the use and 
 understanding of language. And the mother, or the woman who acts for 
 the mother, knows what the child says before any one else can 
 understand his fumbling at speech. Later the mother and the father and 
 other devoted members of the family have to interpret the child's 
 language to all others until he gets accustomed to this difficult art. 
   
 In learning to walk it is the desire to get closer to those most 
 beloved that helps the child to balance on his feet and try the 
 fearful voyage across the room to where father or mother waits to 
 welcome his approach. And here in most families the mother has the 
 practice in hand far more hours in the day than any one else in the 
 family. Yet for talking and walking in families where there are 
 several children the most efficient instruction of the youngest is 
 often given by the older brothers and sisters. The first child has all 
 to do or to try to do alone; the only child has to pioneer all through 
 childhood and youth so far as his own family life is concerned, but 
 the child in a family of several children learns almost by unconscious 
 absorption from those just a step in advance of his own attempts. 
 Where there are children too near in age the inevitable jealousy or 
 unhappiness of the baby too soon pushed from his throne defeats this 
 end of easy accomplishment through imitation. Where there are too many 
 children in the family for the father to properly support, or the 
 mother to healthfully or happily care for, the nearness of age often 
 means friction and not comradeship. Where in such families the older 
 children act as "little fathers" or "little mothers" they may be 
 defrauded of a child's right to care-free leisure or develop a 
 tyrannous control of the younger ones far from helpful to the 
 development of either. The coming of new members to the family, 
 however, in right spacing and right conditions, means that each child 
 gets the benefit of all the teaching each other child receives and 
 makes it far easier for all to learn the ways of life. The art of 
 obedience which is learned in such conditions is a share in a family 
 public opinion, outlined, indeed, by the parents, but maintained by 
 all the younger members of the group. Not that the same elements enter 
 into the early character-drill of each child. There are as many 
 temperaments and as many capacities and as many differing reactions to 
 like conditions in any family, as a general thing, as there are 
 children to be considered. This difference, however, while it makes 
 family discipline more difficult, makes it also usually more 
 effective, for it insures that parents shall study reasons for rules 
 and try at least to reach an obvious basis for them in personal and 
 social well-being rather than in the parents' will. This leads the way 
 to later democracy by stimulating the sense of justice and the sense 
 of individualistic right, together with the sense of mutual tolerance 
 and mutual aid in the very beginnings of family living together. 
   
 =Special Responsibility of the Average Mother.=--The burden of this 
 preliminary training toward social order and social welfare rests 
 to-day more heavily upon the mother than upon any one else, even the 
 father. He often has pressing business down-town whenever hard 
 questions of family discipline must be faced. He is often so 
 overburdened with the financial support of the family that he cannot 
 give time or attention necessary to the constant helping of children 
 to escape from the savage to the civilized, from the selfish to the 
 helpful, from the ignorant to the ever-learning. At any rate, just as 
 many men "keep their religion in their wife's name," so, many fathers, 
 although successfully appealed to as final authority in larger 
 concerns of family order, leave the details of character-drill of all 
 their younger children in the hands of the mother. 
   
 What teachers can do in school comes later in life than the period of 
 which we now speak. Even the kindergarten, with its short hours and 
 its more artificial life, only shows each day a picture of what the 
 child may do later on in his own self-culture. The home nursery is the 
 real place of actual experience for the average child, with the family 
 table and the intimate association with father and mother and brother 
 and sister. These make a school of preëminent importance to the later 
 training. 
   
 =Women's Relation to More Formal Education.=--The fifth obligation 
 which the modern mother inherits from the ages is that relating to the 
 more formal education of all girls and of all little boys in the 
 folk-lore, the vocational skill, and the methods of social arrangement 
 which set moral fashions and demand personal obedience to the social 
 order into which one is born. This obligation is so largely shared 
 to-day that many see in it no special burden for the modern mother. 
 The school training once so largely within the home, or for the older 
 boys so definitely obtained in fraternities or war-groups of men, is 
 now a separate institution. The customs, tribal or national, that once 
 ruled the family-training are now solidified and definitely outlined 
 in laws written on statute books. The illiterate parent cannot, if he 
 would, disobey the compulsory school law. The poverty-stricken parent 
 must either starve himself to feed his children according to the 
 demands of the health board or he must accept public or private 
 charity for their sustenance according to modern demands. The ignorant 
 parent must submit to treatment of his children by public nurse or 
 doctor of whom he may be afraid. The parent not ignorant, but 
 differing from the majority as to what will prevent disease or cure 
 it, must accept the public rule. 
   
 The decay of domestic industry and the growth of the factory system 
 have given rise to so many and serious social dangers that laws are 
 now passed forbidding home manufacture on grounds of need to abolish 
 sweatshop conditions, although to many such prohibition seems, and to 
 some may be, the denial of parental moral protection to children and 
 youth in families of the very poor. The training for self-supporting 
 work, which came about so naturally from within the household in the 
 handicraft stage of industry, now requires many public agencies of 
 education. The new social "mores" accepted by the majority and 
 supported by law and court may be directly opposed to the inherited 
 ideal of right living of large numbers of people in any given 
 locality, especially in the United States with our large immigrant 
 population. 
   
 To have education so much a public concern seems to many to so 
 minimize the mother's share in it that she is placed in the same 
 general relation as the father to what was once her special duty. 
 Ideally, both parents are equally bound to decide all questions 
 concerning the formal education of their children within the limits of 
 personal choice made possible by the public provisions of which all 
 parents may now take advantage. In some favored families this really 
 occurs. Actually, however, in most families the mother has more 
 leisure to learn of possible opportunities, to influence possible 
 improvement, and, above all, to help to wise individual choice in the 
 use by the family of these socially provided educational facilities 
 than has the father. She is also now more likely to belong to 
 associations or clubs or classes for adult study in which educational 
 problems are discussed than is he, and often more intimately 
 acquainted with children's desires or needs in education. 
   
 =Women's Relation to Educational Agencies.=--A glance at the list of 
 national and local associations for the study and application of 
 educational science and art will show the vast majority of women over 
 men (in the United States at least) who are trying to find out what 
 real education in modern life should be and how to secure that best 
 training for their own children and for the children of all. The 
 educational obligation is, therefore, not taken from the average 
 mother's duty; it has changed its form only and often is the more 
 difficult to meet successfully because of the high specialization of 
 the teachers and the confusion of the school direction. No one would 
 claim that fathers, if loyal and worthy, are less anxious than mothers 
 for the trailing of their children toward successful living. The fact, 
 however, that most mothers stand nearest to the lives of the children 
 make them most often the necessary purveyors of educational 
 opportunities from the public provision to private use. 
   
 =The Social Value of Parental Affection.=--Below and within all other 
 gifts to humanity which have come by the way of motherhood's devotion 
 to child-life is that selective and partial affection which secures to 
 each child one adult person at least to whom he or she is supreme in 
 interest. Most normal women feel when they hear the cry of their own 
 new-born that all of life is justly tributary to that one priceless 
 creature who has come at their call out of the mystery of being to 
 travel the difficult road of the generations of mankind. Nor is this 
 inherited tendency toward partial affection a sign of undeveloped or 
 selfish quality in the woman of to-day. It is a provision of nature 
 still supremely useful in helping each tiny atom of the social whole 
 to find and keep its own place in a world of struggle and hardship. 
 The fear of defeat handicaps many a purpose before it is put to the 
 test. The sense of loneliness drives many to lower companionship when 
 higher is hard to attain. The lack of courage and the paralysis of 
 faith in one's self or in others makes invalid many a nature which 
 might otherwise achieve. To prevent such waste from inner weakness and 
 to "encourage excellence in each individual," to use Doctor Small's 
 fine phrase, we need a childhood saturated with the sense of personal 
 values on the plane of affection. Selfishness may indeed pollute this 
 mainspring of personal power, and selfishness sometimes reaches its 
 acme in motherhood's partiality for its own. The ideal of social 
 solidarity and the claim of all upon each one must never be absent 
 from the family influence if that influence is to be wholesome. The 
 family, however, exists to make a small spot in which there may be a 
 unity found nowhere else, and at the centre of the family life is 
 still the mother. 
   
 Says Schiller, "Knowledge and culture demand a blissful sky, much 
 careful nursing and a long number of springs." Who shall be able to 
 secure this for every son of man if no one stands at the door of young 
 life to make these the first demand upon time and strength and 
 devotion for every child in the interest of every child? "The 
 community" has been called "an endowment for human progress." Parental 
 love, so often supremely expressed by the mother, works still and in 
 any future in sight must work ever more devotedly and wisely to secure 
 for each child his rightful share in that endowment. The main business 
 of life is the carrying on of life, and in that business women were 
 drafted long ago for the heaviest end of service and with little 
 social permission to do their work by proxy. Many social helps in her 
 task now make possible leisure and opportunity for individual vocation 
 as never before. Her primal duty to the race remains, however, a debt 
 to be paid as a first obligation wherever and whenever a woman accepts 
 the august function of motherhood. And to-day the majority of most 
 successful families absorb in large measure the time and strength of 
 the housemother. 
   
 =What Women Need Most= is moral sanity and mental poise; the ability 
 to adjust themselves to radical and rapid changes in their 
 relationship to society without losing the finest and most useful 
 results of their past social discipline. Woman is acquiring a new 
 relationship to the home--that of mutual headship with man in the 
 social institution in which for ages she has been a legal subordinate. 
 Social welfare demands that she take into the new copartnership of 
 domestic life the old devotion to family interests. Woman is acquiring 
 a new relationship to the school--that of learner in the highest 
 educational opportunity and of teacher in an ever-widening area. 
 Social welfare demands that she take into the modern school her 
 ancient devotion to child-life. 
   
 The mass of women are acquiring a new relationship to the industrial 
 order--that of spenders instead of producers. Social welfare demands 
 that the modern woman put into her function of purchasing consumer of 
 staple products the same conscientious standardizing of those products 
 and the same sense of responsibility for the conditions surrounding 
 laborers which she displayed in the old handicraft days of domestic 
 industry. A minority of women are acquiring also a new relationship to 
 the industrial order in becoming the recipient of wages or salary, 
 instead of being paid for work as of old in "truck" or in "kind." The 
 feel of the pay envelope on her palm is an unaccustomed but a 
 delicious pleasure to the modern woman. Social welfare demands that 
 she be not beguiled thereby into complicity with industrial 
 exploitation of the weak and the poor, such as she would not have 
 tolerated in the old days of personal relationship in labor in 
 domestic handicraft. 
   
 Woman is acquiring a new relationship to recreation and the social 
 control of the customs ruling leisure hours. Social welfare demands 
 that gambling be not made fashionable in the drawing room as it is 
 being driven out of the business world; that dancing be not vulgarized 
 and the mother-tongue not corrupted, but that self-control, purity, 
 dignity, mark the "new woman" as it did her best ancestors. Woman is 
 acquiring a new relationship to the state--that of citizen with full 
 responsibility instead of her old perpetual minority under man's 
 control. Social welfare demands that she take into the body politic 
 the same devotion to the weak and undeveloped, the same patient, wise 
 dependence upon the spiritual elements of justice and wisdom which 
 have made her private motherhood so successful. She must not now, on 
 peril of a social setback, take up man's weapons of selfishness, of 
 violence, of impatient revolution--weapons the best of men have 
 already discarded. 
   
 Women should now be clear-sighted enough to see that the world needs 
 from them not the same but different contributions to the upreach and 
 onward march of the race from those elements in which man has 
 excelled. If society-at-large is to become truly a family of those who 
 love and serve each other, then human beings of the mother-sex must 
 take into public life and public service the best they have learned 
 and taught in the individual home. What women most need now is to 
 "retain all the good the past hath had" as they step forward to their 
 full liberty and responsibility in new relationships to life. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON THE MOTHER 
   
 What, in general, have been the social demands upon wives and 
 
      mothers, and how have these been met in the past? 
   
 What, if any, of these inherited social demands are now met by 
 
      social agencies outside of the private family? 
   
 What, in general, may be defined as the line of demarkation 
 
      between the private obligations resting still upon mothers for 
      personal service to family life and agencies of public 
      child-care and social standardization? 
   
 How far is a trend toward minimizing the demand for personal 
 
      service of the housemother in the private family to be 
      encouraged? 
   
 If a mother, in average financial condition, has the "three and 
 
      one-half children" eugenists demand of each family, and does 
      her duty by them in private family life, how much of her time 
      and strength must go into the housemother's service and for 
      what period of years? 
   
 What amount of time and strength might be left, in the case of 
 
      strong and competent women, for other vocational work? 
   
 Is the modern "nursery school" an adequate substitute for the 
 
      early home-training? (See report, "A Nursery School 
      Experiment," published by "Bureau of Educational Experiments," 
      144 West Thirteenth Street, New York City.) 
   
   
 FOOTNOTES: 
   
 [3] (_a_) See, for example, "Conveniences for the Farm Home," Farmers' 
 Bulletin No. 270, and (_b_) "The Farm Kitchen as a Workshop," Farmers' 
 Bulletin No. 607. 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER II (THE MOTHER) 
   
     "Strength and dignity are her clothing; 
     She openeth her mouth with wisdom; 
     And the law of kindness is on her tongue. 
     She looketh well to the ways of her household, 
     And eateth not the bread of idleness. 
     The heart of her husband trusteth in her; 
     Her children rise up and call her blessed; 
     Give her of the fruit of her hands; 
     And let her works praise her in the gates." 
                     --PROVERBS. 
   
     "A being breathing thoughtful breath, 
     A traveller betwixt life and death; 
     The reason firm, the temperate will, 
     Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill; 
     A perfect woman, nobly plann'd, 
     To warn, to comfort, and command; 
     And yet a spirit still and bright, 
     With something of an angel light." 
                     --WORDSWORTH. 
   
     "Yet in herself she dwelleth not, 
       Although no home were half so fair; 
     No simplest duty is forgot; 
     Life hath no dim and lowly spot 
     That doth not in her sunshine share." 
                     --LOWELL. 
   
     "I loved the woman; there was one through whom I loved her, one 
     Not learned, save in gracious household ways, 
     Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants, 
     No angel, but a dearer being, interpreter between the gods and men. 
   
     "Happy he with such a mother! Faith in womankind 
     Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high 
     Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall, 
     He shall not blind his soul with clay." 
                     --TENNYSON. 
   
   
 =Antiquity of the Mother-instinct.=--The mother-instinct of protection 
 of offspring, of care of weakness and of sacrifice for the young, came 
 to high power before the human was reached in the scale of beings. It 
 must never be forgotten that humbler sisters set the fashion of 
 motherhood's devotion too long ago to reckon the time and in types of 
 organism too remote to be always recognized as kin to the human beings 
 we know to-day. This is the greatest and most racially useful of all 
 the biological assets stored up for us in the prehuman struggle toward 
 what we now call civilization. Nor should we fail to give full value 
 to the testimony of primitive human life that the mother and child 
 formed the first social group within the loose association of the 
 herd. It was the first group to develop, by virtue of its conscious 
 relationship, the sense of trust and the habit of service of the 
 stronger to the weaker, thus leading toward mutual aid within an area 
 of affection and good-will. These facts give basic assurance that 
 mother-love will last, no matter what changes in form of its 
 expression may be called for by changes in social order. 
   
 The reason why the relationship of mother and child was able thus to 
 lead the way toward social organization for the common good is 
 obvious. The intimate physical tie, the easily understood claim of the 
 child upon its mother, the prolongation of human infancy instituting a 
 habit of continuous service of the young and hence a tendency toward a 
 settled home and peaceful industries, all made it easy for woman to 
 become care-taker of children. These also made it easy for the early 
 social order to hold mothers to the task and, in growing measure, 
 protect them in it. What have been the recognized essentials in that 
 care-taking of motherhood? What are the permanent elements in the 
 mother's devotion to offspring which persist under all changes in 
 social conditions? 
   
 =The Recognized Essentials in Child-care.=--The more important items 
 in a program of child-care may be summed up as follows: 
   
     First--Protection of infancy and childhood from threatening 
           dangers. 
   
     Second--Providing food, clothing, and shelter for the young. 
   
     Third--Drilling children in physical habits and manner of 
           personal behavior demanded by the family rule of time and 
           place of birth. 
   
     Fourth--Teaching the child to talk, to walk, to obey, to 
           imitate. 
   
     Fifth--Interpreting to each newcomer the group morals which 
           govern the family and the educational process in the 
           period and locality into which he is born. 
   
     Sixth--For ages untold, the more formal education of all girls 
           and of all little boys in the folk-lore, the vocational 
           skill, the ways of living together and the methods of 
           social arrangement both within and without the tribe or 
           state or nation into which they were born. 
   
 Are any of these essential elements of motherhood's ancient devotion 
 to child-life lifted wholly from her obligation? Careful study of the 
 family needs and conditions, and the effect upon them of modern social 
 control and social organization, indicates that not one of these 
 ancient obligations is taken bodily from the modern mother's service. 
   
 =The Protective Function.=--The protective function has indeed been 
 considered for many centuries peculiarly the father's duty. Ever since 
 man was bound to family obligations he has been charged with repelling 
 enemy attacks upon the group of which his own family was a part and 
 with the task of standing guard over wife and child as against all 
 physical dangers. Man has developed under this social pressure a sense 
 of chivalry and a tendency to "save women and children first" which 
 give noble examples of courage and self-sacrifice to fire the 
 imagination of each new generation. Has the father-office developed 
 such many-sided and adequate protective service to childhood that 
 mothers have been able to "lay down their arms" and rest content in 
 the knowledge that their children are shielded from every danger? It 
 seems not. In the days when women were ignorant of all outside their 
 homes they may have felt so secure because not understanding the cause 
 of many family tragedies. In the days when they had no power to change 
 conditions affecting the home from without they may have felt excused 
 from the protective function of early motherhood, since men had taken 
 over physical defense and economic support and the relationship of the 
 family group to the social whole. No open-eyed woman in a country 
 giving women social, economic, and political power can so think 
 to-day. 
   
 It is a far cry from the savage mother, beating back some beast of the 
 jungle or the plain, to the modern mother whose physical protection 
 and that of her children is amply provided not alone by the husband 
 and father concerned but by organized society with its police power, 
 its courts and laws. The dangers that threaten child-life to-day in 
 the more civilized communities are not the same that threatened the 
 young of the herd-pack or the early lives of primitive men and women. 
 Then the mother had sometimes to defend her child against its own 
 father, especially her girl-babies against the social fiat of death 
 executed by the father's will. Ancient folk-lore and myth show us many 
 a struggle, intense and cruel, between mother-love and this 
 group-sentence of death upon some of its young. In case of war also 
 the ancient mother had to protect her virgin daughters against outrage 
 and capture, albeit so feebly and to so disastrous an end. And war, 
 since it is always and by its nature must be a return to savage 
 conditions, now leads to the sacrifice of women and children in much 
 the ancient manner; and faced by its horrors at close touch, the 
 mother-instinct essays the old task to the same bitter defeat. 
   
 In peaceful periods, however, in the long ages when the father-rule 
 was a despotism tempered only by natural affection and the skill of 
 women in securing advantages while simulating submission, mothers had 
 large use of their protective function in easing family discipline and 
 in gaining relief from harsh conditions affecting childhood. Theirs 
 was then no open fight for the well-being of their offspring, and 
 often not a wise effort to that end, but ancient song and story all 
 show that childhood and youth depended upon the mother-love in crises 
 of family experience and that without such refuge many young lives 
 would have been utterly sacrificed. 
   
 =Social Elements in Modern Protection of Children.=--To-day the 
 dangers to which babies and children are exposed are more subtle in 
 form and more complex in action. They are less within than without the 
 average home. They are those that give the high death-rate of infants, 
 the crippled limbs of children, the weakness of body and defectiveness 
 of mind and feebleness or perversion of moral nature that make so many 
 human beings unequal to life's demands. They are the dangers, personal 
 and social, summed up in the antitheses of "health" and "disease," of 
 "normal" and "abnormal." Not that the dangers so indicated are new but 
 rather that we are newly aware of them. Not that savage or early 
 civilized life had conditions more favorable to health and normality 
 but that the easier modern conditions save alive many who in harsher 
 times would have died in babyhood. Moreover, we are beginning at last 
 to set a standard, in ever-clearer outline, of what is health and of 
 what is normality in physical, mental, and moral human life. Moreover, 
 we are seeing as never before that the dangers that beset the child 
 to-day are not those from which the mother alone, or the individual 
 father and mother working together, can adequately protect. They are 
 dangers that only society can prevent and that society alone can 
 abolish. 
   
 =Women's Leadership in Social Protection.=--Why, then, do we say that 
 the protective function of individual motherhood is still demanded and 
 still a large part of the modern mother's obligation? Because she is 
 to-day the one most clearly required, in our own country at least, to 
 summon the social forces to lessen or abolish those dangers to which 
 children are exposed. The action of the solitary, primitive mother 
 fighting off the despoiler of her child does not much resemble the 
 banding together of modern women by the hundreds and by the thousands 
 to abolish typhoid fever in some city in which it has become endemic 
 through the greed of manufacturers who pollute the water supply. It 
 is, however, the same spirit in both; and in the modern instance it 
 wakes, first, the fathers to their protective duty, and then the 
 guardians of the public health, and then educates the public mind, and 
 at last accomplishes the desired result through appropriate laws, 
 well enforced. It is a long step from the indirect "influence," the 
 often deceitful cunning, the appeal to sex-attraction and the pleading 
 of weakness by which for ages women sought to protect their children 
 against harsh punishments, their daughters against marriage to those 
 whom they loathed, and their sons to apprenticeship to work they could 
 not choose, to the openly exercised power of the modern mother. In the 
 days when wives and mothers had no legal rights which society was 
 bound to respect, appeal was woman's only weapon; now the modern 
 mother has command of her protective function and exercises it 
 fearlessly. The same spirit is in all the long process of change, 
 however, and women to-day banding openly together and joining also 
 with men on equal terms, to secure laws protecting children from 
 cruelty even against their own parents; to raise the "age of consent" 
 in order to prevent the unwitting moral suicide of little girls; to 
 sweep the streets free from vicious allurements that young boys may be 
 preserved from debauchery and disease; to place trustees of society's 
 power of public protection as chaperones in every place of moral 
 danger; these modern women are near of kin to all motherhood of any 
 past. So also are those of the same spirit as the ancient mother who 
 band themselves together, again with men on equal terms, but oftenest, 
 perhaps, with men whom their own social interest has summoned to the 
 task, for the establishment of "Health Centres", of adequate and 
 efficient clinics and dispensaries; for securing necessary education 
 and care of mothers before the birth of their children, and for 
 mothers and babies alike needing good, fresh air, rest and comfort 
 after birth; for the raising of standards of physical well-being all 
 along the line of life from youth to age. The ancient mother was too 
 ignorant and had too little power to save her children and family from 
 physical ills, but she did her best. The modern mother is able to 
 learn about requirements and to act with power for the better health 
 and better training of every child. Is she always ready for and equal 
 to the task? 
   
 At least we can claim this for the mother devotion in modern times, 
 that it shows, and in exact proportion of its increasing social power, 
 an alertness and a moral earnestness in all that concerns the welfare 
 of children that have perpetuated and extended the protective 
 functions of society as no other agency has done. Much of the modern 
 legislation and social work directed toward the physical and moral 
 safeguarding of the young has been instituted and is carried out in 
 detail largely by women. The passage of the so-called Maternity Bill 
 by our National Congress, at the recognized instigation of women of 
 the United States, and the call it makes for a large staff of women 
 workers to carry out its provisions, is a case in point. This 
 protective work for mothers and babies is not always done by women who 
 are themselves mothers. Perhaps too often its details are in charge of 
 those lacking deep experience of life, and hence not able to interpret 
 new laws of social control to parents of ancient ideals and backward 
 social culture. But women in any case are called for in large numbers 
 to translate the ancient personal duty of protective care of the young 
 in terms of social obligations. 
   
 =The Provision of Food, Clothing, and Shelter.=--The second recognized 
 ancient duty of mothers is in respect to the provision of food, 
 clothing, and shelter for the young. This duty has undergone great 
 changes of method during the last century, and in the large centres of 
 population has altered almost past recognition. These changes seem to 
 many to minimize the individual mother's responsibility in these 
 matters to the vanishing point. 
   
 It is indeed an almost immeasurable distance from the primitive mother 
 scratching the soil with her sharpened stick, her baby bound to her 
 bended back, in order to plant a few seeds for a tiny harvest to save 
 the life of her child when the hunt should be poor, to the modern 
 mother whose food supply for her family comes to the table from all 
 parts of the earth at the call of her telephone. Is the modern mother, 
 then, released from all obligations as to that food supply? It is a 
 long step also from the primitive mother making slowly with her thorn 
 needle the only garment her child may wear, and even a long step from 
 the home spinning, weaving and dyeing of later handicraft, to the 
 modern use of the "ready-made" shop and the division of all 
 garment-making into innumerable specialties of labor. Is the modern 
 mother thereby released from care concerning the family clothing? 
   
 For the modern housing of families do we not all have to depend upon 
 the architect, the builder, the real estate broker, the speculator in 
 land, the laws concerning boundaries, taxes and title deeds, rent and 
 landlords' powers, and press all one upon another for a chance for a 
 home when we elect to live where many other people want also to live? 
 Is, then, the shelter of the family no longer the mother's care? 
   
 =The Woman in Rural Life.=--The country-woman, dealing at first hand 
 with rural conditions, has many of the same problems of personal 
 devotion in the provision of food, clothing, and shelter with which 
 her ancient ancestor struggled. She has, it is true, "scientific 
 farming" of men to raise the harvests that ancestor's heroic but 
 feeble efforts could not secure. She has mechanical and commercial 
 aids as housemother such as the primitive woman never imagined. She 
 has been released from much of the drudgery which burdened her 
 grandmother in the domestic stage of industry. She is under social 
 protection such as no previous woman enjoyed in the solitary household 
 of the past. And in the United States the Federal Government is 
 offering her aids.[3] It is, however, true that the housemother in 
 rural communities still feels many of the obligations of the ancient 
 woman. The three-meal-a-day routine, the actual preparation of raw 
 material of food for the table, the personal offices of housework, 
 washing, ironing, mending, making, sweeping, dusting, cleaning, in all 
 their varied details, keep her in active sympathy with the past. This 
 fact furnishes the main reason why "Women's Columns" and "Magazines 
 for Women" reach such large circulation in rural districts, where they 
 help toward lessening the domestic burden by showing how to carry it 
 more easily. 
   
 The farm woman, however, is moving, many thousand strong, with men as 
 many, to mitigate the isolation of the solitary household, to bring 
 the home nearer to the neighbors, the school, the church and the 
 store, by massing rural homes in villages and forming the habits of 
 the men-folk to go further afield for their own work. This movement, 
 which is of all social reforms most needed because affecting larger 
 classes than any other and also because affecting the basic industry 
 of all countries, that of agriculture, is working toward making 
 farm-life once more attractive to young men and capable of winning 
 young women to the life of the farmer's wife. 
   
 Meanwhile, the higher forms of social organization possible in cities 
 and in closely settled towns and villages are working to lessen 
 house-keeping burdens to an unprecedented degree. It is noticeable 
 that all schemes for so specializing woman's work and so easing the 
 domestic burden as to make, as one writer puts it, "the home a rest 
 place for women as for men," have their imaginary seat in great cities 
 or closely built suburbs. The farm-women we know can combine and 
 coöperate to a greater extent than they now do and the town and city 
 women may take far better advantage of the agencies of household 
 assistance now at their doors. How far this movement to relieve the 
 home of household work may go we do not know. 
   
 =Modern Demand for Standardization.=--Is there any plan yet proposed, 
 however, which can relieve the mother of her primary and ancient 
 obligation to see that her family is well nourished, suitably clothed 
 and healthfully sheltered? Some one must attend to the needs of each 
 family in these vital particulars which underlie all problems of 
 public and private health. Shall the state do it? So far the 
 experience of state institutions and even of private "homes" do not 
 encourage hope along that line. So far the physical and affectional 
 needs of children and youth, and of husbands and wives, and of fathers 
 and mothers have not been met by any substitute for the private home. 
 And in the private home, under any plan, there must go on certain 
 processes which have to cost some one member of the family a great 
 deal of thought, much personal effort and constant attention. For most 
 families in average condition that person is naturally the 
 housemother. If the husband and father is the chief or only 
 wage-earner in "gainful occupations," then his health and strength are 
 of primary concern to all the family and must be secured by adequate 
 and healthful provision of food and clothing, and the home must give 
 him what he vitally needs for maintaining power of economic service to 
 his family. If the mother, also, is a wage-or salary-earner we have 
 the dictum of economists that her inherited and usual place in the 
 family machinery must be filled, if at all successfully, by trained 
 and congenial helpers at a cost in present conditions prohibitive for 
 the average family income. The estimate of Mr. Taber, in his excellent 
 book, _The Business of the Household_, is that unless for causes of 
 illness or special emergency "no family having an income of less than 
 three thousand dollars has any right to maintain a maid." This 
 estimate seems not only economically correct but shows why so few 
 families have incomes that can release the housemother from housework. 
 It also shows why only the exceptionally trained and competent 
 vocational worker, if a married woman and mother of young children, 
 can earn enough to release herself from the miscellaneous tasks of the 
 private household without loss to the family treasury. The easing of 
 the burden of housework, almost unbearable as it has been and 
 responsible, as we have good reason to believe, for much ill-health of 
 women and much unhappiness in marriage, is coming fast and from quite 
 other directions than is often perceived. The commercial aids of 
 wholesale preparation of food and clothing, and the new fashions in 
 house-building and household management are alike working toward such 
 a reduction of private household service as may enable the average 
 woman to meet the family needs, even where there are several young 
 children, if she is strong in body and trained in efficient ways of 
 working, and yet have considerable time left for other activities. 
   
 The apartment house has set the fashion of simplification and 
 reduction of necessary personal service in the home. The apartment 
 house, with its continuous hot water, its ready heat and its relief 
 from care of sidewalks, halls and stairs, and with its hour-service at 
 command is obviously becoming a favorite place to live in. Especially 
 do women like it. The multiple house, however, does not seem the best 
 place for children after the earliest months of infancy, and in many 
 such houses they are openly "not wanted." The multiple house has also 
 many disadvantages from the social side in the lack of home 
 associations which support family affection. They are also for the 
 most part in localities where people are brought together without plan 
 or friendship and hence can not cultivate that neighborliness which, 
 so far in the history of the race, has been a nursery of the community 
 spirit. 
   
 =The Apartment House and the Family.=--The apartment house seems to be 
 the best place for those families in which all the adult members are 
 busy at some vocation, and in which the children are of age to profit 
 by educational opportunities usually found only in cities. In such 
 families the burdens of the person who is in command of the family 
 comfort as to food and raiment and house-keeping are reduced to the 
 lowest terms. If to the usual apartment house provisions for aids to 
 the housemother are added, what is now offered in some places, namely, 
 the "Auto-Service for Meals," whereby the principal meal, at least, 
 the dinner, is brought to the door ready to place on the table and all 
 cooking dishes hard to wash are returned to the centre of supply to be 
 prepared for another service, then, indeed, can all the members take 
 turns in rendering the small offices for family comfort still required 
 and each go about his or her special vocation at will. This seems to 
 be the goal of many progressive minds, although personal taste is 
 seldom satisfied by "coöperative" cooking. 
   
 It must be remembered by all, that the sort of family pictured above 
 has in it no children of ages requiring freedom of motion and constant 
 attention (unless, indeed, "the boarding-school in the country" for 
 all over four or five years is contemplated). It has in it no aged 
 whose needs in diet and in physical comfort vary from the usual. It 
 has in it no chronic invalids and no convalescents, no blind or lame 
 or specially weak requiring special help. It is for the particular 
 benefit, at least, of families of a particular type, of which the 
 cities, with their more varied facilities, contain an unusual 
 proportion. For the family of the ordinary type, with its many 
 differing needs and its variety of claim upon some one person for its 
 central direction and service, the various aids from without which 
 have been indicated serve rather to relieve from excessive burdens 
 than to remove altogether the special obligations of the woman-head of 
 the family. 
   
 Moreover, the time left to the average housemother from the old 
 housework by the new helps in that work is, in part at least, 
 mortgaged in advance to social effort to make the new commercial aids 
 to family service actual helps and not hindrances to family health and 
 comfort. The food supply drawn upon must be sharply investigated lest 
 it contain deleterious substances or be denuded of nourishing quality. 
 The ready-made clothing must be bought with knowledge and constant 
 vigilance against cheating in material or in construction or in sins 
 of fashion against health and beauty. The labor-saving devices of 
 every sort must be put to intelligent test and require specific 
 training for most efficient use. The family budget must be more 
 carefully planned and more heroically maintained at prudent levels. 
 The public service of markets, transportation facilities and functions 
 of "middlemen" must be understood and controlled as never before. 
 Above all, the pressure of uniformity must be resisted if the offered 
 supply of the essentials of life prove inadequate to the deepest 
 needs, or the scale of living be too ambitiously set by the housing 
 facilities adjusted to the ideas and claims of landlords rather than 
 to the needs of family life. 
   
 Hence we may say that the old forms of effort by which mothers fed and 
 clothed and sheltered their children led directly to absorption of 
 interest, energy and conscientious labor within the house. The new 
 forms of effort by which these essentials of healthful and comfortable 
 living are secured lead directly to all manner of coöperative social 
 adjustments of supply to demand. The standard of demand, however, let 
 it never be forgotten, is made and maintained within the intimate 
 family circle itself, and the personal intelligence and ethical 
 maturity of the housemothers, who form the major purchasing class of 
 every civilized community, determine that standard. For that great 
 enterprise of high standardization the same personal devotion to the 
 central demands of life is required in the average modern woman which 
 made the ancient mother so great a leader in primitive culture. The 
 new aids to the housemother's task may give her a better chance than 
 any women ever had before to see the real social significance of the 
 personal offices of home life. The poets have seen it all through the 
 centuries and have pictured the myth goddesses bringing the cup and 
 the bread and the fruit and weaving the web of ceremonial or of simple 
 garment in household poetry. All human need for sustenance and the 
 nurture of our physical being has made the wife the loaf-giver and the 
 mother a nourisher of the young, and as such artists have portrayed 
 her. 
   
 We may say "our father-land," but we always say "our mother-earth." To 
 those who see clearly the value of the ancient family rite of the 
 meal alone together, to which it may well be every member of the 
 family has made a distinct contribution; to those to whom the private 
 table still appeals and who still appreciate the taste and quality of 
 every purchase made for each individual member of the intimate group 
 (things taking time and thought most often of the mother), the 
 individual home has meanings that are not lost but rather are growing 
 in spiritual importance as the drudgery of the household is lessened. 
   
 =New Uses of Electric Power.=--To-day another great contribution to 
 the spiritual value of the private household ministrations is offered 
 in the new uses of electric power. Already the "servantless house" is 
 widely advertised. Already the grave difficulties in household 
 adjustment made by the growing unwillingness of competent girls and 
 women to do anything in the households of strangers, and thereby 
 giving rise to the serious "servant-girl problem" for people of 
 limited means, are being mitigated by the new devices of this modern 
 wizard of electricity. It seems to many of us that had this magician 
 been discovered before the invention of steam-power-driven machinery 
 the whole tendency of modern industry would have been turned not so 
 absolutely, if at all, toward the factory. Such modifications of 
 domestic manufacture and handicraft as right use of electricity could 
 have initiated, might have prevented some of the social and economic 
 evils of our present labor world. However that may be, it is clear 
 that now the modern housewife has at her hand the means of easy 
 control of her special family duties such as no ancient woman could 
 have conceived. The movement henceforward, therefore, we must believe, 
 is toward such lessening of household burdens by mechanical means, and 
 such simplification of household requirements by new family ideals as 
 will make every woman of ordinary strength and of even moderate 
 capacity and training so sure a master of essentials in that field 
 that she can dispense with the "help" that so often now hinders the 
 real family life and make the home more truly the private shrine of 
 affection and of mutual aid than it has ever been before. 
   
 =Certain Duties the Mother Cannot Delegate= if she would hand on the 
 torch of life the brighter for her handling. Doctor Devine has well 
 said that "the only satisfactory method of getting babies safely 
 through the first years of life is the strictly individualistic plan 
 of attention to each one by its own mother." The proof of this is in 
 the death-rate of infants in foundling asylums and in other forms of 
 communal care even where scientific knowledge has been invoked and 
 humane feeling exercised. To keep babies alive and well is a 
 prerequisite to all later development, and happiness seems to be a 
 necessary foundation for such preservation of their life and health. 
 So far in human experience babies have declined with one accord to be 
 happy unless some one person was constantly devoted to their welfare. 
 That person may be a "hired expert," it is true, but the successful 
 nurse must have the mother-feeling. Moreover, it is now agreed that 
 the best physical stamina is secured by mothers breast-feeding their 
 own babies, and all manner of incentives, even to state subsidies, are 
 being used to lead women to this personal office. 
   
 If mothers thus nurse their babies they must come close to them in 
 affectional contact, and it is through affectional contact more than 
 in any other way that babies seem to thrive. No one can claim that 
 ability to care for and bring up children "comes by nature." The 
 affectional tie does, however, give an added earnestness to the desire 
 to learn how to minister wisely and well to the needs of the child. 
 That same affectional tie on the part of the mother is shown in a 
 return of affection from the child. Such personal ministrations of the 
 mother to the child have also a great effect in forming the whole 
 character in later life. One may worship from a distance, and the 
 capacity to justly estimate excellence grows with maturity. But the 
 child knows best those who serve his needs most intimately and gives 
 his love to that person. 
   
 =The Mother's Compensation for Personal Service.=--There is much 
 compensation, therefore, for the woman who gives herself to her child 
 in old-fashioned ways of personal service. She gets the charm and the 
 allurement of the growing bud on life's tree. If she misses that she 
 loses something of her birthright and some "substitute-mother" gets 
 something of satisfaction from the child that she does not. 
   
 =Early Drill in Personal Habits.=--The third essential of the 
 inherited obligation of mothers to their children is the early drill 
 in personal habits that are required for health and decency and 
 propriety in any given time and place. For this it is an absolute 
 necessity that either the mother so serve herself or that she secure 
 some substitute-mother of refinement, knowledge, affection and 
 devotion which make her an equal in the family circle. How many nurses 
 fulfil that demand? Many, even of those least recognized by their 
 employers as entitled to special gratitude and appreciation. The point 
 to be noted is, however, that even if experts for "hour-service" as 
 nursery governess could be had in sufficient numbers and even if the 
 majority of families could financially meet the expense of those fully 
 competent, such service would not, as a rule, meet the needs of 
 children under three or four years. It is a constant task, not, 
 indeed, requiring every minute of time, but requiring constant 
 readiness to serve at need both day and night to start an infant along 
 the required rules of daily habit. And that task does not lend itself 
 to the conditions of group-teaching or to the schedule of shared 
 service of visiting experts. Some one must be on the job all the time 
 or it is not accomplished with success, although skilled personal 
 care-takers can get fine results in gradually lessened attention by 
 the time the baby becomes the child. 
   
 If there are several children in a family, however, the most competent 
 mother, or substitute-mother, has the process to repeat with each 
 newcomer, so that for every child we may reckon at least two years of 
 very constant attention if the bodily habits of health and propriety 
 and the first steps in social training for agreeable membership in the 
 family are to be well taken. The public school is full of children for 
 whom the teachers heroically try to make up for lacks in this intimate 
 home-training. It may be that some people view with pleasure a "movie 
 picture" in which large numbers of children go through a "toothbrush 
 drill," but to some of us it is a sorry exhibit. When Booker 
 Washington opened Tuskegee he required only a toothbrush as entrance 
 fee and equipment, and the use of that implement had to be explained 
 and almost all other agencies for personal neatness and physical care 
 of the body to be offered and their use enforced. This was the step of 
 a whole race toward civilization, a step which the slave condition had 
 not made possible before for the field-hands of the South. The people 
 coming to us from all the peasant classes of Europe and the East have 
 many of them lacked also the chance to be drilled in the things that 
 belong to private and personal habit demanded by our civilization. It 
 may be that for such the public school is the only medium for the 
 belated acquirement of such habits; but if publicity in drill and lack 
 of reserve and modesty be the price paid for wholesale instruction it 
 may injure those with good breeding at command in their own homes by 
 lowering their standards, even while it helps upward those who need 
 the school baths and the school treatment of heads and throats and 
 teeth and all manner of personal care. It is not easy to get what 
 children require in these particulars in the crowded tenement. It may 
 be impossible in the congested quarters of a great city. But the need 
 thus pathetically shown in the children of many social strata in the 
 United States indicates that not only should there be own mothers or 
 substitute-mothers for every little child to start each aright along 
 the way of life but every own mother or substitute-mother should have 
 a decent place to live in so that all needed drill may be conducted in 
 dignified privacy and in an atmosphere required for right results. The 
 housing problem reaches back to the primal need to have a suitable 
 living-place into which to put every home. 
   
 =Early Practice in Walking, Talking, Obedience, and Imitation.=--The 
 fourth obligation which the past has laid upon the modern mother is to 
 teach the little child to walk, to talk, to obey, and to imitate. All 
 these are a part of the habit-drill of the very earliest years. They 
 are bound up with the acquirement of those personal habits of health 
 and propriety before indicated. It is not for nothing that women from 
 the oldest time have been noted for their power of speech and habit of 
 talking. They have had to give every little child the start toward 
 that most indispensable key to all knowledge, the use and 
 understanding of language. And the mother, or the woman who acts for 
 the mother, knows what the child says before any one else can 
 understand his fumbling at speech. Later the mother and the father and 
 other devoted members of the family have to interpret the child's 
 language to all others until he gets accustomed to this difficult art. 
   
 In learning to walk it is the desire to get closer to those most 
 beloved that helps the child to balance on his feet and try the 
 fearful voyage across the room to where father or mother waits to 
 welcome his approach. And here in most families the mother has the 
 practice in hand far more hours in the day than any one else in the 
 family. Yet for talking and walking in families where there are 
 several children the most efficient instruction of the youngest is 
 often given by the older brothers and sisters. The first child has all 
 to do or to try to do alone; the only child has to pioneer all through 
 childhood and youth so far as his own family life is concerned, but 
 the child in a family of several children learns almost by unconscious 
 absorption from those just a step in advance of his own attempts. 
 Where there are children too near in age the inevitable jealousy or 
 unhappiness of the baby too soon pushed from his throne defeats this 
 end of easy accomplishment through imitation. Where there are too many 
 children in the family for the father to properly support, or the 
 mother to healthfully or happily care for, the nearness of age often 
 means friction and not comradeship. Where in such families the older 
 children act as "little fathers" or "little mothers" they may be 
 defrauded of a child's right to care-free leisure or develop a 
 tyrannous control of the younger ones far from helpful to the 
 development of either. The coming of new members to the family, 
 however, in right spacing and right conditions, means that each child 
 gets the benefit of all the teaching each other child receives and 
 makes it far easier for all to learn the ways of life. The art of 
 obedience which is learned in such conditions is a share in a family 
 public opinion, outlined, indeed, by the parents, but maintained by 
 all the younger members of the group. Not that the same elements enter 
 into the early character-drill of each child. There are as many 
 temperaments and as many capacities and as many differing reactions to 
 like conditions in any family, as a general thing, as there are 
 children to be considered. This difference, however, while it makes 
 family discipline more difficult, makes it also usually more 
 effective, for it insures that parents shall study reasons for rules 
 and try at least to reach an obvious basis for them in personal and 
 social well-being rather than in the parents' will. This leads the way 
 to later democracy by stimulating the sense of justice and the sense 
 of individualistic right, together with the sense of mutual tolerance 
 and mutual aid in the very beginnings of family living together. 
   
 =Special Responsibility of the Average Mother.=--The burden of this 
 preliminary training toward social order and social welfare rests 
 to-day more heavily upon the mother than upon any one else, even the 
 father. He often has pressing business down-town whenever hard 
 questions of family discipline must be faced. He is often so 
 overburdened with the financial support of the family that he cannot 
 give time or attention necessary to the constant helping of children 
 to escape from the savage to the civilized, from the selfish to the 
 helpful, from the ignorant to the ever-learning. At any rate, just as 
 many men "keep their religion in their wife's name," so, many fathers, 
 although successfully appealed to as final authority in larger 
 concerns of family order, leave the details of character-drill of all 
 their younger children in the hands of the mother. 
   
 What teachers can do in school comes later in life than the period of 
 which we now speak. Even the kindergarten, with its short hours and 
 its more artificial life, only shows each day a picture of what the 
 child may do later on in his own self-culture. The home nursery is the 
 real place of actual experience for the average child, with the family 
 table and the intimate association with father and mother and brother 
 and sister. These make a school of preëminent importance to the later 
 training. 
   
 =Women's Relation to More Formal Education.=--The fifth obligation 
 which the modern mother inherits from the ages is that relating to the 
 more formal education of all girls and of all little boys in the 
 folk-lore, the vocational skill, and the methods of social arrangement 
 which set moral fashions and demand personal obedience to the social 
 order into which one is born. This obligation is so largely shared 
 to-day that many see in it no special burden for the modern mother. 
 The school training once so largely within the home, or for the older 
 boys so definitely obtained in fraternities or war-groups of men, is 
 now a separate institution. The customs, tribal or national, that once 
 ruled the family-training are now solidified and definitely outlined 
 in laws written on statute books. The illiterate parent cannot, if he 
 would, disobey the compulsory school law. The poverty-stricken parent 
 must either starve himself to feed his children according to the 
 demands of the health board or he must accept public or private 
 charity for their sustenance according to modern demands. The ignorant 
 parent must submit to treatment of his children by public nurse or 
 doctor of whom he may be afraid. The parent not ignorant, but 
 differing from the majority as to what will prevent disease or cure 
 it, must accept the public rule. 
   
 The decay of domestic industry and the growth of the factory system 
 have given rise to so many and serious social dangers that laws are 
 now passed forbidding home manufacture on grounds of need to abolish 
 sweatshop conditions, although to many such prohibition seems, and to 
 some may be, the denial of parental moral protection to children and 
 youth in families of the very poor. The training for self-supporting 
 work, which came about so naturally from within the household in the 
 handicraft stage of industry, now requires many public agencies of 
 education. The new social "mores" accepted by the majority and 
 supported by law and court may be directly opposed to the inherited 
 ideal of right living of large numbers of people in any given 
 locality, especially in the United States with our large immigrant 
 population. 
   
 To have education so much a public concern seems to many to so 
 minimize the mother's share in it that she is placed in the same 
 general relation as the father to what was once her special duty. 
 Ideally, both parents are equally bound to decide all questions 
 concerning the formal education of their children within the limits of 
 personal choice made possible by the public provisions of which all 
 parents may now take advantage. In some favored families this really 
 occurs. Actually, however, in most families the mother has more 
 leisure to learn of possible opportunities, to influence possible 
 improvement, and, above all, to help to wise individual choice in the 
 use by the family of these socially provided educational facilities 
 than has the father. She is also now more likely to belong to 
 associations or clubs or classes for adult study in which educational 
 problems are discussed than is he, and often more intimately 
 acquainted with children's desires or needs in education. 
   
 =Women's Relation to Educational Agencies.=--A glance at the list of 
 national and local associations for the study and application of 
 educational science and art will show the vast majority of women over 
 men (in the United States at least) who are trying to find out what 
 real education in modern life should be and how to secure that best 
 training for their own children and for the children of all. The 
 educational obligation is, therefore, not taken from the average 
 mother's duty; it has changed its form only and often is the more 
 difficult to meet successfully because of the high specialization of 
 the teachers and the confusion of the school direction. No one would 
 claim that fathers, if loyal and worthy, are less anxious than mothers 
 for the trailing of their children toward successful living. The fact, 
 however, that most mothers stand nearest to the lives of the children 
 make them most often the necessary purveyors of educational 
 opportunities from the public provision to private use. 
   
 =The Social Value of Parental Affection.=--Below and within all other 
 gifts to humanity which have come by the way of motherhood's devotion 
 to child-life is that selective and partial affection which secures to 
 each child one adult person at least to whom he or she is supreme in 
 interest. Most normal women feel when they hear the cry of their own 
 new-born that all of life is justly tributary to that one priceless 
 creature who has come at their call out of the mystery of being to 
 travel the difficult road of the generations of mankind. Nor is this 
 inherited tendency toward partial affection a sign of undeveloped or 
 selfish quality in the woman of to-day. It is a provision of nature 
 still supremely useful in helping each tiny atom of the social whole 
 to find and keep its own place in a world of struggle and hardship. 
 The fear of defeat handicaps many a purpose before it is put to the 
 test. The sense of loneliness drives many to lower companionship when 
 higher is hard to attain. The lack of courage and the paralysis of 
 faith in one's self or in others makes invalid many a nature which 
 might otherwise achieve. To prevent such waste from inner weakness and 
 to "encourage excellence in each individual," to use Doctor Small's 
 fine phrase, we need a childhood saturated with the sense of personal 
 values on the plane of affection. Selfishness may indeed pollute this 
 mainspring of personal power, and selfishness sometimes reaches its 
 acme in motherhood's partiality for its own. The ideal of social 
 solidarity and the claim of all upon each one must never be absent 
 from the family influence if that influence is to be wholesome. The 
 family, however, exists to make a small spot in which there may be a 
 unity found nowhere else, and at the centre of the family life is 
 still the mother. 
   
 Says Schiller, "Knowledge and culture demand a blissful sky, much 
 careful nursing and a long number of springs." Who shall be able to 
 secure this for every son of man if no one stands at the door of young 
 life to make these the first demand upon time and strength and 
 devotion for every child in the interest of every child? "The 
 community" has been called "an endowment for human progress." Parental 
 love, so often supremely expressed by the mother, works still and in 
 any future in sight must work ever more devotedly and wisely to secure 
 for each child his rightful share in that endowment. The main business 
 of life is the carrying on of life, and in that business women were 
 drafted long ago for the heaviest end of service and with little 
 social permission to do their work by proxy. Many social helps in her 
 task now make possible leisure and opportunity for individual vocation 
 as never before. Her primal duty to the race remains, however, a debt 
 to be paid as a first obligation wherever and whenever a woman accepts 
 the august function of motherhood. And to-day the majority of most 
 successful families absorb in large measure the time and strength of 
 the housemother. 
   
 =What Women Need Most= is moral sanity and mental poise; the ability 
 to adjust themselves to radical and rapid changes in their 
 relationship to society without losing the finest and most useful 
 results of their past social discipline. Woman is acquiring a new 
 relationship to the home--that of mutual headship with man in the 
 social institution in which for ages she has been a legal subordinate. 
 Social welfare demands that she take into the new copartnership of 
 domestic life the old devotion to family interests. Woman is acquiring 
 a new relationship to the school--that of learner in the highest 
 educational opportunity and of teacher in an ever-widening area. 
 Social welfare demands that she take into the modern school her 
 ancient devotion to child-life. 
   
 The mass of women are acquiring a new relationship to the industrial 
 order--that of spenders instead of producers. Social welfare demands 
 that the modern woman put into her function of purchasing consumer of 
 staple products the same conscientious standardizing of those products 
 and the same sense of responsibility for the conditions surrounding 
 laborers which she displayed in the old handicraft days of domestic 
 industry. A minority of women are acquiring also a new relationship to 
 the industrial order in becoming the recipient of wages or salary, 
 instead of being paid for work as of old in "truck" or in "kind." The 
 feel of the pay envelope on her palm is an unaccustomed but a 
 delicious pleasure to the modern woman. Social welfare demands that 
 she be not beguiled thereby into complicity with industrial 
 exploitation of the weak and the poor, such as she would not have 
 tolerated in the old days of personal relationship in labor in 
 domestic handicraft. 
   
 Woman is acquiring a new relationship to recreation and the social 
 control of the customs ruling leisure hours. Social welfare demands 
 that gambling be not made fashionable in the drawing room as it is 
 being driven out of the business world; that dancing be not vulgarized 
 and the mother-tongue not corrupted, but that self-control, purity, 
 dignity, mark the "new woman" as it did her best ancestors. Woman is 
 acquiring a new relationship to the state--that of citizen with full 
 responsibility instead of her old perpetual minority under man's 
 control. Social welfare demands that she take into the body politic 
 the same devotion to the weak and undeveloped, the same patient, wise 
 dependence upon the spiritual elements of justice and wisdom which 
 have made her private motherhood so successful. She must not now, on 
 peril of a social setback, take up man's weapons of selfishness, of 
 violence, of impatient revolution--weapons the best of men have 
 already discarded. 
   
 Women should now be clear-sighted enough to see that the world needs 
 from them not the same but different contributions to the upreach and 
 onward march of the race from those elements in which man has 
 excelled. If society-at-large is to become truly a family of those who 
 love and serve each other, then human beings of the mother-sex must 
 take into public life and public service the best they have learned 
 and taught in the individual home. What women most need now is to 
 "retain all the good the past hath had" as they step forward to their 
 full liberty and responsibility in new relationships to life. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON THE MOTHER 
   
 What, in general, have been the social demands upon wives and 
 
      mothers, and how have these been met in the past? 
   
 What, if any, of these inherited social demands are now met by 
 
      social agencies outside of the private family? 
   
 What, in general, may be defined as the line of demarkation 
 
      between the private obligations resting still upon mothers for 
      personal service to family life and agencies of public 
      child-care and social standardization? 
   
 How far is a trend toward minimizing the demand for personal 
 
      service of the housemother in the private family to be 
      encouraged? 
   
 If a mother, in average financial condition, has the "three and 
 
      one-half children" eugenists demand of each family, and does 
      her duty by them in private family life, how much of her time 
      and strength must go into the housemother's service and for 
      what period of years? 
   
 What amount of time and strength might be left, in the case of 
 
      strong and competent women, for other vocational work? 
   
 Is the modern "nursery school" an adequate substitute for the 
 
      early home-training? (See report, "A Nursery School 
      Experiment," published by "Bureau of Educational Experiments," 
      144 West Thirteenth Street, New York City.) 
   
   
 FOOTNOTES: 
   
 [3] (_a_) See, for example, "Conveniences for the Farm Home," Farmers' 
 Bulletin No. 270, and (_b_) "The Farm Kitchen as a Workshop," Farmers' 
 Bulletin No. 607. 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER III (THE FATHER) 
   
     "Who plants his soul in stalwart sons and daughters keeps on giving 
       His life and vision to his fellow men; 
         His power grows like leaven. 
   
     "His children strive to take his spirit up and keep it living; 
       They share with all the love he gave his own, as he had shared, 
         And lives, his love has served, all call him father." 
   
                         From the Tribute, _To My Father_, 
                              by HORNELL HART. 
   
   "To dwell in the wide house of the world; to stand in true 
   attitude therein; in success to share one's principles with the 
   people; in failure to live them out alone; to be incorruptible by 
   riches or honor; unchangeable by poverty; unmoved by perils or 
   power--these I call the qualities of a great man."--MENCIUS. 
   
   "For the man who is such as no longer to delay being among the 
   number of the best is like a priest and minister of the gods, 
   using the deity that is planted within him, that which makes a man 
   uncontaminated by any pleasure, unharmed by any pain, untouched by 
   any insult, feeling no wrong, a fighter in the noblest fight, who 
   cannot be overpowered by passion, one dyed deep with justice, 
   understanding that only what belongs to himself is matter for his 
   activity, yet remembering also that every human being is his 
   kinsman, and that to care for all men is according to mans 
   nature."--MARCUS AURELIUS. 
   
     "'Tis not in battles that from youth we train 
     The governor who must be wise and good. 
     Wisdom doth live with children round her knees; 
     Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk 
     Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk 
     Of the mind's business; this is the stalk 
     True power doth grow on."--WORDSWORTH. 
   
   
 =Historic Background of Fatherhood.=--The father seems to have had a 
 precarious attachment to the family in earlier forms of life. As Le 
 Tourneau well says, "The animal family is especially maternal; 
 although father birds often share parental duties, many mammals are 
 less developed in duration and strength of affection." Fathers, 
 mothers, and their offspring are not closely grouped in lower life. 
 The relation of the sexes, even when the human was reached, seems not 
 to have carried with it a sense of the double obligation of 
 parenthood. "Marriage was brittle in the early times," says Sir John 
 Lubbock. The obvious relationship of mother and child, the lack of 
 such irrefutable testimony to parenthood in the case of man, and other 
 elements of primitive experience lending confusion to the situation, 
 made it a process of time and a test of growing intelligence for men 
 to learn that babies take two parents to give them birth. 
   
 When the human male did learn that he was a father, as his mate was a 
 mother, it seems to have mentally intoxicated him, and led the way to 
 many social vagaries. The grotesque comedy of the couvade, which 
 proved a tragedy so often for the poor mother compelled by the custom 
 to rise in her weakness and even neglect her new-born baby, in order 
 to do double work and to tempt the appetite of her lord after his 
 make-believe pangs of childbirth, was one sign that primitive 
 consciousness found the new knowledge of double parentage very 
 exciting. 
   
 The varieties of phallic worship found in so many ages and among so 
 many peoples show how man plumed himself upon the generative function 
 and how he linked it with the god-idea. The "religious dedication of 
 women," which gratified at once the lust of priests and the demands of 
 ancient theology that the gods should have the best of everything 
 earthly, is another testimony to the preoccupation of early man with 
 sex in its relation to religion. This idea of the sacrifice of 
 sex-relationship to the gods passed down through the ages until actual 
 celibacy became the ideal of the holy life and the Divine was supposed 
 to be better served by monks and nuns than by fathers and mothers. 
   
 In the family relation the experience of fathers, after they knew 
 themselves to be such, has been widely varied and not along any single 
 line of development. To quote Le Tourneau again, "There has been no 
 strict relation between intellectual development and the form of 
 sexual union. Even among monkeys, as in men, we find both polygamy and 
 monogamy; and bees and other forms of lower life show a high degree of 
 social organization and division of labor without the institution of 
 the family at all." The relation of the sexes has always been a deep 
 concern of human society even in most primitive forms of social order, 
 but after men knew the connection between the gratification of 
 sex-instinct and the procreative function, they began to reason about 
 and to make more definite the customs that outlined permitted 
 marriage. The varieties of social expression in these ancient customs 
 is witness alike to economic pressure, the effect of climate and 
 immigration, political struggle and the institutions of war and of 
 private property. 
   
 =Purchase and Capture of Wives.=--Purchase and capture began early to 
 run a race in the supply of wives. Purchase, which kept the twain 
 together in nearness to one or the other side of the family line, was 
 usually best for women; especially when, as often happened, it gave 
 her the protection of her own blood relations. Capture, on the other 
 hand, made woman not only the possession of her husband in a peculiar 
 sense as separating her from all who might, through the working of 
 natural affection, act as her helpers in time of need, but made it 
 possible for the slavery of the wife to the husband to take on more 
 cruel forms. Although, it must be said, even capture gave a few women 
 of superlative charm a chance to take precedence of common wives 
 gained in the usual manner. 
   
 Two influences, one from the custom to allow marriages only within a 
 certain blood bond, and one to allow marriages only outside that 
 family relationship, have worked in the first instance to preserve 
 certain racial traits from extinction, and in the second place to mix 
 the common elements of human nature to the enrichment of the common 
 stock. This balancing regard for the known and allurement of the novel 
 has also worked to give manifold forms of family association, since 
 those customs were superseded. 
   
 It would seem that not only were "trial marriages" for individuals an 
 ancient, not at all a modern device, to see how the twain could get 
 along together, but varying trial forms of marriage for racial, 
 tribal, and national groups have made all manner of experiments to see 
 what on the whole would serve best the social need in the family 
 relationship. 
   
 That process of wide experimentation at last settled into the ideal 
 and practice of one father-head, at least, even if still allowing more 
 than one wife and mother within its bond. That father-head seems to 
 have found his place only on condition of grant from society of 
 complete authority over wife and children. 
   
 =The Patriarchal Family.=--The patriarchal family, which Sir Henry 
 Maine described so well, but which he mistakenly supposed to be the 
 first great type of familial association, placed firmly at the centres 
 of social order the power and responsibility of the man. Doubtless 
 that power and responsibility drew their chief sanction from the idea 
 of man as the real source of being. After man learned that he was as 
 much a parent in being father as woman was a parent in being mother, 
 nothing seemed to have contented him but spiritual supremacy in 
 parenthood. The classic picture and interpretation of this phase of 
 family development is contained in the great drama of the Greeks, the 
 trilogy of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra, Orestes, and the 
 Erinnyes. Here we see how the mother-side of life, once so powerful as 
 representative of tribal unity, was set aside and overborne by the 
 father-side, as Apollo proudly claims all generative power for man and 
 relegates the mother to the position of an underling nurse. It will be 
 remembered, however, that Athena, although, as Apollo said, "having a 
 father only," makes the mothers still invaluable as guardians of the 
 family altar and as those who can bless or blight both the fruitage of 
 the earth and of the marriage bed. 
   
 The Greeks, by virtue of their superior self-consciousness when 
 passing through radical social changes, and by virtue also of their 
 power of literary portrayal of experience, have set down for us, for 
 all time, the way by which man attained his unlimited power over woman 
 and over the family order. 
   
 We need not accept in full measure Dr. Lester Ward's picturesque story 
 of the manner in which women were made subject to men, _i.e._, that 
 female sex-selection so overdid the business of rewarding with favor 
 the strength, the fighting quality, and the cunning which grew to 
 mental power in the male, that when human men and women were reached, 
 woman found a master ready-made by her subhuman sisters. We may, 
 however, find a most suggestive indication of the real reasons for 
 that masculine supremacy in Doctor Ward's testimony to the way in 
 which the female sex, when it had the power of special selection of 
 the kind of mates it wanted, set a fashion in masculine attainment 
 which did work later against her own command of the sex-relation. 
 Women did not become subject to men because of physical weakness. The 
 savage woman does continuous work heavier and more strength-demanding 
 than that assigned to the savage man. It was not even that the 
 primitive woman had always to carry the child as she worked, and had 
 therefore a double burden, although that greatly helped men in gaining 
 supremacy. It was rather that the larger leisure of primitive man and 
 his consequent development of thought and imagination enabled him to 
 secure religion and statecraft as allies to his physical claims. The 
 intellectual side of the male development was doubtless greatly aided 
 by female selection, and when man was reached he already knew how to 
 outwit other men and most women in the race for power. 
   
 =The Three Chief Sources of Influence.=--It has been well said that 
 the "three great sources of influence in barbarous as in civilized 
 countries are religion, military power, and money." All these 
 influences became masculine monopolies ages ago. 
   
 The ancient woman was sometimes a priestess and often a healer in her 
 simple fashion and in all ages has acted as nurse in illness and 
 care-taker of the aged and the feeble when these have received care. 
 She has been mistress of the ceremonials of birth and death and 
 marriage when these have been parts of the family ritual, and 
 courtship has been largely in her charge. All the customs that relate 
 to intimate household experiences have been shared by women as ritual 
 and rule of life. 
   
 Men, however, took over the simple elements of religious feeling and 
 social requirement in which women bore so great a part and made of 
 them religious cults and theologies, and they then became a masculine 
 monopoly. Men also took over the simple healing of gifted women and 
 made it first the prerogative of the "medicine man" and at last of the 
 medical profession, from which women were barred until very lately. 
 The social customs which women once had power to enforce in so many 
 ways became the "law," made and executed solely by men. Art, science, 
 literature, grew to great proportions as man acquired the opportunity 
 and the skill to concentrate his intelligence upon specialties of 
 effort; and from all the walks of educational preparation and of 
 professional achievement women were debarred. Hence, in the family 
 order, in which the first and obvious place of women had been 
 relatively high, man took the position of mastery by right of 
 religious priesthood, by right of legal supremacy, and by right of 
 monopoly of the money power. 
   
 Back of all this lay the assumption of the superior relation of the 
 father to the spiritual life of the child. 
   
 Man gained his larger leisure first by the use of women as slaves when 
 individual women became the property of individual men, and later by 
 conquest over other men through which process he secured more slaves, 
 and finally by the military systems that in various forms gave some 
 men a chance to work at what they liked and from which they could gain 
 advantage in the growing complexity of increasing social organization. 
   
 Man's larger leisure, which gave him money power or its equivalent in 
 earlier forms of exchange, could not have been secured by him had not 
 woman been socially and by religious sanction set to the constant task 
 of the family service and the more peaceful occupations of primitive 
 agriculture. 
   
 =Ancient Military Training of Youth.=--Doubtless man's military 
 prestige and power gave him the greatest advantage over woman and was 
 the source, more than anything else, of her subjection in the family 
 order. This came about not only because military success gave the 
 women of conquered tribes into the absolute power of the conquerors, 
 and broke for such the social bond of remaining mother-right, but 
 because of the special training of boys and young men which the 
 military systems of all ages have initiated. "The ancient 
 fraternities," and the manner of education which separated those who 
 would be "braves" from the family life in early youth, the strong bond 
 of a common purpose made appealing to youthful imagination by mystic 
 ceremonials and burnt into the consciousness by painful "initiations," 
 all combined to teach men how to work together for common ends and in 
 a way unknown to the training and opportunity of women.[4] This it was 
 which gave a consistency and a power to man's collective life which 
 woman could not gain in the past, and exclusion from which enabled man 
 to become her legal and economic master even within the home. 
   
 The economic power which man acquired through specialization of labor, 
 made possible for him by social excuse from exhausting personal 
 service within the family; the political power, made possible for him 
 by military achievement, from which women for the most part were 
 strictly barred by the "Trade Unionism" of war preparation; the 
 intellectual power, made a sex-monopoly in education and professional 
 use and opportunity; and the religious sanction of priesthood and 
 theology, which fastened all these to law and government, secured the 
 complete subjection of mothers to fathers and gave woman in the family 
 the status of her infant children. 
   
 =Ancestor-worship.=--This triple influence of money, military power, 
 and religion, gave the definite basis for ancestor-worship, which has 
 been so widespread and so influential in the setting of social 
 customs. Ancestor-worship, with its separate family ceremonials, for 
 which the wife must learn her husband's family ritual, led to 
 child-marriage, and that in turn to the slavery of the wife not only 
 to the husband but to the older women of his family. Child-marriage 
 led also to many tragedies of racial decay before it was seen to be 
 inimical to strength and power of achievement. When child-marriage was 
 not a part of marriage customs, however, and a suitable age was 
 demanded, for sex-unions, ancestor-worship made the position of the 
 father secure. He alone could pass on the name and inheritance, the 
 family worship and the dutiful service of his forefathers, to the 
 children yet to be. The Greek poem before referred to shows in the 
 pathetic attempt of Electra, the loyal daughter of the slain 
 Agamemnon, to offer the required sacrifices at her father's grave, and 
 her joy that the return of the son could make such sacrifices valid 
 for peace of the dead and the service of the living yet to be born, 
 shows vividly how religion made firm and binding the father's place in 
 the family. 
   
 So deeply did this religious sanction of ancestor-worship affect the 
 social "mores" that, as is shown so clearly in Spartan history, no man 
 could shirk his duty of marriage and of parenthood without social 
 opprobrium. The well-known anecdote related by Plutarch of the youth 
 who, educated rigorously to show respect to the aged fathers, is 
 praised for flouting a grey-haired bachelor and refusing to rise and 
 give him a seat in the open square because, as the youth scornfully 
 says, "No children of yours will ever make sacrifice for his 
 ancestors," pictures vividly the sense of responsibility to the family 
 life once almost universal. 
   
 This feeling, bred by ancestor-worship, has persisted long after the 
 church in its various forms has superseded the ancient family worship. 
 We find it as late as in Colonial times in Protestant New England, 
 where the bachelor was fined and subjected to humiliating community 
 supervision and the spinster, almost unknown above twenty years of 
 age, if persisting in her single life was treated as an exception to 
 be held in social tutelage. 
   
 =The Double Standard of Morals.=--The triple bond of money, military 
 power, and economic supremacy, which made men masters in the family 
 life, made them also able to free themselves from exclusive devotion 
 to one wife, whether under the law of polygamy or professed monogamy; 
 as it has been possible for men to divorce their wives for slight 
 causes, while wives often received the death penalty for even supposed 
 infidelity. It has also instituted and maintained for ages a double 
 standard of morals by which the same act mutually shared by men and 
 women has been for men a slight peccadillo and for women a deadly sin. 
 Chastity has been made almost the sole virtue of women, invasion of 
 which even by resisted force has destroyed her "honor," and voluntary 
 rejection of which has made her a creature of social ostracism. Man, 
 on the other hand, has been forgiven all manner of slips from the 
 straight and narrow way of marital fidelity, provided he could achieve 
 something of importance in the world of thought or action. 
   
 This double standard of morals has reacted upon the family not only in 
 preventing women from establishing social conditions suitable for 
 their own best development and that of their children but has thrown 
 over the home the dark shadow of commercialized prostitution with its 
 cloud of evil thought, physical degeneracy and defrauded childhood. 
   
 =Basic Needs for Equality of Human Rights.=--When women as mothers 
 have no power of guardianship of their own children; when they as 
 persons have no power of self-defense against cruelty and outrage of 
 their own fathers or husbands; when as members of society they have no 
 contract-power but must suffer all manner of injustice unless highly 
 fortunate in their male representative; when as citizens of a 
 so-called democratic state they have no voice in either law or its 
 enforcement, then they are indeed a subject class. Any subject class 
 dependent upon privilege or special favor for all the order and 
 circumstance of life is clearly not a fit part of modern democratic 
 society. It is, therefore, of tremendous social importance to the 
 family, as truly as to all other inherited institutions, that women 
 are now rapidly emerging from that subject condition of perpetual 
 minority under the law to the individual responsibility and 
 self-protective power of the legal adult. This passage "from status to 
 contract" was too long delayed (the position of women after the 
 affirmation of liberty and equality for men in modern forms of 
 government being so illogical as to cause much disturbance in the body 
 politic), but it has, after all, been rapid in its final steps. To-day 
 the ideal of equal rights between the sexes and in relationship of men 
 and women to society-at-large is fully accepted by a majority of the 
 enlightened. What is before us is the slow and in some respects 
 difficult task of working out that ideal in social adjustments. While 
 at work on this task it behooves us to go over the past experience 
 more carefully than many have yet done, to note what the patriarchal 
 family gave to society and through society to wife and children as 
 well as what of their just due it took from or refused to give to wife 
 and children. 
   
 =Special Protection of Women Needed in Ancient Times.=--It seems not 
 too much to say that in the time and place where men in general first 
 attained power of property rights, of military supremacy, and of 
 religious priesthood, most women needed some special protection from 
 particular men. In such period and condition the sex-relationship 
 itself had not attained its present spiritual quality. There was 
 apparently required the sense of ownership on the part of one man to 
 safeguard those women most generally desired from exploitation by all 
 men. Some legal order in the oppression of women by society had to 
 precede, apparently, the abolition of oppression of women itself; just 
 as to-day the effort is to "humanize war" before we can become wise 
 and strong enough to abolish it. No social device that the imagination 
 can conceive could be so well fitted to protect motherhood, in an age 
 before justice could give power of self-protection, as was that of the 
 patriarchal family. The religious aspect of ancestor-worship, the 
 political aspect of the building up of great families from which the 
 state could derive its power and the economic necessity of having the 
 industrial system develop more highly all vocations, combined in the 
 patriarchal system to make the family the main expression of social 
 order and the chief heir of social privilege. It seems apparent, 
 therefore, that a socially delegated power of absolute control by the 
 father was highly useful in the period when the state was growing, and 
 the school was separating itself from the hearth-stone, and the 
 economic system was changing from barter to the complicated exchange 
 of the present time, and religion itself was merging its ideals from 
 the innumerable private ceremonials of noble families into the worship 
 of one chief, emperor, or despot who must receive the homage of all, 
 and so on to the incarnation of divine power in one King and Lord of 
 Heaven. 
   
 "Order" is not only, as we were once told, "Heaven's first law," but 
 social order, human experience declares, comes before the recognition 
 of equality of personal rights within that order. The great lady of 
 the Middle Ages who begged of her King a "new Lord" within a month 
 after the death of her husband because her "lands were being taken and 
 her estate defrauded by hostile lords who surrounded her castle," and 
 only a husband for herself, a new father for her children and a new 
 owner for the inherited property could protect from this robbery, 
 realized the social advantages of the patriarchal system in 
 appropriate social conditions. 
   
 To-day, when so much of the community protection surrounds the family 
 and so much in education, law, and social custom aids the wife and 
 mother toward independent action, we are naturally horrified at the 
 thought of life and death power of the husband and father and shocked 
 at recital of the humiliations and privations of women's subject 
 condition in the past. We have to remember, however, that social 
 history seems to indicate that no system of human association has 
 grown up and persisted without great need for some, at least, of its 
 dominant features. The protection of wife and child, which rested for 
 so long upon man's conception of "property" to be defended from 
 outside attack, was a chief necessity in the rougher and coarser ages 
 of the world. 
   
 The main hindrance to social progress, however, is the tendency of 
 forms of institutional life and methods of social relationship to 
 persist after the need for them has ceased. This hindrance has been 
 shown perhaps most harmfully in the retention of the patriarchal power 
 of the father after his abdication from the throne was called for by 
 ethical and humane considerations. A form of family relationship 
 entrenched in institutions of age-long prestige and supported by the 
 triple influence of money, military power, and religion, lived on 
 after its work in securing social order had been accomplished and long 
 after its usefulness was entirely ended. After the father-headship 
 ceased to express the highest ideals of either sex-relationship or 
 parental devotion, its retention produced social evils and personal 
 wrongs which made a conscious and determined movement for "Woman's 
 Rights" necessary, and still makes necessary close and definite 
 attention to the equalizing of opportunities. 
   
 =The Social Value of the Patriarchal Family.=--It is well, however, to 
 consider not only the negative but the affirmative side of the social 
 inheritance of the patriarchal family, in which has grown up and 
 developed the ideal of monogamic marriage. What did the father gain, 
 intellectually and ethically, from that patriarchal order, and what 
 did he give, not only in protection of wife and children but toward 
 their moral development in social life? 
   
 The effect of unlimited power over another is generally worse for the 
 one who wields than for the one who is subjected to that power, and 
 the faults of men have their deepest origin in the family order that 
 gave all its members into his complete control. Man's faults of 
 dogmatism, of selfish domination, of sacrifice of personal life to 
 further desired political or economic ends, have roots in the 
 patriarchal family. Man's careless misuse of his own moral ideals for 
 purposes of ambition was certainly fostered by this sense of ownership 
 of women and children with legal power to use them for pleasure or 
 profit. 
   
 Something else, however, came to man in and through the patriarchal 
 system. Society, that gave him liberty to rule the family, rigidly 
 required of him that such rule should be in the social interest, as 
 that interest was then understood. 
   
 It was obviously for the interest of society that women should be 
 chaste, in order not only that a man might know his own children but 
 that the family line and inheritance should be preserved from 
 insecurity. A man's infidelity to the marriage vow might seem to do no 
 perceptible harm if practised outside the family circle, but woe to 
 him if he trespassed upon the family ownership of another man. 
   
 There might be more than one wife acknowledged as secondary in status 
 or a mere concubine slave to help in domestic duties while giving 
 pleasure to the head of the family, but there was early a social 
 demand for one chief wife whose offspring should inherit the family 
 power. Although even in this fixed demand there were loopholes of 
 "legal fiction of adoption" by which some favorite child not of the 
 actual line of inheritance might be given the place of honor and 
 control. Again, if the father under the patriarchal system was the 
 recognized economic master he was also legally held to the financial 
 support of wife and child. In the collective family life his 
 obligation extended far through the line of kinship and of alliance by 
 marriage, and to-day in many Oriental countries the father may be 
 bound to poverty as the responsible support of a large company of 
 dependent pensioners. It must also be remembered that if the ancient 
 father, as head of the family, held the permission of society to 
 discipline wife and child even to severity of corporal punishment he 
 was also charged with the task of insuring their obedience to whatever 
 social laws were in force and was himself legally liable to punishment 
 if he did not keep his family law-abiding. That moral responsibility 
 for the behavior of his family, early outlined in detail, was 
 increasingly eased by the growth of personal relationship of women and 
 youth to society. That was shown in the laws that defined the extent 
 of punishment allowed the father-head. Although he might be secure in 
 his legal right and duty to bestow on wife or apprentice "moderate 
 castigation," an old Welsh law limited him to "three blows only with 
 a broomstick on any part of the person except the head;" and another 
 ancient law allowed the use only of "a stick no longer than the 
 husband's arm and no thicker than his middle finger" in the case of 
 the wife; while Blackstone's well-remembered restriction was to "a 
 stick no bigger than his thumb." 
   
 The moral responsibility of the father for his children, carrying with 
 it as it did the liability of prison or even death for the misbehavior 
 of sons, was governed by various statutes which show in the Middle 
 Ages a growth toward freeing children from parental control and 
 placing upon them when "of age" a definite and personal legal bond and 
 penalty. 
   
 For example, we read that the Anglo-Saxon law held many children at 
 the age of ten responsible for some acts which were forbidden, but 
 that most youth were legally minors until the age of fifteen. Until 
 the early period of the eighteenth century it was still possible for a 
 parent to legally sell his children, "a girl up to fourteen, a boy 
 under seven." And after that period a wayward or troublesome son or 
 daughter, or any of the offspring, when the parents could be proved 
 financially incapable of their care, could be sent to convent or 
 monastery. 
   
 The ability to bear arms seems to have been the criterion for legal 
 coming of age. The Romans, with their heavy weapons, held the son in 
 tutelage until the age of fifteen. The Germans, with their use of 
 light darts, gave their sons power of self-control at the age of 
 twelve. In the heyday of feudalism "a knight's son became of age when 
 he could swing his father's sword" and "a yeoman's son when he could 
 swing his father's battle-axe," and by that process the fathers were 
 released from liability to punishment for their sons' misdemeanors. 
   
 On the other hand, after the tenth century, no child under ten could 
 be punished for his father's crimes unless it could be shown that he 
 was a party to them, and the custom of carrying family autonomy so far 
 as to wipe out innocent and guilty alike, when a treason or crime of 
 any sort angered the powers in command, was practically ended. 
   
 When the beginnings of the modern industrial order appeared and 
 burghers shared with knights and yeomen the social responsibility, "a 
 burgher's son acquired freedom and legal responsibility when he could 
 count and measure broadcloth." The wife gained a growing and perilous 
 freedom from laws which increased her direct relationship to the 
 state. She attained the power of being punished even by the death 
 penalty for broken laws far earlier than she attained the slightest 
 influence in the passage or enforcement of those laws. It was 
 generally thought, however, until very recently, that if a wife "did 
 not behave" it was the husband's fault and right that he should suffer 
 the consequences. 
   
 =The Responsibility of the Ancient Father Commensurate With His 
 Power.=--Again, it must be remembered that if the ancient father was 
 by virtue of his military training and activities separated from the 
 domestic interests which he so often and with full social permission 
 sacrificed to war and preparation for war, he was at the same time 
 under perpetual conscription by the community of which he was a part 
 to serve as protector of his own family and the families of those of 
 the same social group. The social pressure upon the father-head of the 
 family was therefore severe and unremitting, since he was in so many 
 ways responsible for, as truly as master of, his household. It was no 
 light task to be a worthy head of a patriarchal family in all the ages 
 when growing law was superseding custom and advancing civilization was 
 increasing the complexity of social life. This task when well achieved 
 gave to man a serious sense of his duty as well as a firm conviction 
 of his power. 
   
 We see the fruits of that ethical training in family responsibility in 
 many of man's noblest traits; preëminently in his recognition of the 
 duty of protection of the weak and young, and in his devotion to his 
 own, against the world if need be. 
   
 The vast outreach of man's intelligence toward the organization of the 
 state, of the industrial order, of the church, of the formal educative 
 process, of the means of transportation, of the systems of finance, of 
 the development and application of scientific knowledge, and even of 
 the arts and of literature, all reveal the effect of his early 
 schooling in the representative responsibility of fatherhood to 
 society. 
   
 We speak to-day of the "father of modern invention" in this or that 
 particular. We have not ceased to praise the "good provider" or to 
 esteem him highly who has a well-ordered home. 
   
 =Moral Qualities in Women Developed by Masculine 
 Selection.=--Moreover, we are all now recognizing the fact that we owe 
 to the ownership of woman by man a secondary sex-selection of 
 inestimable value. It may be an extreme statement to say, with at 
 least one sociologist, that the ages of woman's subjection to man was 
 not too great a price to pay for the gift to the race of feminine 
 beauty and charm. We can assert, however, that some moral values which 
 men insisted upon in the women they chose for wives gave the race what 
 at one time it needed most and still needs: namely, the habit of 
 service to others, and the power of adaptability to changing and often 
 difficult conditions. 
   
 Man's genius for organization institutionalizes every aspect of 
 thought and activity he takes under his control. The institution, 
 organized at first for the benefit of personal life and the 
 life-process, tends invariably toward a fixity of method and hardness 
 of substance that finally sacrifices life-growth to its iron pressure 
 until a new form of institution makes its way through struggle and 
 suffering. 
   
 The relation of women to men and of women to family life demanded of 
 most women easy and rapid adjustment to the requirements of others and 
 led to their mediation between every institution and the personal 
 life. The household mastership of men, and the fact that they could 
 choose for favor the sort of women most agreeable to them as masters, 
 placed at the centre of the family, and therefore at the centre of the 
 life-process itself, the type of womanhood that lent itself most 
 easily to social adjustment. And it placed that type at the centre of 
 the social order when the "cake of custom" most needed to be broken to 
 allow of a more democratic association. The type of womanhood which 
 masculine selection, working through long ages, has made the 
 essentially "womanly" type, is one in which physical beauty, charm of 
 manner, general rather than special ability, affectionate and 
 competent response to family, easy adaptability to whatever social 
 system her marriage might give entrance, and unswerving loyalty to the 
 ethical traditions and religious sanctions of her day and generation, 
 combine to attract the love of man and the devotion of children. 
   
 Some of these elements of character are especially needed to-day in 
 order to make democracy work, and to secure against dangers incident 
 to decay of autocratic control, and hence may later prove of great 
 social use in the modern state. 
   
 The idealization of womanhood by man, which seems never to have made 
 him uneasy in claiming control of her person or estate, has embodied 
 itself in the artist's pictures of Truth and Justice, and Knowledge 
 and Charity, in feminine forms. These bear witness to the fact that 
 even when men were most insistent upon father-rights they were moulded 
 by intimate companionship with women in the home to some appreciation 
 of the value of feminine personality. 
   
 While, therefore, the moral discipline which came to the mother in the 
 old order of the family, led her to understand the value of 
 personality, and the need of ever-increasing effort to make the 
 individual lives within the family circle comfortable, happy and good, 
 the moral discipline of the patriarchal father led toward an 
 increasing conquest of nature, of other men, and of all the social 
 forces, in the interest of his own family group. This led at last to 
 his impersonation of many ideals in the "eternal womanly that leads us 
 on." 
   
 =The Higher Ideal of Fatherhood.=--Throughout this many-sided 
 discipline of marriage and parenthood there has been growing an ideal 
 of fatherhood so noble and so tender that it has easily become the 
 central thought in many religions. 
   
 The "Heaven-father" is an old picture. The Father in Heaven persists 
 in the effort to bring the Supreme near to the human heart. A law of 
 obedience unquestioned, a rule of conduct making an actual Way of 
 Life, a power unlimited and yet a loving-kindness that marks the 
 sparrow's fall and has regard for the prodigal as for the upright 
 son--surely there must have been uncounted fathers of goodness and 
 wisdom passing praise to have made the name the easiest one by which 
 to call the Divine! 
   
 Meanwhile, the average life has been working, often unconsciously, 
 toward a condition in which the patriarchal father is out of drawing 
 with his own industry, his own political system, and his own theology. 
 To-day we give the wives and potential wives contract-power, private 
 ownership of property, opportunity for economic independence, 
 vocational training, entrance to all higher educational institutions, 
 adult responsibility under the law, and the franchise on equal terms 
 with men. 
   
 In the light of these accomplished facts vain is the effort of such 
 writers as Devoe, in his _Studies in Family Life_, to show that "the 
 Christian family" still makes women "subject" and holds "all goods in 
 common" in the husband's name. 
   
 =Incomplete Adjustment and Equality of Rights in the Family.=--There 
 is, however, great confusion of mind as to the extent of change in the 
 father-office which the new independence of wives and mothers should 
 effect. Take, for example, the matter of the financial responsibility 
 of the husband and father. If a married woman has independent 
 property, shall she not be liable as well as her husband for the 
 support of the children? If so, what becomes of the suits at law 
 against "Family Deserters" heretofore applied alone to husbands and 
 fathers? A study of this class of offenders under the law, published 
 in 1904, shows that in New York alone something over $100,000 was 
 collected in one year in "alimony from men, two-thirds of whom were 
 deserting husbands." In these cases the duty of providing financially 
 for wife and child pursued the husbands and fathers after they had run 
 away from home. In the 591 cases of "Family Deserters" especially 
 studied two-thirds were men and one-third women, showing not only that 
 the law deals more severely with men than with women, even when women 
 are held to be responsible for any sort of family support, but that 
 desertion is for the most part a masculine offense. If it can be shown 
 that fathers are or should be relieved from the age-long financial 
 responsibilities of family support, will the showing in "Family 
 Desertion" be different? 
   
 There seems to be a consensus of opinion that in present conditions 
 that family is likely to be in the best economic condition, in which 
 the chief, if not the entire, income is supplied by the husband and 
 father, leaving the wife and mother to be specially responsible for 
 the translation of that income in terms of family comfort. That is 
 admirably indicated in Mrs. Hinman Abel's book, _Successful Family 
 Life on the Moderate Income_. Does that condition still carry with it 
 the sole economic responsibility of the husband and father for the 
 wife as well as for the children? Or shall the phrase now beginning to 
 be used in laws passed against family desertion apply to the wife only 
 when it is proved she is "in necessitous circumstances" without her 
 husband's provision? For the children the newer laws say "him" or 
 "her" when providing penalties for "any person," either father or 
 mother, "who wilfully neglects or refuses to provide for the support 
 and maintenance of minor children." 
   
 The claim, then, of the wife seems to be increasingly one of either 
 invalid "conditions," or "necessitous circumstances," or "lack of 
 other means of support," when defaulting husbands are brought to 
 court; and the claim of children upon parents is increasingly extended 
 from father to mother whenever there are means at hand from either to 
 supply the children's needs. 
   
 In respect to the "choice of domicile," always the right of the 
 husband and father, there is little change in law; but the strong 
 movement to secure to women independent nationality, in place of 
 automatic following of the nationality of their husbands, will, if 
 carried out, make the supreme choice (that of the country to which one 
 shall pledge allegiance) a legal right of women as of men. That in 
 itself would make some confusion in cases where international 
 marriages give separate national interest. 
   
 In respect to man's responsibility for national defense in the 
 interest of home and native land, he is alone conscripted to-day, as 
 of old, for fighting service on the battle-field, but all manner of 
 social demands, almost as imperative as a governmental draft, now call 
 women to special service in war time. In peace, the taxes know no sex, 
 and the rules of the business game are not amenable to chivalry. 
   
 In the matter of professional and vocational training and opportunity, 
 men and women are largely on an equal footing, in the United States, 
 at least. And apparently for the first time in human history a man and 
 a woman, both eminent in their line of work, may seriously ask which 
 of the two earns the larger salary, and hence it may be which of the 
 two can do more toward family support. 
   
 The full consequences of women's moral acts now fall wholly upon her 
 in the case of disobedience to law. There is still, it is true, in 
 some parts of the civilized world respect for "an unwritten law" that 
 excuses a man for killing a rival in his wife's affections, but for 
 the most part she stands on her own feet and he on his when there is 
 question of crime or misdemeanor. 
   
 =The Marriage Question To-day the "Husband-problem."=--The whole 
 situation is changing in so many ways as relates to the mutual 
 obligation of men and women in family life that Havelock Ellis is 
 right when he says "the marriage question to-day is much less the 
 wife-problem than the husband-problem." That is to say, the single 
 headship of the family is invaded and yet the methods of adjustment of 
 two heads are not yet clear in either law or custom. As the Bishop of 
 Hereford said at the meeting of his brother Bishops, in which the 
 resolution to omit the word "obey" from the marriage service of the 
 Church of England was withdrawn (on the ground that if presented it 
 would be successfully opposed), "It is obvious to every one that it 
 would not be convenient to have two heads to a family."[5] There are 
 already two heads in every up-to-date family in the United States! The 
 real difficulty now is to see how best to adjust mutual 
 responsibilities toward each other and toward the children involved, 
 and to write a consistent and uniform set of statutes into the law. 
 That law respecting marriage and the family, partly inherited without 
 change from the patriarchal order, partly altered in particulars in 
 obedience to some popular demand based on cramping conditions made by 
 the law whenever it was enforced, after it was already outgrown, needs 
 careful revision. Ignored so often by the moral and intellectual 
 élite, inconsistently set aside by new measures passed without regard 
 to what is already established as precedent, all laws respecting 
 marriage, the family, and the parental relation which have come down 
 from the past, need thorough overhauling and the best wisdom should be 
 exercised in full revision and codification. 
   
 The husband and father, meanwhile, many times holds firmly to his 
 old-time fine chivalry and adds justice without spoiling his 
 relationship to the family. The wife keeps her inherited aptitude for 
 loving care of husband and children, and adds a new independence of 
 thought and action without danger of confusion of ideal or function. 
   
 =Can Women Have All the New Freedom and Also All the Old 
 Privileges?=--Some women, however, are trying the absurd and dangerous 
 experiment of seeing how much they can take from men in the old lines 
 of "support" and how little they can give in the old lines of service; 
 how much they can gain in the new freedom and how little they can pay 
 for it in individual work. These are the women who are willing that 
 the family property shall be in their name for the purpose of cheating 
 creditors, and at the same time acknowledge no obligation to support 
 the children from a common family fund. These are the women who demand 
 their liberty to achieve and deny their duty to help. These are the 
 women who take "alimony" from a man with whom they will not live and 
 have married for their own convenience. They are the women who have 
 independent incomes from inheritance or from vocational success and 
 yet excuse themselves from any responsibility toward even invalid 
 husbands, and never see the parental bond as now binding both fathers 
 and mothers alike. 
   
 Many men are struggling in some confusion of mind as to the outcome of 
 this new tendency to equalize rights and opportunities, and to the 
 credit of most of them, be it spoken, they want to do the right thing. 
   
 It is now for women to preserve the father, the best of him, and for 
 men to still call for the mother, the noblest of her, in the new 
 adjustments that wait for full realization of the new democracy in the 
 family. 
   
 Here, again, we need not wait for perfect consistency in law, or full 
 understanding of social tendencies and their outcome, to find our way 
 in life. Love shows the way--love between intellectual and moral 
 equals, who, in trying to adjust their own lives to a higher law in 
 which "self-reverencing each and reverencing each," settle all 
 problems on the higher levels of thought and feeling. 
   
 =New Social Advantages for Fathers.=--Meanwhile, again, the 
 father-office stands out in actual living function as never before. 
 The fathers that now show what fatherhood was meant to be--they are 
 legion. Holding the wife and mother in her place of sacred honor, they 
 are to their children the Supreme Court of appeal in grave questions 
 of discipline, the highest functionary of the family in the 
 distribution of honors and rewards, the best comrade in fun, the most 
 delightful companion in games, the strongest challenger in effort, and 
 the symbol of knowledge and power of the community life. 
   
 With the new partnership of men and women in the family the father has 
 a chance to be a companion and friend as never before. He has an 
 opportunity to show his children that side which the ancient father 
 often failed to develop, the side of friendship and understanding. To 
 the boy a clear picture of what he would be, to the girl a declaration 
 of the kind of man she would marry, the modern father of the highest 
 type makes possible a modern mother who shall show her son what 
 womanhood may become in freedom, and who can lead her daughter to be, 
 like herself, the flower of all the best of the past. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON THE FATHER 
   
 What, in general, have been the social demands upon husbands 
 
      and fathers, and how have these been met in the past? 
   
 What effect has the new freedom of women had upon the autonomy 
 
      of the family and the legal obligations of the husband and 
      father? 
   
 Should the relation of men and women to family life be 
 
      identical? If not, why not? If so, what new agencies can or 
      should be developed to secure what husbands and fathers are now 
      legally obligated to provide? 
   
 What ideal of fatherhood should we now secure and maintain? 
 
   
 In Minnesota, recent bills presented to the Legislature 
 
      "relating to and regulating marriage" include among the items 
      "prohibition of marriage within six months after a divorce has 
      been granted from a former spouse; and forbidding of marriage 
      between persons either one of whom is epileptic, imbecile, 
      feeble-minded, insane, an habitual drunkard, affected with a 
      venereal disease, or addicted to the use of opium, morphine, or 
      cocaine." This indicates the trend of newer laws regulating 
      marriage. Is this trend justified? If so, how do the laws of 
      your own State compare with others in this particular? 
   
 Doctor Devine says, "Home is not a boarding-house, but a 
 
      complex of relations, physical and spiritual, which were never 
      more beautiful, more enduring or more ennobling than in the 
      modern family." Is that true? If so, what contribution must the 
      father continue to make to family success? 
   
   
 FOOTNOTES: 
   
 [4] See "Education of the Australian Boy," by A.W. Howitt, in his book, 
 _Native Tribes of Southeast Australia_, showing the Initiation 
 Ceremonies that separated the youth from family influence. 
   
 [5] Since that decision a General Convocation of the American 
 Protestant Episcopal Church has voted to eliminate the word "obey" from 
 its marriage service. 
   
 
 
 
 CHAPTER IV (THE GRANDPARENTS) 
   
   "From my grandfather I learned good morals and the government of 
   temper. From my great-grandfather to know that on education one 
   should spend liberally. From the reputation and remembrance of my 
   father, modesty and a manly character. From my mother, piety and 
   beneficence, and abstinence not only from evil deeds but from evil 
   thoughts; and, further, simplicity in way of living. To the gods I 
   am indebted for having good grandparents, good parents, a good 
   sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen and 
   friends."--MARCUS AURELIUS. 
   
   "Honorable age is not that which standeth in length of years, nor 
   that is measured by number of years; but wisdom is the grey hair 
   unto men and an unspotted life is old age. The multitude of the 
   wise is the welfare of the world; and the righteous live 
   forevermore."--THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON. 
   
   "Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. It is not a 
   matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a temper 
   of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the 
   emotions; it is the freshness of the springs of life. 
   
   "Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over 
   timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. We 
   grow old only by deserting our ideals. In every heart there is a 
   wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, 
   cheer, courage and power from other men and women, and from the 
   Infinite, so long is every one young."--SAMUEL ULMAN. 
   
     "Grow old along with me! 
     The best is yet to be, 
     The last of life, for which the first was made." 
                        --BROWNING. 
   
   
 =Relative Increase of the Aged in Modern Life.=--The outstanding fact 
 concerning the aged is that they increase proportionately to 
 population as civilization increases. Easier conditions of living make 
 for longer life. Public sanitation, private hygiene, good heating 
 arrangements in each house, good water and plenty of it, sidewalks 
 and porches for easy airing, medical science and the art of nursing 
 made more widely available even for the poor, more physical comforts 
 of every sort, more widely distributed, all tend toward the 
 preservation of life after middle age is reached. They also tend to 
 keep alive many babies who would have died in harder conditions and 
 prolong the life of many invalids who would have succumbed to 
 hardships in early youth. Indeed, Doctor Holmes declared that "the 
 best insurance of a long life was to acquire an incurable disease when 
 young;" while the average of robust health in all modern communities 
 is certainly lowered by the modern methods of preservation of the 
 delicate and the aged. 
   
 =Savage Treatment of the Old.=--In the annals of savage life we find 
 many gruesome tales of intentional disposal of the aged. The use of 
 the old grandmother as a target for the training of young boys in the 
 art of slaying one's enemy is an extreme example. The pathetic couple 
 left behind when the tribe migrated, often with a small supply of food 
 saved for them by some pitiful member of the family from the scanty 
 hoard that must suffice until the next harvest or the next hunting, 
 the neglect and the actual abuse that often made the last days quickly 
 ended, all show that when life is too hard there is no room for the 
 old. 
   
 =The Relation of Ancestor-worship to Respect for Aged Men.=--Two 
 things, at least, helped to give the aged a better place in the social 
 esteem and in the provision for necessities as primitive life 
 developed toward civilization. One was ancestor-worship, which made 
 the father and the grandfather a link, indispensable and therefore 
 honored, in the chain of blood relationship which carried on the 
 generations. This type of religious belief and practice did not, 
 however, work to ease the lot of old women. If the young wife did not 
 have a child, especially a son, she could be repudiated often, and 
 lose her standing in the family relation and hence be subjected to 
 hardships that made her early old and often ended her life while still 
 in middle age. If she had a son and rose to be a grandmother she might 
 attain a most honorable position, having her son's wife to be her 
 servant and her son's son's wife to be her slave. Even with the best 
 intentions, the patriarchal father could not attend to all the details 
 of government within his usually extensive household, and no man has 
 yet lived who could manage unassisted a group of women, such as legal 
 polygamy and concubinage brings under one roof, each one determined to 
 get from him the best possible conditions for her own life and that of 
 her children. 
   
 =The Position of Chief-mother in Ancient Family.=--These facts often 
 made the position of the chief-mother in a family one of such 
 importance that they became her insurance against want and 
 ill-treatment. The position of the chief-mother in the collective 
 family is now one of the vital problems of Eastern nations trying to 
 adjust the family system to modern ideas. The father's power is so 
 much a delegated responsibility and the relationship between the 
 lesser wives and the younger wives so much closer to the chief-mother 
 than to the chief-father that the grandmother's position may be that 
 of a tyrant. A series of questions which a group of Chinese students 
 in an American university has drawn up include such as the following: 
 "Where a young girl is brought into the home to be reared as the 
 future bride of the boy in the family, is there any limit to the 
 authority of the mother-in-law?" The mother-in-law in such cases being 
 usually the older or chief-mother, she is really the 
 grandmother-in-law. 
   
 =Memory of the Aged Valued in Primitive Life.=--The position of aged 
 men in primitive life secured some advantages because of the 
 dependence upon memory for the carrying on of continued and conscious 
 social existence before literature was born. The aged man who had been 
 an important member of some military order or "fraternity" and 
 remembered the exact words and motions of a valued ritual could be 
 sure of having his continued life provided for by all those who 
 desired to learn and to retain the means of perpetuating the religious 
 cult thus expressed. Also those who remembered vital tribal 
 occurrences and dealings with other tribes and could rehearse the same 
 with exactness must have been considered of social use, and the older 
 they were the more their memory gathered and the more their recital 
 seemed sacred and hence the more the reciter was cherished. 
   
 Nothing corresponding to this social value of the aged man, who could 
 make permanent in ritual or in song or in story the experiences of the 
 group, can be traced in the valuation of the experience of the aged 
 woman in the periods before written literature. There were, however, 
 as we can clearly see, traditions and customs, taboos and permitted 
 familiarities so many and varied that old women with good memories and 
 a personality that commanded attention must have had some accepted 
 value within the inner circles of family experience. We get from 
 folk-lore some clear intimations of this prestige and power of the 
 ancient old woman in intimate social relationship. 
   
 The power of old men received a great accession when political and 
 religious orders and legal rules began to make social organization 
 more definite and precise. "Old men for council; young men for war" 
 had an early meaning. "The venerable Senate" is not a modern phrase. 
 The "reverend father of the church" is an ancient allusion to the 
 respect for and leadership of the aged in religious circles. The Popes 
 of to-day begin their high service at an age that is in many positions 
 a "dead line." The hardening of the social arteries in religion, 
 government, politics, and law, however, while making old men more sure 
 of their place in life, made old women less valued and worse treated. 
 The ages of mediæval experience and of the feudal order, until 
 chivalry began to affect the sex-relation, show almost unbelievable 
 cruelty toward many aged women. The idea of the church fathers that 
 women were, at best, a necessary evil and at worst the form most often 
 assumed by the Devil of temptation, made it seem that all divergence 
 from the purely domestic type was proof of collusion with evil powers. 
 And all nervous ailments were once deemed a sign of the witches 
 compact with Satan. Hence, since the unmitigated drudgery and the hard 
 conditions of the lives of most women made them not only prematurely 
 old but also given to nervous prostration (before that title appeared 
 in the medical lists), the numbers of old women tortured, burned, 
 drowned, beaten, and stoned to death, and otherwise destroyed, seems 
 almost incredible to modern ideas, although so well authenticated in 
 history. 
   
 =Old Women and the Witchcraft Delusion.=--The young woman, being 
 necessary for the bearing and rearing of children and the carrying on 
 of important, although despised, labors, might escape active ill 
 treatment. The old woman, old at thirty-five or forty, often, was not 
 only considered a useless burden but a positive nuisance if she were 
 at all "highstrung" or "meddling." Hence the natural conception, in a 
 time of superstitious fear of evil spirits, of her complicity with 
 those spirits made her seem a danger to society. The history of the 
 witchcraft delusion and the cruelties that were a part of that 
 delusion show that aged women almost alone suffered from that 
 nightmare of human ignorance. 
   
 Doubtless, however, there were even in those days grandmothers beloved 
 and protected, busy even to the last with caretaking of childhood and 
 the rites of hospitality; grandmothers whom their sons and even their 
 sons-in-law revered for some quality of gentleness and sympathy found 
 useful in family emergencies; grandmothers whose shrewd wisdom of 
 experience and fine gift of understanding made them invaluable members 
 of the family circle. Folk-lore and ancient song give hint of these. 
   
 The waste of old age in women, however, is, as has been indicated 
 elsewhere by the writer, the greatest of all social wastes since time 
 began. The idea that women were serviceable only for the procreative 
 function and the hardest drudgery of family service, and that they 
 lost all social value when they ceased to be attractive to the senses 
 of men or ended their personal ministrations to their own little 
 children, long obtained. This idea is responsible for the further 
 conception of old women as not only useless but a disagreeable burden. 
   
 Hence, while old men rose during many ages in social regard and 
 protection and care, old women became more and more miserable and 
 ill-treated where the collective family was superseded by the newer 
 type of individualistic bond between one man, one woman, and their 
 children. In the ancient patriarchal and collective family the oldest 
 mother might reign as queen. In the more modern type of family, made 
 the social fashion by what is called Christian civilization, the aged 
 woman, the grandmother, unless exceptionally attractive and 
 sweet-tempered and exceptionally able to help in the household tasks, 
 was the victim of the change from one system to the other. The fact 
 that women, if well-developed and well-treated, are younger at seventy 
 than are men and that more women than men live to be aged than when 
 the conditions of living were less favorable to the weak and delicate, 
 gave early in our civilization what must have seemed far too many old 
 women. 
   
 While women had the constant burden of a "steady job" within the home, 
 harder and more continuous than men had in their handicraft labor, yet 
 men were killed in battle in large numbers, and were physically able 
 to dangerously overdo in some labor "spurt" and hence more women than 
 men lived to be old. Hence, again, there were far more grandmothers 
 than grandfathers in the family in all mediæval life. This led to many 
 cruelties to old women who were deemed "superfluous." While, however, 
 the actual experience of common people made conditions so hard for 
 grandmothers, the idealism within the religious field was favorable to 
 the mother of any age. The same church fathers who shunned marriage as 
 a cowardly concession to the body, and who wrote flaming 
 animadversions upon women in general, gave the Virgin and Child their 
 adoration and made a place of honor and of comfort to those women who 
 chose the religious vocation outside the home. 
   
 =Older Women in Religious Vocations Honored in Middle Ages.=--These 
 women, the Ladies of the Abbeys and the special servitors of the 
 Church, reached the first independent places of distinction which 
 women in Christian civilization attained and to them, at least, age 
 added power and veneration. Hence, even while they ignored their 
 relationship to common womanhood, they often allayed superstitious 
 cruelty toward other old women. 
   
 Whenever any subject class develops within it a genius or a quality of 
 talent or a specialty of activity that gives personal prestige, that 
 class as a whole gains recognition. The Carlisle Indian who beats at 
 the game of football; the Afric-American artist whose works claim 
 admiration; the representative of the backward nation who shows power 
 of achievement formerly supposed to be the sole accomplishment of the 
 conquering peoples, not only makes a place for himself, he opens the 
 door to wider opportunity for his class. So the woman of the religious 
 orders, when of scholarly achievement and of commanding intellect, 
 showed these qualities in increasing example as she grew older and 
 more experienced, and so worked to make a place for the older woman in 
 every sphere of life. 
   
 Slowly it began to dawn upon the common consciousness that the 
 individualistic family of one young couple and their children needed 
 props from within if it had lost those from without--those ancient 
 props which sustained as well as controlled young fathers and mothers 
 in the collective family. Hence grandmothers, and grandfathers, as 
 well, became of recognized use in the care and upbringing of children. 
 The picture of the grandmother by the fireside holding the youngest 
 baby and the grandfather coming in with a gift for the young mother, 
 who is manifestly pleased, with the young father in the background 
 delighted at the family welcome for his offspring, is not only old but 
 the theme of many of the world's best-loved paintings and stories. 
   
 =To-day Comparatively Few Really Old at Seventy.=--To-day there has 
 come about a wholly new condition in the most advanced centres of 
 social life in respect to the aged. In the first place, there are few 
 "old" grandmothers left. There are grandmothers, but they are 
 sprightly and give little token of being passée or laid on the shelf. 
 There are few old men left. There are those who have passed the 
 allotted term of threescore years and ten, but they well know and make 
 all others understand that this was a mistaken limit to human powers. 
 They look forward to usefulness until eighty, at least, and now are 
 encouraged to feel that one hundred years is the natural span of life. 
 There are, it is true, few really important studies of how to keep 
 people from growing senile and really old before the time now set for 
 failure of powers. Such studies, however, are prophesied in a small 
 "endowment for the study of diseases of the aged" already given, and 
 more in the statement of appeals for increase of such endowment. The 
 tendency now is setting strongly not only toward the lengthening of 
 life but toward the lengthening of the mental and physical power that 
 alone makes long life desirable. 
   
 We shall see more and more of this interest as medical science reaches 
 out further and further toward lessening all the ills that flesh is 
 heir to. 
   
 Meanwhile, what is the actual condition in the various strata of life, 
 in our own country, for example, in respect to the protection, the 
 care, the comfort, the happiness, and the general welfare of the aged? 
 In the first place, the speeding up of machinery has made many manual 
 workers prematurely old. The worst thing, perhaps, about child-labor 
 has been that, owing to premature "laying off" of the fathers, the 
 children have been set to earn money for family needs, and have 
 acquired, with their pay envelope, a contempt or disrespect for the 
 father in ways that have reversed the natural relationship and given 
 society much use for the Children's Court. This disrespect shown the 
 father, even when he is only of middle age, passes on in increased 
 measure to the grandfather who has been pushed aside from self-support 
 and family support while still comparatively young and has never been 
 able to again catch on to the wheels of industry. The fact that he 
 eats and does not work; that he takes space in the crowded tenement 
 and does not aid in paying its rent; that he has no light employment 
 that can give his fading mental powers an impulse toward ambition and 
 energy, all make the position of the grandfather in many homes of 
 struggling poverty a most unhappy one. In such homes the grandmother 
 is often still seen to be really useful. She may make it possible for 
 the young mother to earn outside the home. She may, if skilled in 
 sewing, ease the expense of ready-made clothes. She may, at least, and 
 usually does, relieve the mother of much care of the babies. There are 
 several reasons why more aged men are sent to public institutions for 
 final care than aged women of the same general type of family, but the 
 most important reason is that most women have skill in domestic 
 matters; and domestic service is needed everywhere, no matter how many 
 unemployed walk the streets. Needed most in the poorest home, the help 
 of the grandmother is often appreciated in inverse ratio to the 
 income. 
   
 In the circles above the poverty line there is much variety in the 
 estimation and in the treatment of grandfathers and grandmothers. The 
 ideal picture of a family always has in its background, if not in the 
 very front, an old man and an old woman, benevolent and sweet-natured, 
 who can be depended upon to be more indulgent to the children than 
 even the father or mother and who appear always in family emergencies 
 to renew their youth of service in behalf of the younger generation. 
   
 What is thus ideally pictured is a fact in thousands of families. No 
 one can say that it is always best to have three generations under one 
 roof, but all who have had a happy family experience believe that the 
 grandparents should be "handy by," to use the Scotch phrase. The 
 grandparents' house in the country is best of all, where all family 
 and national holidays can be celebrated with due form and in 
 accordance with ancient tradition. The grandparents' house for the 
 city children is next best, if in a suburb near by where more space 
 and independence of movement are possible than in the city residence. 
 The grandparents' house or apartment in the same or a near-by city is, 
 however, not at all to be despised as a refuge when "Mother does not 
 understand," or "Father is so particular." 
   
 =Is Any House Large Enough for Two Families?=--Although the proverb 
 says, "No house was yet made large enough for two families," the 
 residence of one grandparent (oftener the mother than the father) 
 within the family circle has often proved highly successful if only a 
 few rules have been observed. One of these rules is that each adult 
 person shall have one place strictly his of her own. Another is a 
 rule, so difficult for some aged persons of both sexes to obey, 
 namely, that each person married is doubly entitled to individual 
 choices in action without interference even from parents, since each 
 such married person has to adjust his or her ideas to another person. 
 To work out full agreement between themselves is all that any married 
 couple should be expected to accomplish. Hence, in the nature of 
 things, the grandparents who are so near the new family that they know 
 and see everything have a far more difficult rôle to play than do the 
 grandparents who have their own home and simply visit and are visited. 
 It is, however, often a necessity of financial provision and often a 
 choice of ease in ministration to the needs of the aged, that brings 
 one grandparent or even two within the daughter's or son's household. 
 The time-worn jokes about the "mother-in-law" are based upon the fact 
 that it is more often the daughter than the son who is expected to or 
 needs to personally care within her own home for the mother. The son 
 is not so bound by social custom to take his mother in. Hence, more 
 husbands than wives have trials with their parents-in-law. 
   
 =Reasons Why Husbands Desert Their Families.=--The statistics of 
 deserting husbands, as compiled in a careful study made by Lillian 
 Brandt and Roger Baldwin, show that among the chief causes of "leaving 
 home" is "trouble with the wife's relations." In these cases it is not 
 only the grandmother, although she is often a member of the disturbed 
 family; it is also often other relatives--a sister, a brother, or a 
 first husband's people--who cause trouble. The wife's mother is, 
 however, often enough a member of the household the husband leaves 
 behind to give some point to the coarse and often unjust jokes 
 concerning the mother-in-law. 
   
 Where the feeling is right, and both generations reasonable and just, 
 there are still many problems of adjustment arising from an attempt to 
 bring either or both parents of the married couple into the same 
 household. The first problem is that of the financial support. It 
 ought not to be the case that any aged couple or any widowed father or 
 mother should be left wholly dependent upon their children. The demand 
 for better economic provision for the aged is one of the most vital 
 and pressing of social needs. The difficulty of taking care of the 
 father and mother when the children are coming on with pressing needs 
 of their own is felt acutely in cases of narrow income. The call is 
 almost universal to provide more adequately for grandparents. How can 
 we meet this call? 
   
 =The Financial Provision for Old Age.=--In the case of those whose 
 earning capacity is not equal to saving a sufficient old-age provision 
 while at work the claim for an Old-age Pension is growing. This may be 
 either a subsidy from the state, a joint pension from the state and 
 the employing business in which the man or woman has worked, or it may 
 be a threefold provision contributed to from the savings of the 
 laborer, the quota from the employer, and the state subsidy. Since no 
 insurance system that discourages thrift, or fails to encourage it, is 
 socially sound, the latter seems the best ideal. There may be, in 
 addition, or as a substitute, a family provision on the plan so well 
 suggested by Mr. Taber in his book, _The Business of the Household_, a 
 plan that calls for the definite setting apart of an "Old-age Fund," 
 to which each child shall contribute in the years when he is earning 
 most, not as a gift but as a "deferred payment," as it were, for all 
 that the parents give in childhood. To this Old-age Fund any savings 
 of the father and mother may be added until a sufficient sum is 
 secured for comfortable care in old age. Mr. Taber indicates that at 
 least five dollars out of every twenty-five saved should be thus 
 assigned and invested only in the safest manner and held inviolate, no 
 matter what the temporary needs of the family may be, until the 
 work-time has passed. Whatever plan may be adopted, it is certain that 
 family well-being and the happiness of the aged alike call for a 
 better and more adequate old-age provision. 
   
 The laborers who earn less than the required sum for a decent standard 
 of life for father, mother, and children cannot, of course, make any 
 provision for their own old age or care for dependent parents. In such 
 families the public institutions or privately endowed and managed 
 "Homes for the Aged" offer the only and often a comfortable and 
 sometimes a happy place for the grandparents. The movement for this 
 social care of the aged has many phases. In some countries, as in _The 
 Danish Care of the Aged_, so well described by Edith Sellers in her 
 book of that name, there is a far more complete and generous use of 
 public funds than we have in the United States, a possibility of 
 careful grading of persons in appropriate groups, and a removal of the 
 crushing sense of public charity which those of English ancestry so 
 often feel when obliged "to go upon the town;" yet this leaves much to 
 be desired.[6] 
   
 In the grade of economic condition above that in which it is a dire 
 struggle to make both ends meet for the husband, wife, and their 
 little children, there are to be considered five ways in which the 
 care of the aged can be made adequate and not too great a burden upon 
 those of young and those of middle life. 
   
 =Needed Ways of Preparing for Old Age.=--First: There must be devised, 
 as indicated above, better and surer ways of insurance, savings, and 
 pensions, by which the grandparents can be made more or less 
 independent even in families of limited means. 
   
 Second: There must he measures established for the prevention of 
 premature old age, measures operating in health and in labor-power to 
 prolong self-dependence by means of individual earnings, to the 
 fullest extent possible. 
   
 Third: There must be for men, as for women, provision in vocational 
 training by which each person may have in reserve some light and 
 interesting form of activity, possibly of earning value, which may 
 serve as occupation when strenuous work is outgrown. 
   
 Fourth: There must be a clearer understanding of the mutual 
 obligations of parents and children so that the care of the aged may 
 seem more often, what it really is in most cases, not a charity from 
 within the family circle, to be passed around with jealous eye for 
 just distribution of family burdens within the group of children, but 
 a family debt, for the payment of which early and constant provision 
 must be made by all members of the family during the years of largest 
 earning power. If the grandparents have had a chance to save enough to 
 pay all their own share of the family expense to the end of life, well 
 and good. If, on the contrary, as is so often the case (now that the 
 social standard for child-care and child-education has risen to such 
 heights of parental requirement), the parents, now old, have spent so 
 lavishly on the schooling and marriage setting up of their sons and 
 daughters that they have not been able to save for themselves, then 
 the obligation of the children is clear and the grandparents should 
 never feel themselves pensioners. 
   
 Fifth: Actual old age, senility, failure of physical and mental power, 
 should be postponed in each case as long as possible by active 
 measures of mental and moral discipline consciously undertaken by 
 personal effort. "The making of mind" is not an art of youth alone. It 
 is an art of middle age and of the older years. Says William James: 
 "The man who daily inures himself to habits of concentrated attention, 
 energetic volition and self-denial in unnecessary things, will stand 
 like a tower when everything rocks around him and when his softer 
 fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast." Such a one also 
 will resist the decay of powers and be able to keep young when the 
 years tell of many birthdays. 
   
 To go over these points with greater detail: The first requirement, 
 namely, to make sure that all possible financial provision is made for 
 grandparents while they are yet young and capable enough in their work 
 to save, is one that is more and more recognized. Moreover, the 
 tendency in every country is increasingly toward state recognition of 
 the duty of society toward its aged members. The proposition of Victor 
 Berger, then the solitary socialistic member of the Congress of the 
 United States, to pension every person over the age of sixty is one 
 that will hardly be carried into effect. The objection, however, to 
 much existing pensioning by the state which this blanket proposition 
 was intended to offset is that its benefits are mostly for those near 
 the poverty line or below it and hence may be and often is a 
 discouragement to thrift and self-dependence rather than an aid to 
 individual effort. 
   
 =Pension Laws.=--For example, in Great Britain, the pension law made 
 all eligible to state aid who were over seventy years of age and whose 
 personal income did not exceed one hundred and five dollars per year. 
 Such were entitled to aid to the extent of $1.25 a week, and those 
 having incomes above that sum were entitled to receive a graduated 
 series of state benefits. This aid from the state has doubtless made 
 the condition of many aged persons far more tolerable and even happy 
 in families where, previous to the passage of that Act, the extra 
 expense involved in caring for the grandparents was the last straw 
 that broke the back of independency. In all cases where the addition 
 of a few dollars weekly to the family income is an actual and obvious 
 help to family comfort, state pensions for the aged have worked good 
 results in family feeling and good-will and affection. Where, however, 
 the state aid comes without any contributory savings from the 
 individual or his employer and where to qualify for its benefit all 
 must have an income of very small proportion, it is in effect a class 
 measure and obviously for the relief of the very poor. 
   
 The higher family interest demands that every system of insurance or 
 of subsidy, or of occasional aid to any member of the family, should 
 tend directly and powerfully toward and not away from thrift, work 
 capacity, and sound business principles. Society-at-large must now 
 make good in some makeshift fashion for many social failures of the 
 past, but its main currents of pressure upon the individual life 
 should be in the production of a line of normal and successful men and 
 women, rather than attempts to make all share alike, whatever their 
 personal quality, when old age comes on. This principle makes it 
 imperative that some larger and wiser plan than has as yet been 
 attempted shall make all systems of financial care of the aged a 
 positive aid toward self-dependence and social serviceability. 
   
 =Old-age Home Insurance.=--In this connection a radical suggestion is 
 offered, namely, a scheme for Old-age Home Insurance. It is a 
 well-known fact that the waiting list of most private Homes for the 
 Aged is long, and that men and women wait piteously for the death of 
 an "inmate" to give them entrance to the only place of comfort and 
 security life can offer them. It is also well known that there are 
 more aged persons who need the companionship of those of their own 
 generation, who need quiet and relief from the noise and excitement of 
 young children, than can now secure those requirements in the homes of 
 their daughters or their sons. It is again true, although not so well 
 recognized or understood, that most aged persons unable financially to 
 retain a personal home would prefer a choice between residence in a 
 child's family, however dutiful and generous that child might be, and 
 residence elsewhere. It is also true that the care of aged parents in 
 her own home is often too great a tax upon the time and strength of 
 the housemother when there are many young children. Again, it is true 
 that many aged people prefer a place they can call "home," even if it 
 is only one room, to which they can invite their friends and from 
 which they may pay visits to their relatives, even their nearest and 
 dearest, and return to their own small quarters at will. It is also 
 true that although most elderly persons live for years in quite good 
 health and need little actual nursing, they do profit by occasional 
 attentions which a nurse can give, and few such elderly people can 
 afford or obtain this occasional service in either a home of their own 
 or in one shared with a child. 
   
 These facts indicate a need for a larger and a more democratic 
 provision of homes for the aged, a provision that can be more easily 
 made by personal effort through the younger years of life, and one 
 that can receive social aid at less cost to personal dignity and with 
 less rigid rules of managing "Boards" than the present prevailing type 
 of Homes for the Aged supply. The boarding house sought by many aged 
 persons who prefer independence of life to living in the family of 
 their children, and sought also by many well-to-do elderly widows and 
 widowers who find that the personal home is too lonely or too 
 expensive to keep up for one alone--the average boarding house is a 
 sorry substitute for a home. For the young, who hope to escape it 
 soon, it is tolerable. For the aged, who need to feel settled, it is 
 often a most unhappy dwelling-place. Beside, any one who tries to find 
 a place for the elderly boarder will find that prices are often 
 prohibitive for all but the rich, and few boarding mistresses want old 
 people. 
   
 A state pension has often, as has been said, been proposed for all 
 aged people. Let us suppose that instead of this some scheme of State 
 Insurance for Old-age Homes be devised; a scheme in which after the 
 payment of a certain specified sum a share in a Boarding Home might be 
 secured. If the state or if any private Agency or Foundation could 
 provide the "plant," a suitable building and its repairs and 
 fundamental expenses of upkeep, with one salaried superintendent whose 
 character and ability could be guaranteed, the running expenses of a 
 Boarding Home could be met easily by the limited means of many who now 
 lack the security of an institutional provision and in consequence 
 lack also many essentials of old-age comfort. 
   
 A skilled budget-maker could determine the numbers required in each 
 household to make the board low and a sympathetic social worker could 
 suggest the coöperative features of management most likely to give 
 successful results in the composite home. The entrance age in such a 
 Boarding Home could be lower than that required in the usual type of 
 privately endowed Home for the Aged and thus a felt need be met for a 
 suitable home for those between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five. 
 In these privately endowed Homes for the Aged the entrance fees range 
 from $100 to $1,000, and beneficiaries are required to give up all the 
 property of any kind of which they may be possessed when they enter 
 this permanent residence. This is not unjust, but it is often an added 
 trial to the independent nature. There is need of far larger provision 
 for the old in Homes for Aged Men, Aged Women, and Aged Couples. No 
 one can give anything but gratitude for the opportunities they now 
 offer or fail to hope for their increase. There is, however, a special 
 need for some social engineering which can initiate Boarding Homes for 
 the Elderly. Many of these are still strong and well, but need special 
 consideration in particular ways. Many others are not ill, but 
 delicate, and in need not of full-time nursing care but of occasional 
 good offices of trained helpers. One nurse, a "practical nurse" or a 
 trained nurse past in age and strength full service of her profession, 
 could easily give occasional service needed for twenty or more elderly 
 persons in usual health or for ten or more aged, in greater need of 
 care but not helpless, if all were under the same roof. The 
 coöperative plans that often fail in serving the family of father, 
 mother, and children, may be found exactly suited to special classes, 
 and among them the aged. The Social Settlements were started to serve 
 and have served the neighborhood needs of the poor and the immigrant. 
 They have also, incidentally, demonstrated the financial advantages of 
 coöperative housekeeping. A company of congenial people living 
 together in groups of twenty to forty can secure the essentials of 
 food, shelter, and necessary service at a cost per person far below 
 the average expense for boarding or private housekeeping. This does 
 not mean that families can combine easily in multiple households. The 
 personal equation counts for its greatest influence in the real family 
 group, of father, mother, and their children under eighteen years of 
 age. Few, if any, schemes of coöperative housekeeping have as yet 
 worked well for the combination of such groups. 
   
 The aged, especially the aged widow or widower, are not in the direct 
 family group. They belong to but they are not inside the inmost 
 circle. If one alone is left the life of the personal home is broken 
 for the elderly, however dear and kind the children may be. For such 
 there surely needs something easier than the attempt to maintain a 
 separate home with half its life gone. And also something more 
 independent and more secure than either enforced residence with 
 children or compulsory use of the ordinary commercialized boarding 
 house. 
   
 =To Prevent Premature Old Age.=--The second social demand, that 
 premature old age shall be more effectively prevented, is one that is 
 pressed upon this generation with new and imperative considerations. A 
 knowledge of health conditions shows that although infant mortality is 
 greatly lessened and infectious and epidemic diseases greatly brought 
 under control, the diseases of middle age, such as hardening of 
 arteries and kidney and digestive disorders, have increased 
 relatively, while insanity is much more frequent than of old. These 
 facts give us all deep concern. From the failure of health in middle 
 life comes the premature senility and the invalid weakness of old age. 
 The cause of the increase of middle-life diseases, relatively to those 
 of other periods of life, seems to be principally the pressure of 
 business and industrial life upon the worker. The high speed of 
 machinery, the extreme competition in business, the monotony of the 
 specialized manufacturing groups, the weight of great financial 
 enterprises and the struggle to make the family setting equal to the 
 family desires or even the family needs, all tend to make men in 
 middle life fail so often in health and so often leave behind their 
 better sheltered and more tenderly cared-for wives. There is a new 
 movement of great social importance, and one tending directly toward 
 the saving of one-half of the family circle, which is now taking a 
 front place in social interest; namely, the movement for annual 
 medical examinations. The work of the Life Extension Institute leads 
 toward this end and seeks the better adjustment of life and work in 
 the interest of simplicity and mutual service in the family and the 
 better health of all its members. 
   
 It is not, however, in the power of the wisest and most unselfish of 
 individuals to so manage the work-power as to insure against premature 
 old age from too great speeding and overstrain. There must be social 
 movement of the most thorough-going sort to prevent the waste of the 
 laborers in all fields. Social workers should remember that it is not 
 alone important to try to safeguard the health and strength of mothers 
 and of potential mothers by laws protecting women and girls in 
 industry. It is as vital a need to safeguard the health and strength 
 and perpetuate the work-power of fathers and potential fathers in 
 order that old age may be not a terror but a blessing to the family. 
 This is emphasized by recent indications that the increase of the 
 diseases of middle age is already checked and that we are gaining 
 ground in this particular. 
   
 A recent report of the Federal Department of Commerce through the 
 Bureau of Census shows that there has been a decline in the death-rate 
 for all age periods during the last decade. In the rate for infants 
 under one year of age a decline of twenty-six per cent., or from 
 13,804 per 100,000 in 1910 to 9,660 per 100,000 in 1920. The 
 death-rate for middle-aged and old people shows an encouraging 
 decrease, that of twelve per cent., in the period above seventy-five 
 years of age. This shows that we are gaining on disease and premature 
 death with every new advance in preventive medicine and the crusade 
 against bad living conditions. This, again, means that in the future 
 we shall have more aged persons in ratio of population than we have 
 had in the past, and indicates the great need of taking measures 
 betimes to make old age not only more mentally strong but more happy 
 and comfortable in condition. 
   
 =Check Extreme Requirements for Youth in Labor.=--There are many 
 requirements for youth in offered opportunities of training and of 
 work which are distinctly detrimental to respect for, and possibility 
 of continued service of, the old. Take, for example, the age limit in 
 many departments of business and manual labor. During the war we had 
 in the countries most denuded of young men a new sort of trial of the 
 middle-aged in positions where it had been thought youth was required. 
 What was the result? The trial made in Chicago by fifteen large 
 employers of labor under the leadership of Mr. Benjamin Rosenthal, was 
 distinctly, to use his words, "to upset the fallacious theory that men 
 between the ages of 45 and 65 are fit only for the scrap-heap." The 
 result of this experiment showed that in some phases of work the older 
 men did as much work in a given number of hours as the younger men; in 
 other departments they did as much in the week or month, from their 
 steadiness and devotion to their work, but not as much in any one day. 
 That is, the older men were less quick, but more steady and, 
 therefore, in the end accomplished as much. In some kinds of labor the 
 older men did better than the younger because usually more patient of 
 detail and less restive in monotonous toil. In the larger enterprises 
 older men are proverbially less speculative, more conservative, less 
 venturesome than the young. American business would, perhaps, not 
 suffer if a larger admixture of these qualities were found in all the 
 walks of commerce and business. 
   
 The fact that when a man is at the head of a concern, large or small, 
 he is valued usually more at sixty-five than at thirty-five, and the 
 further fact that thirty-five is often the dead-line for admission to 
 the lower ranks of the same industry or commercial position, is a 
 proof that this age-limit of the worker in lower position is not one 
 of definite knowledge of actual incapacity after forty years of age 
 but rather due to other conditions. Those conditions are, first and 
 foremost, the easier management of younger than of older subordinates. 
 It is hard for many men to "order about," in peremptory fashion, a man 
 older than themselves, and few men can command without abruptness or 
 sharp orders. It is still harder for most men to order about as office 
 assistant or clerk or secretary a woman older than themselves. And 
 fewer men can assume a respectful yet commanding attitude toward women 
 than can do so toward men in their employ. Some embarrassment has yet 
 to be worn off in business relations of the sexes. Moreover, the 
 tendency toward upspeeding of all mechanical manufacture is a part of 
 the rushing spirit of an age which has invented more fast-going things 
 than it has as yet mental power to use wisely or with social safety, 
 and it is true that fewer men over forty can rush in their work than 
 can do so below that age. 
   
 Youth is nimble; youth can be snubbed for errors of accomplishment 
 without hurt to a "gentleman's instincts;" youth, although so careless 
 as to often get injured by the swift-going machines, can yet exult in 
 their rapid swing; and, above all, youth is flexible and can be shaped 
 to any form of business requirement decided upon by those higher up. 
 Hence a fictitious value is assigned to youth in all departments of 
 work to-day. Hence, again, a special movement for actual trial of the 
 relative values of workers of different ages in special kinds of work 
 is necessary if we would know whether or not it is possible to prevent 
 that premature old age and tragical financial helplessness at 
 fifty-five or sixty, which makes the workless man or woman a burden 
 where many believe he or she might be still a help to the family 
 income. 
   
 We have been a nation of the young. We shall more and more balance the 
 different age-periods, as is already done in the older countries. We 
 should prepare, betimes, for this new aspect of the future's census, 
 by providing against preventable old age by the wiser use of all 
 laborers as long as work-power can be made available for 
 self-dependence. 
   
 =Need of Experience in Many Fields of Work.=--There are certain fields 
 of work on the higher side of social ministration in which the more 
 experienced are more needed than the young. Some one has said that "no 
 man is fit to be a pastor of a church until he has been something else 
 for several years and knows something of life." There is a very real 
 demand for any one, man or woman, who ventures to deal with the 
 spiritual life that he or she shall have more than youth can give of 
 sympathy and understanding. There is need also for larger experience 
 and greater breadth of view in professional social work of all sorts, 
 more than the young man or woman can give who has had college, plus 
 "School for Social Work," and nothing else; but who, because 
 "trained," feels expert. There could not be a greater social mistake 
 than is made by schools which attempt to train for child-care, family 
 visiting, rehabilitation of the dependent, aid to the "down-and-out," 
 succor to the tempted and help to the weak, and yet deny the 
 opportunities of their classes to men and women over thirty-five. The 
 giving of "auditors' privileges," or "special courses for volunteers," 
 or like makeshifts for regular student privileges is not what is 
 required; for such provisions carry with them the idea of less than 
 professional standing and usefulness. The initiation and maintenance 
 and increase of schools of training for social work is one of the 
 great educational and social achievements of the past quarter-century, 
 but the age-limit for entrance in many such schools is a huge mistake. 
 The very essence of true social service to individuals is experience 
 in life. The girl or boy who has had none or little may make a good 
 technician in many departments and may make a fine showing in work 
 that is not personal, and may collect material or knowledge about 
 groups of persons who need help. But the man or woman who is able to 
 be of great value as a "social doctor" is not only born to such 
 service but also is one who has not begun a specialty of social 
 technic too young to have learned something of the difficulty of 
 living. Young students? Yes. But many more who have come later in life 
 to a sense of their social responsibility and to a desire to learn how 
 best to serve society with all that they have gained in rich 
 experience. The psychology of social training must envisage a wider 
 range of years to be most effective. 
   
 =Prepare Vocationally for Old-age Needs.=--The third demand, that 
 every man and woman in early youth or in later youth shall be trained 
 in some light and agreeable occupation that can be pursued, perhaps to 
 economic return, in the days when strenuous labor can no longer be 
 carried on, is one that has as yet received little attention but which 
 should be a matter of deep concern. The fact that so many old women of 
 little physical strength and who require much personal care can yet 
 be useful and therefore actually wanted as helpers in many families is 
 indicative of the fundamental fact in industrial life that a general 
 training for general usefulness, such as the housewife has had through 
 the ages, has some advantages still. 
   
 Before Mrs. Perkins Gilman gets all women into some specialty, 
 alongside of the already highly specialized men workers, let us see to 
 it that men get a chance for a more general training! The restless 
 idleness of the man whose specialty of manual labor or definite type 
 of business interest is now beyond his strength or opportunity is a 
 sad thing to see. We have had to develop a special charity to furnish 
 a work-interest to aged men in public institutions. They were so 
 miserable and pathetic without that occupation. Women fare better in 
 this, as in many other elements of labor, for they can do so many 
 things, usually have to do so many things, most of them, in the 
 family, that some one sort of work, at least, is left to them for 
 special old age. "Mother's pies" or grandmother's cakes or needlework 
 or knack at dusting or baby-tending or what not keeps her young and 
 makes her actually a helper even when old. Grandfather's loss of his 
 job, of his specialty of effort, of his hold on the great industrial 
 machine, leaves him too often hopelessly at sea for the passing of 
 time still left to him. 
   
 Well-to-do women in the United States, moreover, have acquired through 
 the large leisure inherited wealth or their husband's means have 
 supplied, a social business that has not only delayed old age but 
 nearly obliterated its ancient signs and tokens. The Clubs, the 
 Leagues, the Alliances, the charitable agencies, the institutions of 
 care for the defective, the friendless, the infirm, the dependent 
 children, the countless societies and coöperative social organizations 
 for social serviceableness, in which women are leaders and chief 
 workers, bear witness that "grandmother" has found a place for her 
 energies after the children have grown and set up households of their 
 own. 
   
 If such a grandmother is a member of the daughter's family she is not 
 half so objectionable to daughter's husband as when mother-in-law had 
 a permanent place at the fireside, perhaps in the exact spot where he 
 wanted to put his easy chair, and had to be "taken out" if she ever 
 ventured into the great world. She now has her own interests, often so 
 many and vital that her day is more completely filled than when she 
 was younger. She has her own set of friends and her own use for the 
 energy and power of direction that often in the old days made her a 
 troublesome member of the family. If only she has a chance at her own 
 little cooking, and her own individual sitting room, and has her own 
 income, if ever so small, she may fit well into even a city apartment 
 and no other member of the family be the worse. The thing required for 
 old men and women alike is some work suited to slower motion and 
 lessened strength and greater need for quiet and independent thought. 
 This is a need which more women than men have met to-day, we repeat, 
 but it is one that must be understood and effectively satisfied for 
 men and women alike. 
   
 Edward Everett Hale said every man needed "both a vocation and an 
 avocation"--something by which he earned his living and something by 
 which he maintained his interest in activity. It is the avocation that 
 must be planned for. The vocation is often thrust upon one by 
 necessity or chance association. If every aged person had something to 
 do that made each day short and each night a welcome rest much of the 
 friction between the older and the younger members of families would 
 be avoided and life would piece the generations together more 
 perfectly. 
   
 =The Attitude of Mind Toward Old Age.=--Life calls upon us all to 
 prepare while yet young for the lessened power of old age. The removal 
 from the commanding place to the honorable but more difficult position 
 of the ex-leader and the chief-emeritus is a step that requires care. 
   
 The attitude of mind that can keep in harmonious touch with the 
 oncoming generation and yet not lose the value of its own day of 
 contribution to the social inheritance is an art to be acquired only 
 by effort and the exercise of moral and mental power. There was, 
 perhaps, never in the history of our civilization so great a gap 
 between the ideals and social practices of the grandparents and those 
 of the third generation. The parents even are feeling themselves too 
 far from the children; the grandparents often realize a vast distance 
 between themselves and the rising generation. The distance is not 
 always the measure of progress. It is not seldom the effect of rapid 
 changes in mechanical appliances, in material agencies and economic 
 conditions, in literary taste and in ideals of culture; an effect 
 which has unsettled youth in the inherited ways and not yet settled 
 them in well-considered new rules of living. The experience that might 
 aid in easing the process of readjustment is not always at hand and 
 not always used when it is attainable. The experience of age is too 
 often shown in dogmatic rules. The inexperience of youth is too often 
 the accompaniment of a childish conviction that everything that has 
 been is wrong and everything that promises to be is best. 
   
 There is, therefore, greater need, perhaps, than ever before for 
 wisdom and patience and sympathetic understanding of those from whom 
 one differs within the family life. It is for the grandparents to set 
 the fashion for these new adjustments. They have loved most because 
 they have given most. They have learned most, or could have learned 
 most, because longer in the school of life. And they have but a little 
 way to travel on the long road their children and their children's 
 children must go to meet their fate. 
   
 To the lasting credit of human nature be it said that the grandparents 
 of to-day measure as well for the most part as do the parents in these 
 difficult tasks of family adjustment to a rapidly changing social 
 order. It is often the grandparent who sees what the different life of 
 his or her children have meant to the still greater difference in the 
 condition of the grandchild, and can interpret to the latter the 
 reason for the restraint of the parent. It is often through the 
 tenderness and devotion to the aged called out by the grandparents 
 that the son and daughter learn the real depths of parental love. It 
 is often the partial affection of the grandparent for the grandchild 
 that makes a new tie in family love and enables that family love to 
 grow wiser as well as stronger. It may be, as quoted before, that no 
 house is large enough for two families. It surely is true that no 
 family living room is spacious enough for the continuous use of three 
 generations; but it is still more true that with new interests all 
 around the circle of family membership a more varied family life can 
 be managed without friction or loss of privacy for any member if only 
 there is the right attitude of mind. To-day the ideal of the 
 Heaven-father fastens itself as easily to the child's affection for 
 grandpa as on his dependence upon his father. To-day the ideal of 
 mother-love, never lessened even by wrong-doing of the child, is as 
 securely fibred upon the picture of grandma, ever ready to heal and 
 comfort, as upon that of the mother, whose daily ministrations make 
 the child comfortable. 
   
 =The Special Gifts of the Old to the Home and the World.=--In some 
 ways it is surely more easy to believe in goodness at the heart of 
 things because some aged man or woman, closely related by blood and 
 breeding, has been a living example of what must be revered. Moreover, 
 to the family, as to the world-at-large, old age brings a special 
 gift--if that old age is what it may be. Each period of life has its 
 own gift to make. Age should make a precious contribution, even the 
 central faith of life. 
   
 Youth, eager, responsive to all noble ambitions and touched by all 
 noble dissatisfactions with what is, makes its plan for what should be 
 on a strictly logical basis. His rejected Evil is wholly evil; his 
 chosen Good without a flaw. Children are all Calvinists; and youth, 
 for the most part, separates its ideas of good and bad as the sheep 
 and goats within its mind. Well that it is so. The law of growth in 
 life is so far from logical, so operative by inconsistent 
 fluctuations, that it is of the greatest social use for each fresh 
 generation of reformers to hew to the line and express that 
 intolerance of compromise which helps the struggling moral sense to 
 clarify the issues of each new day. 
   
 In middle life, if the individual worker for better things is not 
 merely a prophesier but has become an actual agent for the realization 
 of his ideal in practical achievement, he suffers many a disillusion, 
 not in respect to his ideal, but in respect to the ease of working it 
 into the body politic or into the compelling purpose of the social 
 mind. That is the time of danger; and how many lose heart and hope and 
 fall weakly by the way when they first learn that to state a truth 
 with power is not enough to insure its acceptance! That one should set 
 himself with courage and faith to the long, slow processes of actual 
 change of the social order after he has learned how difficult that is, 
 is to be indeed a hero--a hero of the actualization of the ideal, even 
 though he dies with the promised land hardly in sight. 
   
 In later life comes to many, and should to all, another gift. Not 
 alone the vision of youth, never lost and always dear; not only the 
 strength of open-eyed effort to achieve so much of the ideal, even its 
 very least atom, as the times and the conditions allow and not lose 
 heart that it is so little, but also the interpretative and 
 harmonizing spirit of those who see, beyond the personal ideal and 
 vision and far beyond the personal achievement, the upward march of 
 all mankind--not alone the leaders of that march; not alone those who 
 will and know the upward way, but all who feel the under-current 
 pressure "toward the better, ever onward toward the best," This 
 pressure even those feel who fondly imagine they are holding all life 
 to outgrown patterns, and they prove its power by their unconscious 
 response. 
   
 Another gift of insight they may have who grow old in the spirit of 
 youth. It is the gift of seeing in one picture those who have come a 
 long way up the path of progress and those who have but just entered 
 upon it. The harsh judgments of youth, so tonic and useful, that 
 measure moral actions by their exact position in ethical perception 
 (judgment so tonic and useful that youth without that element misses 
 its own gift to human progress) cease to serve in old age for purposes 
 of just discrimination. In later life may come the wisdom of 
 understanding those from whom one differs, the gift of seeing the 
 helpful interrelations of newer and older "mores" in normal human 
 development and the glad recognition that even defective moral vision, 
 though retarding needed changes, may be used by the powers that 
 balance our complex life to hold, its course steady in chaos of 
 change. These gifts may add patience and love, sweetness and light, to 
 the zeal of the reformer and yet not dull his ardor for the next 
 morning-hour of progress. 
   
 Not the old, then, because it is old, nor the new because it is new; 
 not the few who will hold no parley with that which to them is evil, 
 nor the many who cling to what they have inherited lest they lose 
 life's best treasures; not to those who call aloud in the market 
 place, "Behold the coming of the Lord!" nor to those who sit at the 
 fireside and cherish their own only; not on or to any one 
 manifestation of the life in which we have our being can the old, with 
 the spirit of youth, fibre their faith and trust. 
   
 In all the struggling, mistaken, weary, selfish, cowardly, alike as in 
 all the brave, heroic, unselfish and lovely, is manifestation that 
 makes "no good thing a failure, no evil thing success." This is the 
 testimony of a ripe and wise old age. In that they must trust who have 
 tested the real things of life in the real world of effort, nor lost 
 hope in the Onward Way for all. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON THE GRANDPARENTS 
   
 What have been the general tendencies in social treatment of 
 
      the aged? 
   
 What are some of the social needs in respect to public and 
 
      private health, vocational training, wages and standards of 
      living, family and personal insurance and educational 
      opportunities which must be met if old age is to be prolonged 
      as far as possible and made happy and comfortable to the end of 
      life? 
   
 What should be the aim of youth and middle life in respect to 
 
      preparation for old age? 
   
 Read _Old Age Support of Women Teachers_, by Dr. Lucille Eaves, 
 
      _A Study in Economic Relations of Women_, by the Department of 
      Research of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union of 
      Boston, Mass., and read "The Trade Union and the Old Man," by 
      John O'Grady, Catholic University of America, published in 
      _American Journal of Sociology_ of November, 1917. Are the 
      suggestions in these articles along needed lines? 
   
   
 FOOTNOTES: 
   
 [6] See _The State and Pensions in Old Age_, by J.A. Spender. 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER V (BROTHERS, SISTERS, AND NEXT OF KIN) 
   
   "The members of the ancient family were united by something more 
   powerful than birth, affection, or physical strength; this was the 
   religion of the sacred fire and of dead ancestors. This caused the 
   ancient family to form a single body, both in this life and in the 
   next,"--DE COULANGES, in _The Ancient City_. 
   
   "Land belonged to the clan and the clan was settled upon the land. 
   A man was thus not a member of the clan because he lived upon or 
   even owned the land, but he lived upon the land and had interest 
   in it because he was a member of the clan."--HEARN, in _The Aryan 
   Household_. 
   
   "Three things if possessed by a man make him fit to be a chief of 
   kindred: that he should speak in behalf of his kin and be listened 
   to; that he should fight in behalf of his kin and be feared; that 
   he should be security on behalf of his kin and be 
   accepted."--WELSH TRIADS (cited by Seebohm). 
   
     "I cannot choose but think upon the time 
     When our two loves grew like two buds; 
     School parted us; we never found again 
     That childish world where our two spirits mingled 
     Like scents from varying roses that remain one sweetness. 
     Yet the twin habit of that earlier time 
     Lingered for long about the heart and tongue. 
     We had been natives of one happy clime 
     And its dear accent to our utterance clung. 
     And were another childhood world my share, 
     I would be born a little sister there." 
                     --GEORGE ELIOT, in _Brother and Sister_. 
   
     "When love is strong it never tarries to take heed 
     Or know if its return exceed 
     Its gift; in its sweet haste no greed, 
     No strife belong. 
     It hardly asks if it be loved at all, to take 
     So barren seems, when it can make 
     Such bliss, for the beloved's sake, 
     Of bitter tasks."--H.H. 
   
   
 =Ancient Kinship Bond.=--The relation of brothers and sisters in the 
 family group has passed through many changes and must at times have 
 caused much confusion and difficulty in the home. For example, in that 
 state of familial association in which all the brothers of a certain 
 relationship were considered as husbands of all sisters within a 
 certain bond there must have been some heart-burnings and several 
 kinds of family unpleasantness. We have some hints of these from many 
 historical sources. In the era of complete subjection of the 
 individual to the community such unpleasantness may have counted only 
 for negligible unhappiness on the part of a few social rebels, but the 
 custom alluded to did not prove to work well enough to become 
 permanent. 
   
 Again, the form of family bond which demanded that a man take to wife 
 the widow of his dead brother and "raise up children to the name" of 
 the deceased had a long but not a permanent life. In the well-known 
 passage from Deuteronomy, the 25th chapter, the faithful are commanded 
 that "if brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no 
 son, the wife of the dead shall not be married without unto a 
 stranger: her husband's brother shall ... take her to him to wife, and 
 perform the duty of a husband's brother unto her. And the first-born 
 ... shall succeed in the name of his brother that is dead, that his 
 name be not blotted out of Israel." The same passage shows that while 
 it was doubtless at first an imperative social law, there came a time 
 when the living brother had a choice as to whether or not he should 
 take to wife the widow of one who had died. Perhaps there might have 
 been an economic pressure that made it difficult to perform this 
 ancient duty. Perhaps there might have been objection from the wife or 
 wives already in command of the household matters. Perhaps the widow 
 was sometimes of a type to make the brotherly and family duty seem 
 very hard. At any rate, there came a time when, as the writer in 
 Deuteronomy says, "If the man like not to take his brother's wife" he 
 could refuse the family service. It cost him, however, in such cases a 
 severe ordeal. He could be haled before the elders on the complaint 
 that he "refused to raise up unto his brother a name in Israel." The 
 widow "could loose his shoe from his feet and spit in his face" and 
 say "so shall it be done unto the man that doth not build up his 
 brother's house." 
   
 The large requirement for the brother, thus indicated, passed outward 
 to the next of kin in certain circumstances. There are many deeply 
 interesting accounts of readjustment of family life through the taking 
 over by the living of duties once undertaken by the dead. The lovely 
 idyl of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz, shows this widely spreading 
 brother-duty. Here the mother-in-law, so sweet and so wise that her 
 sons' wives loved her deeply, shrewdly manages a contact between Ruth 
 and Boaz to the lasting service of her son's inheritance of name and 
 land. The whole story is redolent of the finer side of ancient forms 
 of familial duty, the man being rich and generous enough to take on 
 his more remote relative's responsibilities, the young widow being 
 sweet and charming enough to capture the interest of the rich man even 
 before he knows who she is, and the mother-in-law showing 
 statesmanship of the highest order in managing the affair, together 
 with such fine character of her own that all respect and love her. 
   
 To-day we have left in law and custom but the shadow of these ancient 
 demands upon brothers in the family. That shadow is limited to the 
 purely economic aspect of brotherly responsibilities. The old law of 
 inheritance made the sons the preferred heirs. Only when there was no 
 son could the daughter inherit if at all. The responsibility of that 
 heir, however, was often made commensurate with his inheritance. He 
 must financially care for the near relatives--the father and mother 
 first, the sister and brother next, the uncles and aunts and cousins 
 not to be forgotten. 
   
 =Present Demands of Kinship.=--The existing statutes make it incumbent 
 upon any man in receipt of income beyond his own immediate needs to do 
 what is possible to prevent his near relatives from requiring aid 
 from the general public. The custom of all charitable organizations 
 when appealed to for aid for individuals, or for a family, is to ask, 
 "What can your relatives do for you?" The pressure upon those 
 connected even by marriage to help relatives privately, and so reduce 
 public relief, is often very severe. In those of English ancestry the 
 disgrace of having a near relative, even so distant as a great-uncle 
 or great-aunt or sister-in-law, "come upon the town" is felt keenly. 
 The sacrifices of many people of limited means to prevent such a 
 catastrophe would make a long and heavy list of discomforts and 
 privations. The duty of brothers, sisters, and next of kin to help 
 provide for the poorer members of the family connection is thus still 
 held firmly by social ideals. That all people, however, pay this debt 
 of family responsibility or that as many struggle to do it as used to 
 do so cannot be affirmed. On the contrary, many charitable societies 
 make it a serious business to discover and hold to responsibility 
 shirking members of families in which there is great discrepancy in 
 financial condition. 
   
 There is now, however, no recognized social responsibility for giving 
 support to poorer members of the family within one household. There is 
 no pressure to bring those needing material relief tinder the roof of 
 the well-to-do of the family circle. Even parents cannot claim 
 residence with adult children, although they can claim by law some 
 support commensurate with their children's income. It is seen now that 
 the duty of aid does not carry with it the obligation for personal 
 association. That is, on the whole, a gain, especially in cases where 
 there is temperamental incompatibility. 
   
 The whole relationship of brothers, sisters, and next of kin is 
 simplified and placed more securely on bases of affection and ethical 
 ideal in modern life, and people are good brothers and sisters or good 
 family relatives in proportion as they are unselfish and useful in all 
 their other social relationships. There is a real family tie, however, 
 which still holds. We see it in the Family Reunions, in the listing of 
 relationships in those devoted to genealogy, and in the patriotic 
 societies that indicate by membership what ancestors fought in the 
 Revolution or held office in Colonial days. There is the permanent tie 
 of blood that makes a peculiar bond unlike that of friendship and 
 unlike that of marriage--a tie sometimes carried to extremes, as in 
 the case of the woman who, angry with her husband for a breach of 
 etiquette, declared she "was glad that he was no relation of hers!" On 
 the whole, in reasonable moderation, one of the best ways we have 
 to-day of helping a group is by means of the generosity of the more 
 successful members of that group. 
   
 =Special Burdens of Women in Family Obligations.=--Brothers, usually, 
 marry and have their own households to take care of. The unmarried 
 sisters, coming from a long line of women who were supposed to work 
 entirely for the family, with no commercial value placed upon their 
 household service, feel a call to duty from ancient times to carry 
 family burdens. The sons, however, do not escape the parental call for 
 help and have often in the immediate past (when women ceased to have a 
 large economic value in the home and had not yet acquired the capacity 
 or desire for self-support) borne a heavy burden of financial aid for 
 unmarried sisters. The tables are well-nigh turned now, however, and 
 the number of self-supporting women who have relatives of varied 
 nearness and ages dependent or partially dependent upon them, is much 
 larger than that of spinsters care-free and independent. In all cases, 
 however, whether of men or women, those who respond loyally to the 
 needs of those kin to them are the unselfish and capable. The slogan 
 of socialism, "To all in the measure of their need; from all in the 
 measure of their capacity," may never be accepted by society in 
 general, but it is now the rule in the family relation. 
   
 =Disadvantages of the Only Child.=--In the individualistic family of 
 the modern monogamic type the chief need is for every child to have 
 brothers and sisters or at least a brother or sister. The "one-child" 
 plan, which places a solitary little creature as sole recipient of 
 money, affection, and care of the household, is one that shows poverty 
 of condition for the child concerned, no matter how rich the parents. 
 Such a child lacks a chief aid in its development. Nature sometimes 
 sends, even in a large family, all boys or all girls and makes 
 coeducation at the start difficult. Usually, however, when there are 
 two, three, four, or more children they are mixed in due and helpful 
 proportion. When the family is too large, as it so often was in the 
 older days, it must subdivide according to ages and tastes, and in 
 many old-fashioned families some brothers and sisters were near in 
 sympathy and love and others wide apart. In the moderate-size modern 
 family, however, where there is enough companionship within the home 
 for family good times and not enough to cause breakage into groups 
 within the group, we have the ideal conditions for child development. 
 For the only child there are happily some substitutes for this home 
 companionship in the "residential school," or the school with long 
 days of group relationship of like age and condition, but it is not 
 the same and seldom as good as the home circle of the right size and 
 variety. 
   
 The modern conditions make the old ties seem less important to many. 
 In the United States, where people move about so freely across the 
 vast spaces of our continent, and where in the large cities so many 
 move each year to try vainly to better themselves in hired houses, the 
 ties of family outside of the immediate circle seem remote and to be 
 easily set aside. It is not, however, a sign of advanced social spirit 
 which makes a young girl declare "she has no use for her relations; 
 she cares only for her chosen friends," and it is often of the essence 
 of social danger that a young man wants to give up all connection with 
 his family. The fact is that one can understand better how one came to 
 be what one is by knowing something of one's forbears and one's living 
 relatives. 
   
 =Permanent Value of the Family Bond.=--The feeling that one belongs to 
 a blood group, the feeling so old and so wonder-working in the past, 
 gives at least one ideal of permanence in a world of affairs whirling 
 in such rapid change that the common mind becomes dizzy and the common 
 idealism confused. On the other hand, it is cause for gratitude 
 unspeakable that the old bondage of the family life is relaxed, never 
 to be tightened again to such oppression as once prevailed. The fact 
 that inheritance is now seen to be so varied and so unpredictable that 
 one child in a family may "take back" to one ancestor and another to a 
 different one to ends of complete divergence of character and 
 capacity, shows that the old attempt to keep them together, whether 
 they could love each other or not, was a social mistake. To-day we are 
 more reasonable. We even say that fathers and mothers may not be 
 taken into the home of their children if it best serves the mutual 
 happiness for them to have separate homes. We seldom now in 
 enlightened families make the mistake of holding to "living together" 
 when living apart is clearly the wiser thing. 
   
 The old sense of family responsibility is, however, happily not lost 
 and in its new ways of working often gives a finer representation of 
 mutual aid than was common of old. The will of one rich man which 
 included many gifts to sisters, cousins, and nieces, and left 
 directions to the principal heirs to find out if there were any 
 relatives of the same nearness left out and if so to make them equal 
 sharers, is but a type of many who, with or without large means, share 
 generously with all their name and kin. 
   
 On the other hand, we have examples of those who, in the effort to 
 leave a large fortune for some specific object of education or of 
 public charity, wholly neglect, often with cruel indifference, the 
 needs of some member or members of their own family. One man of 
 conspicuous gift to education left a sister and her two daughters 
 without means for comfortable living while piling up money for his pet 
 scheme. Many men skimp themselves and also their wives, children, and 
 still more their parents and more remote kin, to hoard a monster sum 
 for some charity to be forever called by their name. These, however, 
 are unusual examples of losing sight of the near in the remote. The 
 average man and woman has in mind a series of concentric circles, 
 those nearest to be helped first, those next beyond to share next, and 
 the world outside to have what is left when these inner claims upon 
 love and generosity are fully met. 
   
 If it were not for this general tendency society-at-large would have 
 far more responsibility for all sorts of care of the aged, of the 
 incapable, of the unsuccessful, of the invalid, of the defective, of 
 the insane, of the "cranky" and of the lonely. Finally, without this 
 innate tendency to feel a sense of responsibility for those nearest 
 related by family ties much of the discipline toward social usefulness 
 would be lacking in the lives of average people. We learn the larger 
 duty through faithful response to the nearer and closer obligation. 
 For this reason the family holidays and reunions, the family birthday 
 celebrations which include all the relatives within reach, the 
 pressure of the law and of custom upon those able to care for those 
 less strong and competent within the kinship bond, are all socializing 
 influences which it is well to keep warm and consciously active. 
   
 The lovely spirit of Mrs. Hodgson Burnett's "Tembarom" when he finds a 
 "real relative" is duplicated by many immigrants who after years of 
 loneliness greet one of the family on the shores of the new country; 
 and the member of the eastern family "gone west" is the most 
 hospitable of all relatives to the visitor from the old home who has 
 the same family tree. 
   
 The gratitude of the ancient poet that "God has set the solitary in 
 families" is not a sentiment to be outgrown. Those who feel that it 
 is, lose something precious from the basis of human affection. The 
 adjustment of this old bond to the new individualistic life is not yet 
 made even in the Western world, while in the Eastern the vital 
 problems of family adjustment press in supreme unrest. The one 
 principle that should guide us in this as in all inheritance from the 
 past is surely this, that while the sacredness of personality of any 
 one member of any group, even of the family, shall not be wholly 
 sacrificed to the needs and demands of any other member, yet "they 
 that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak" in the old 
 spirit of unselfish service. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON BROTHERS, SISTERS, AND NEXT OF KIN 
   
 In the monogamic system of the family what, in general, has 
 
      been the legal responsibility toward blood kin? 
   
 Is the inherited legal and social responsibility for the care 
 
      and well-being of relatives lessened at the present time? If 
      so, is that for good or for ill in the wider social fabric? 
   
 How far should accepted obligations toward near relatives be 
 
      met in ways to bring under one roof more than the fathers and 
      mothers and children of a given generation? 
   
 Should natural kinship weigh heavily in considering 
 
      arrangements for material relief in poverty? In the care of 
      orphans and half-orphans? And in provisions for aid to the 
      aged, the sick, and those out of work? 
   
 What special conditions make appeal to family feeling difficult 
 
      in a population like that of the United States with many 
      immigrants and great mobility in industrial relations? 
   
 Is there any way of strengthening family feeling without 
 
      attempting return to older forms of family autonomy? 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER VI (FRIENDS AND THE CHOSEN ONE) 
   
     "The path by which we twain did go, 
       Which led by tracts that pleased us well, 
       Thro' four sweet years arose and fell, 
     From flower to flower, from snow to snow: 
   
     And we with singing cheer'd the way, 
       And, crown'd with all the season lent, 
       From April on to April went, 
     And glad at heart from May to May. 
   
     And all we met was fair and good, 
       And all was good that Time could bring, 
       And all the secret of the Spring 
     Moved in the chambers of the blood." 
                     --TENNYSON. 
   
   "There is no man that imparteth his joy to his friend but he 
   joyeth the more; and no man who imparteth his grief to his friend 
   but he grieveth the less."--BACON. 
   
   "True, active, productive friendship consists in equal pace in 
   life, in moving forward together, steadily, however much our way 
   of thought and life may vary."--GOETHE. 
   
   "Accept no person against thy soul."--ECCLESIASTICUS. 
   
     "Your love, vouchsafe it royal-hearted Few 
     And I will set no common price thereon; 
       But aught of inward faith must I forego, 
     Or miss one drop from truth's baptismal hand, 
       Think poorer thoughts, pray cheaper prayers, and grow 
     Less worthy trust, to meet your heart's demand. 
       Farewell! Your wish I for your sake deny; 
       Rebel to love, in truth to love, am I." 
                     --D.A. WASSON. 
   
   
 =The Power of Friendship.=--The man who said, "Our relations are 
 thrust upon us; thank heaven we may choose our friends" expressed a 
 feeling shared by many, that fate may handicap us by giving us birth 
 in an uncongenial circle, but we may recoup ourselves by chosen 
 friends and enjoy companionship with them which our kin cannot 
 furnish. 
   
 Friendship has inspired many of the greatest deeds and many of the 
 noblest poems, and has given us examples of heroic devotion almost 
 passing the love of man for woman. It is not within our purpose to 
 recall these great friendships, but they are familiar and furnish the 
 unfailing stimulus of finer sentiment in youth as the classic examples 
 are recited to each generation. Real friendship is a sacred thing. 
 There are pinchbeck imitations which are neither sacred nor helpful. 
 The "mashes" and the "crushes" of school-life are not even good 
 imitations. The bargain-counter exchange of services--"you give me 
 society uplift, and I will give you under-current influence," as one 
 woman frankly stated it to another, although it may be called 
 friendship, has no element of real affection in it, as the first one 
 to fail in "value received" so clearly understands. The unwholesome 
 absorption of one woman with another, so that no minute apart can be 
 endured, may be long-lived or an ephemeral expression of a weakness on 
 one or the other side, but it is not the best type of friendship. 
 Among men the submergence of one personality in another, so that 
 although there are two people there is but one mind and one purpose, 
 may be friendship, but it is not that equal comradeship which the 
 healthy-minded seek. The friendship between a man and a woman which 
 does not lead to marriage or desire for marriage may be a life-long 
 experience of the greatest value to themselves and to all their circle 
 of acquaintance and of activity; but for this type of friendship both 
 a rare man and a rare woman are needed. Perhaps it should be added 
 that either the man or the woman thus deeply bound in life-long 
 friendship who seeks marriage must find a still rarer man or woman to 
 wed, to make such a three-cornered comradeship a permanent success. 
 Friendship at its best is a task as well as a gratification. Nothing 
 in this world can be had for nothing. "Earth gets its price for what 
 earth gives us." A really great friendship is a test and a challenge 
 and a "time-consumer," as Emerson says. It is, next to marriage and 
 parenthood, the most exacting of human relationships. For this reason 
 few men and women can have a great friendship that does not lead to 
 marriage, and at the same time have a complete marriage with another. 
 For this reason again, the great friendships are generally between two 
 unmarried men or two unmarried women. 
   
 =The Newly Wed and Old Friends.=--Much is written of the sad 
 disillusion experienced by the newly wedded man when he finds his 
 friends are not as welcome at his new fireside as he had expected. 
 These friends of his are not of the sort prophesied by the love of 
 David and Jonathan, but they are valued comrades and he has 
 anticipated sharing the delights of his new home with them. Many a 
 woman in her desire to be all in all to her husband and in the selfish 
 absorption of an undisciplined affection, starts married life the 
 wrong way by making no place in the home life for these old friends of 
 her husband's bachelor life. That reacts often in the worst possible 
 manner upon his affection for her. She forgets too often that she is 
 not called upon to give up her friends. They can come, and do come, 
 when her husband is away at his work, while his friends, if they come 
 at all, must come in his leisure hours which she often wishes to 
 preempt for herself alone. It is the most short-sighted of follies for 
 a woman to try to sweep clean of all former interests and friendships 
 the life of the man with whom she is to try the great adventure of 
 marriage. 
   
 The most a wife can accomplish by selfish denial to her husband of his 
 right to keep his friends and enjoy the old as well as the new 
 companionship is to make it impossible for him to enjoy his friends in 
 her company. She can thus send him off on hunting trips or other 
 outside enjoyments which leave her lonely at home. The fact that few 
 worth-while men or women have lived to the marriage day without deep 
 affection for some friend, or perhaps for many friends, is not a 
 testimony to need of change when a new relation is formed but to the 
 enlargement of both circles of comradeship and their amalgamation into 
 friends of the family. This may be a difficult achievement. Many men 
 and women have found, to their surprise, that although they are in 
 love with wife or husband they are not at all in love with the 
 respective families and still less inclined to accept each other's 
 chosen friends as their own. One angle alone of the many-sided 
 character may have "made the match;" quite other angles have already 
 attracted and still hold the friends. These often mutually incongruous 
 friends of both sides must somehow be made to attach themselves to the 
 marriage plan or they may work much harm to the new home. 
   
 The art of holding on to old associations and yet substituting, where 
 substitution is wise or necessary, a new for an established 
 relationship is a great art. In the case of the newly married whose 
 friends have been in widely different circles, it is often an 
 impossible one. 
   
 Here is where the social wisdom that in some manner essays to make the 
 twain to be later one a part of the same or a very similar social 
 group, shows its finest results. When marriage was arranged by the 
 elders of the respective families there was likely to be a similarity 
 in the social standards of the two circles from which the bride and 
 groom were drawn. Their friends were usually so inevitably of the same 
 financial standing and of similar cultural ideals and manners that 
 they would be likely to be congenial to each other and all to both 
 husband and wife. When the one chosen was selected by the fathers and 
 mothers there were some essentials for successful married life secured 
 in advance. We have now come to feel that each couple must choose for 
 themselves and that conscious, selective love is the very essence of 
 that choice. It is well, however, to name over the essentials secured 
 by the arranged marriages, to which such an enlightened country as 
 France still gives much heed and still holds to some extent in family 
 control. 
   
 =Some Advantages in Choices of Marriage by the Elders.=--The old 
 arranged choice for marriage, in the first place, secured, and still 
 secures in countries not yet changed in this particular, a similar 
 financial position. Often greed of family prestige made the money end 
 the chief one and sacrificed everything else to the bringing together 
 of two great fortunes. Yet the fact that family choices usually united 
 those of similar financial standing and power of gratification of 
 taste did lead toward an easy adjustment of the young couple to life 
 together. One of the chief causes of unhappiness in marriages wholly 
 from personal choice and in response to an impulse of passionate 
 attachment is that the taste and "style" of living of the two has been 
 so different that it is hard, after the first glamour wears away, to 
 settle down to agreeable compromises. As a rule, "the beggar maid and 
 King Cophetua" can get on better than the young woman heiress and the 
 ex-chauffeur in such compromises; for it is always easier to extend 
 one's income than to contract it, and women can still owe all to the 
 loved one with better grace than men can bear the position of one 
 "marrying above his lot." The tendency of the older custom, however, 
 to limit all marriage choices on the basis of money to be contributed 
 to the common fund was, and is when now in force, as destructive to 
 real happiness in marriage as any ill-considered leaping across social 
 barriers could well be. It is well, therefore, that it is outgrown. 
   
 The second condition believed essential to success in marriage from 
 the point of view of family stability, when the marriage choice of the 
 loved one was made by the elders, is far more important than that of 
 financial equality. It is the congeniality of the two families to be 
 united by the marriage. The custom of betrothing their children as a 
 means of carrying on the close friendship of a lifetime beyond its 
 natural limit into the generations yet to be, is an old and not a 
 wholly bad one. It insures for the young couple a genuine love from 
 both sides the family line. To be sure, that love may be an oppressive 
 and undesired gift which one or the other of the young people ardently 
 wishes to ignore or to be freed from, but it contains also some 
 elements of a good start for those same young people in a mutually 
 devoted double parentage. When, however, as in Eastern countries, it 
 leads to betrothal in infancy or very early childhood and sets the 
 girl who is to be the wife in the family of her betrothed when she is 
 too young to know her own real nature or to have a mind to make up 
 about what she would wish for herself, it may be and generally is an 
 evil thing. In the questions concerning the family set forth by the 
 Chinese inquiry, to which allusion has already been made, the first 
 set of problems relates to "Early Engagements," and it is asked, "Is 
 the practice of parents in arranging for the engagement of a girl 
 while still a mere child productive of happiness in the future home?" 
 And, again, "Can a woman refuse to marry a man whom her family decides 
 she should marry, after the formal engagement has taken place?" To our 
 Western ideas the answer is so plain to both these questions that one 
 may be impatient at their repetition here. Yet it is certainly true 
 that many people freely engage themselves to their later unhappiness 
 and there have been many family virtues bred on even the outgrown 
 fashion of family choice. Where unhappiness has been prevented in the 
 results of family choice doubtless the friendship of the two family 
 heads has had much to do with such mitigation of bad effects of 
 extreme parental control in marriage. 
   
 Social protection of the young has in a measure superseded the ancient 
 family arrangement, but where it has not, a young person may be found 
 to-day in as bad a position through personal choice as that of the 
 girl set in a home without her own consent to be the future wife of a 
 man she has not seen. The difference is, however, a vital one. 
   
 In the case of the Chinese girl the status is fixed. In the case of a 
 girl of the Western world, even of most unfortunate circumstance or 
 weakness of character, there is a possibility of escape from even the 
 worst conditions into a new relationship to life and to marriage. We 
 have suicides in the Western world, and some of them of young girls 
 who, free to choose their mates, loved not wisely but too well; but 
 the toll of suicides of wives in China is one that testifies that 
 polygamy and the power of fathers over their daughters in marriage and 
 even in their sale for immoral uses, and the legal right to hold girls 
 in domestic slavery, are evils not made tolerable even by the 
 high-minded who try to perpetuate the friendship as well as the power 
 of leading families by intermarriage. 
   
 An early Massachusetts law declared that "No female orphan could be 
 given in marriage during her minority except with the approbation of a 
 majority of the selectmen of the town." This was proof that in this 
 country from the first, the social power was used not to make girls 
 accept husbands that might be chosen for them but to protect girls 
 from exploitation of designing persons, and if they had not a family 
 protection they were held secure in that of the officers of the 
 community. The law of 1719, in New York, that no person under 
 twenty-one should be married without the written consent of parent or 
 guardian was a step in the direction of social control. This law aimed 
 not to make marriage choices for any young person but to safeguard 
 such choice from possible harm. 
   
 The ancient family choice in marriage tried in the third place to give 
 every one an equal chance to be married. The families concerned, when 
 the age thought to be marriageable had been reached, sought to give 
 the young persons a place in the family order. The idea of bachelors 
 and maids of mature years was not only repugnant, it was an indictment 
 of the vigilance and good offices of the elders. When a certain Doctor 
 Brickell practised medicine in North Carolina in about 1731, he 
 declared that "She that continues unmarried until twenty is reckoned a 
 stale maid, which is a very indifferent character in this country;" 
 and in New England the unmarried man, as elsewhere, was subjected to 
 special tax and social odium. 
   
 The family arrangement for marriage of the young did one thing, at 
 least, in a time when women and girls enjoyed little protection or 
 financial security outside of marriage--it set at work forces to 
 provide husbands for many girls who would not be the first choice in a 
 free competition for masculine favor. 
   
 =Some Ancient Spinsters, But Few.=--There were, however, some 
 distinguished women of the older time who never married. Margaret 
 Brent, of Maryland, for example, whose appeal for "voyce and vote with 
 men," in the making of laws to which she must owe allegiance, is 
 historic. And that Mary Carpenter, sister of Alice, wife of Governor 
 Bradford, who, at the beginning of her ninety-first year, was declared 
 a "godly old maid;" and, again, that "ancient maid of forty years," 
 who is said to have founded the town of Taunton, Massachusetts. Others 
 of distinction might be mentioned. These show clearly that the right 
 not to marry at all, and the right not to marry a person whom she had 
 not seen or, having seen, did not want as husband, was well sustained 
 in the case of young girls in our own country from the first. 
   
 The lot of most women here in the United States, as elsewhere in the 
 world, includes marriage; and although no one wants to go back to 
 family arrangement of nuptials, the desirability of marriage within a 
 congenial and familiar circle--that which the family arrangement 
 distinctly set out to secure--is still obvious. 
   
 The fourth element of family stability and well-being which the 
 ancient parental arrangement of marriage was intended to secure is 
 deliberation and chance for learning all the facts on both sides, so 
 that there may be no marrying in haste to repent at leisure. The 
 reaction from this deliberation in tying the nuptial knot is seen in 
 "running away to be married" without the slightest knowledge on either 
 side of the qualities or capacities of the chosen partner and without 
 giving the parents any opportunity of safeguarding from disastrous 
 choice. This is the swing of the pendulum in a new freedom, often to 
 personal disaster. Social ideals and legal provisions are alike 
 engaged more and more to prevent too ignorant and too hasty marriages. 
 Such may turn out to have been made in heaven as nearly as the average 
 union, but the chances are against that happy consummation. 
   
 =New Demands for Social Control of Marriage Choices.=--Social wisdom 
 obliges more deliberation in the case of young people seeking a 
 marriage license on their own initiative and perhaps after a very 
 brief acquaintance. There is a strong demand that a certain period 
 shall elapse between the request for the license and its granting and 
 that sufficient publicity be secured to make it easy for interested 
 parties to ascertain any facts concerning both the man and the woman 
 involved, which might make the marriage either illegal, as bigamy, or 
 a catastrophe, as uniting one unfit for marriage with an unsuspecting 
 person blinded by sudden attraction. More than this, many States of 
 our Union are beginning processes of law to require certificates of 
 physical fitness, of freedom from infectious or dangerous disease, and 
 some statement of facts as to previous obedience to law and ability 
 for self-support such as alone would make marriage successful. 
 Ministers of religion of various sects are taking more and more a 
 stand against marriage of persons whom they know are of bad habits or 
 otherwise likely to give a married partner an unhappy life. Insanity 
 in the family is now considered in some States a disqualification for 
 marriage, and statutes requiring some family testimony to facts 
 concerning that inheritance are coming into enactment and enforcement. 
 The tragedy of marrying ignorantly into a certain and hopeless fate of 
 union with one who can never be of sound mind is so terrible that the 
 state itself is trying to safeguard carelessness on that point. The 
 medical profession is more and more acting a parental part in 
 requiring the registry of diseases that are most unsocial in their 
 effect--diseases incident to vice, and which make any man while 
 suffering from them unfit for marriage. It is proposed by many, and by 
 law required in some States, that no marriage license shall be given 
 without a certificate of both mental and physical fitness, to be 
 handed to the officer before registry of the application, in order 
 that there may be no public refusal on such grounds of unfitness after 
 it is known that a license to marry has been sought. This would be far 
 better than, as has been proposed by some persons, for clergymen to 
 take the initiative in requiring such physical and mental tests after 
 a request to marry two people and after a license has been secured. 
 After a matter has gone so far as to result in a request to a 
 clergyman to officiate at the marriage ceremony, the exaction of an 
 examination which the state has not previously required would 
 inevitably, as has been already shown in some instances, lead to 
 suspicion and bad feeling. The duty of the state, which alone in our 
 country gives power to marry (the clergyman performing the ceremony 
 pronouncing the couple married "by virtue of the power invested in him 
 by the state"), is clear. That duty is to take all initiative in all 
 previous inquiries aimed at preventing the marriage of unfit persons. 
 If the state does take such initiative and for all alike, no matter 
 what their social standing or reputation may be, then there is no 
 stigma for any individual and no suspicion aroused to injure any class 
 of persons. There seems as good reason why a compulsory physical and 
 mental examination, together with an inquiry into the main facts of a 
 person's life in order to prevent fraud and exploitation, should 
 always precede the giving of a marriage license as for the required 
 physical and mental examination of children when they enter the 
 tax-supported public school. It is, in both cases, a way by which 
 society secures itself, in the interest of the family and of social 
 life, against the fostering or continuance of evils that may be 
 prevented from poisoning the sources of moral and intellectual growth. 
   
 The fiat has gone forth in the Western world that no one shall be 
 compelled to marry against his or her will. The first revolt from 
 family control of marriage, that which made so many persons believe 
 that any one should be allowed to marry any one whom he or she might 
 choose, is now, however, waning. Elements of social control are 
 superseding the "marriage broker" and the parental office in deciding 
 what unions shall be allowed. 
   
 =The Young Should be Helped to Make Wise Choices.=--Wisdom and 
 consistency are not yet developed in this new way of helping the 
 young, even against their will, to avoid mistakes of ignorance and 
 folly, but they are developing. Meanwhile, many children still revere 
 their parents' wishes and ideals, even if the wild few do as they 
 please without regard to their elders. Most marriages in our country 
 are not only safely entered upon but happy in results because of 
 tendencies and tastes engendered in homes of love, truth, and 
 goodness. The increase of social control in the direction of knowledge 
 and caution even among the best people, and the safeguarding of the 
 less advantaged in family training, must go on until all the good 
 things parental choice gave to marriage arrangements are retained more 
 perfectly and all the bad things outgrown. 
   
 The fifth element in the ancient parental control of marriage choices 
 was the definite placing of youth under the leadership of age and thus 
 holding firm the inherited "mores" to make the family stable in ideal 
 as in practice. We have now a revolt of youth against the leadership 
 of age. We have now, even among those whose affection for their 
 parents is strong in feeling and generous in action, an idea that the 
 convictions and reverences of the older generation are outgrown and 
 for the better. There is a general impression, perhaps speeded unduly 
 by the war, that what is new must be good, and what is old must be, if 
 not bad, at least not the best. The decay of family religion lessens 
 respect for old sanctions. The fact that business and pleasure alike 
 take the different members of each family on different ways all the 
 week and Sunday, too, make each age represented in the household 
 influenced chiefly by its own set of friends. The way in which 
 mechanical invention gives unexampled speed in opposite directions to 
 the young and the old alike intensifies the segregation of each group 
 and minimizes the influence of the family bond. The fact, perhaps of 
 all most significant, that every form of art, from the lowest to the 
 highest, is changing before our eyes into something new and strange 
 tends toward the unconscious absorption by youth of new ideals of what 
 is desirable in life. These things all conspire to make youth 
 impatient of age. 
   
 =The Revolt of Youth.=--Many of the boys who went to torture and 
 cripplement in the war have returned to declare that the old life is 
 gone, and if there can be no better one devised and realized then the 
 old world should go too. Many of the girls who went overseas to a 
 vivid excitement and a stimulus of unwonted comradeship with men feel 
 that they have so much more insight into real things than do their 
 mothers that they know not only what is best for themselves but what 
 is best for all youth. Many women, for the first time earning 
 independent livelihood during the war-struggle, feel that now, at 
 last, they have arrived; and what have they to do with old-fashioned 
 behavior? More than all else, the modern economic independence of 
 women of good breeding and assured position, in social classes which 
 used to consider that only women in direst need could properly earn 
 money, gives a wholly different aspect to many social questions. The 
 tendency to individualism, so often seen in the modern woman, 
 unbalanced by study of the past or its lessons or by any real 
 grappling with present problems as they relate to possible future 
 adjustments, now begins its strongest revolt at the fireside and makes 
 the daughter often a stranger to her mother. 
   
 Only the older woman who has kept in touch not only with young life 
 outside her own family but with the problems that modern changes in 
 education, in industry, in art and literature, press upon the mind, 
 can understand why so many young people to-day distrust everything 
 that is old and welcome everything that seems new, however ancient it 
 may actually be. Many of the newest things proclaimed are old mistakes 
 of human nature revamped for a masquerade. A little study, for 
 example, would show many young people who think they are responding to 
 fresh revelation of the right relation of the sexes that they are 
 really coming under the spell of some ancient and discarded plan of 
 getting all satisfaction out of a relationship without assuming any 
 obligation in return. 
   
 =The Wisdom of the Ages Must be the Guide of Youth.=--There is no 
 chance of putting youth back into tutelage to age in any personal 
 relation and in the old sense. Wise older people do not wish that. 
 What is happening, and will be accelerated in action when the first 
 flush of youthful consciousness of power is a bit balanced by 
 knowledge of life's difficulties, is this; the wisdom of the ages, not 
 the wisdom of their own parents and family alone, will be available to 
 youth and used by youth in ever-increasing reverence. Not that some 
 one who has lived longer shall of right determine a young life, but 
 that young life shall learn more than in any past time it could do 
 what the experience of the race has to teach. Happy the child whose 
 parent can interpret this wisdom of life and happy the parent whose 
 child can even now see that there is wisdom from the past to 
 interpret. 
   
 Meanwhile, the fact that so many people marry and so many marriages 
 turn out happily speaks well for the wisdom of youth or else gives 
 testimony of the kindness of the fate that watches over lovers. We are 
 told that at the ages of twenty to twenty-five half of the women and 
 one-fourth of the men in the United States are married, and at the 
 period of life between thirty-five and forty-five years only seventeen 
 per cent. of the men are single and only eleven per cent. of the 
 women; while at sixty-five years and over only six per cent. of either 
 sex are listed as having never married. If out of this large 
 proportion who dare matrimony on their own motion, and often without 
 even the parental approbation, only one marriage out of ten to twelve 
 turns out so badly that the parties ask to be released from their 
 marriage vows, surely it argues well for independence in choosing 
 one's partner for one's self even if there are mishaps and disasters 
 for the few. 
   
 =Personal Choice in Marriage Has Now the Widest Range.=--One fact 
 which many overlook when making estimates of the mistakes in marriage 
 (and drawing therefrom dire prognostication for the future of the 
 family in our country) is that personal choice among a circle of 
 friends was not only never so free for young people but also never 
 able to cover so wide a range of divergent national and racial 
 backgrounds as in the United States. Marriages in this country often 
 bridge or try to bridge a chasm between centuries of social 
 development and continents of educational influence. It is estimated 
 that of the 3,424 languages and dialects spoken in the world, about 
 one-third, or 1,624, are spoken in some part of the American 
 continent. The English language is spoken by more people than use 
 either the German, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese, 
 but the 150,000,000 who thus preserve the "mother-tongue" of the early 
 American settlers have to come into intimate contact with those of far 
 different lingual background. This difference in language, which is 
 found so often a barrier to unity between the respective parents of 
 the young people who choose each other in marriage, is but a sign and 
 symbol of deep-seated and ineradicable divergence in family tradition, 
 in fashion of customary ways of living, in scale of moral values and 
 in personal habits. It is rather a matter for astonishment that so 
 many "mixed marriages" turn out well than that a minority prove 
 disastrous. Mixed marriages will continue and with wider range of 
 alignment in the future than in the past. That is inevitable with our 
 increased complexity of life, which brings together in school and in 
 labor, in social gatherings and in political association, all sorts 
 and conditions of men, and women. Love not only laughs at prison bars, 
 love scoffs at parental differences as well as at parental control. 
 Yet is it true that wide divergence in family background is 
 accountable for many of the tragedies of broken families after love 
 has cooled and the facts of sober obligations incurred have become 
 obvious. 
   
 The great social need in the United States is for means of 
 acquaintance and friendship for the young in lines of association in 
 which a safe and helpful marriage choice may be made. William Penn 
 said, "Never marry but for love, but see that thou lovest what is 
 lovely." The effort of all social arrangements for the young in 
 families where the elders do not try to reinstate parental control but 
 rather to give a chance for safeguarded independence of choice is to 
 bring together young people who should find, each one of them in that 
 group, a chosen one of the right sort. Financial capacity, mutually 
 congenial relatives, suitable age and similar tastes, after 
 acquaintance giving reasonable basis for hope for permanent agreement 
 in essentials, might insure suitable marriages. The many advantages of 
 close friendships within a group bound together by similar culture and 
 outlook is the real reason for "society." Often foolish in its ways 
 and defeating its own higher ends, it is yet a real effort to give a 
 new and more democratic guidance through favorable circumstances, 
 rather than through personal will or family rule, to the marriage 
 choice of youth. 
   
 The reason why one is chosen and another not is never clear to any but 
 the ones who make the choice. To them, indeed, it may be a mystery, 
 but one they are sure must have its source in the necessity of things. 
 To others it is often a puzzle past understanding because so many of 
 the friends of each of the twain "would have chosen so differently, 
 you know." 
   
 Something of racial need both for mixture and for persistency of type, 
 something of hidden demand of temperament for a complementary 
 personality, something of easy awakening of passion and easy holding 
 of attention, something of requirement for a larger sympathy than most 
 friends can give and the favored one seems able to supply--all these 
 enter into the selection of the chosen one from all the rest of one's 
 friends. The need is for as wide a range of personalities and for as 
 large a chance to make friends with the suitable and truly congenial 
 as can be given to youth in order that the choice may be really free 
 and the result happy. 
   
 =The Value of the Church in Social Life.=--In our day the best 
 opportunities for such a choice within social ranges most likely to 
 offer the right choice is found in the churches. Whatever they may 
 lack in power of leadership, the churches have a social activity 
 to-day which gives the very best opportunity to youth in its quest for 
 the perfect other half. It is not necessary or best to do as the 
 Friends have done, turn out of the communion those who "marry out of 
 meeting." It is not a wholesome sign when religion puts bars before 
 the marriage altar, for one's true mate may be found in another temple 
 than that in which one was consecrated in infancy. It is often the 
 very difference in family faith that unites two people whose religious 
 inheritance has slipped away from bondage and gives only a reminiscent 
 glow. It is, however, true that like beliefs, like forms of worship, 
 like use of the same tabernacle, Sunday after Sunday, which bring 
 parents and elders of families together, give chances for the young to 
 form wide and strong attachments of friendship within a circle of like 
 quality and tastes. In spite of the fact that many people bridge vast 
 social chasms with high success in a marriage venture, the majority 
 of happy marriages are of those who do not have to engage an outside 
 interpreter in order to understand each other in reaction to social 
 habit, ethics, and culture. 
   
 It is often made a reproach to the modern church that it is so much a 
 supplement of the home, so largely a social opportunity rather than a 
 controlling moral force. In some sense the reproach may be a just one, 
 but in a very real meaning of human service, the church that aids 
 young people to find themselves and each other in a friendly circle of 
 the like-minded, like-mannered, and like-spirited, within the circle 
 of whom a really good marriage choice may be made, can claim 
 recognition as of those functionaries that meet a need not met so well 
 by any other social agency. The straining of this point by advertised 
 "courting parlors" for the friendless and homeless may not be the 
 right thing, but what is needed is an opportunity providing the right 
 atmosphere and chaperonage for easier acquaintance among young people 
 away from home. 
   
 The sad fact that so many young men and young women never meet the 
 right mates in youth and marry perforce, if at all, any one that 
 "comes along," makes any organization that naturally and simply 
 enables those who need it to make acquaintance with those among whom a 
 congenial mate may easily be found socially useful. 
   
 Either as substitute for home surroundings or as supplement to unhappy 
 or inadequate family life, the church home may be a benefactor in this 
 direction of enabling young people to find what all need, friends and 
 possible chosen ones among those friends. 
   
 The prophetic mission of the church, laments an earnest reformer, is 
 now too much in eclipse. Perhaps so, but it may be truer to say that 
 the prophetic mission has now escaped all walls, even of grandest 
 cathedrals, and is now busy at organizing that mission into 
 specialties of social reform and social progress. However that may be, 
 the church as a home-extension meeting-place of the higher, broader, 
 and finer friendly association, in which all ages can come together, 
 in a friendly spirit and for worship of all that is lovely and of good 
 report;--the church as such a home-extension service has a noble place 
 to fill in modern life. 
   
 =Easy Divorce Does Not Lessen Marriage Responsibility.=--At any rate, 
 by whatever means of help, or however left to struggle alone with its 
 problems, the youth of to-day has taken all life's choices in its own 
 hands, especially the choice that puts one friend above all others and 
 takes the first step in the founding of a home. If any one thinks that 
 it is so slight a thing to do this now, since if one is not satisfied 
 one can get a divorce, he or she is not giving the choice a fair 
 chance. It must be held within the heart and purpose as a permanent 
 bond or the marriage will not be likely to realize its own 
 possibilities. 
   
 The real lover is sure that he will love forever the same. It is that 
 feeling that consecrates the marriage and gives most assurance of its 
 success. If we could get rid of romantic love we should have no good 
 start toward married happiness. If we got rid of the ideal of 
 life-long devotion we should not build the home on sure foundations. 
 The psychology of permanence is an essential of true marriage. 
   
 On the other hand, if we tried to put the family back into the bondage 
 of the old time, when youth was subject and could never exercise its 
 own power of choice, we should lose the one precious gift of freedom 
 to love, the power to find and keep one's own. If we fear the future 
 of the family because now the spiritual essence of marriage is 
 demanded, even if the form of its first enclosure prove too strait for 
 its growth, we cannot turn back to the harsh practice and coarse 
 ideals that once made all unions seem right that preserved a legal 
 bond and all men and women wrong-doers who sought freedom from 
 intolerable ills. 
   
 =New and Finer Marriage Unions.=--There is a way of life, full of 
 difficulties and not yet clear, a way of life that leads to such a 
 noble comradeship and such a type of loving union as the world could 
 rarely see in the older days. 
   
 Our children and our children's children will know how to use freedom 
 for service, and service for mutual growth, and mutual growth for 
 community betterment, in those "world's great bridals, chaste and 
 calm," which the future shall make the common glory of the home. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON FRIENDS AND THE CHOSEN ONE 
   
 Does youth now take its own way in choice of companionship as 
 
      never before? If so, does it mean better or worse choices in 
      marriage? 
   
 Should early marriages be encouraged? If so, how should the 
 
      social opportunity for wise choices be secured to youth? If 
      not, how can the social dangers of postponement of marriage be 
      minimized? 
   
 Should young people in shops and manufactories, in college, in 
 
      school, in recreation centres, and elsewhere, be guided into 
      social circles in which marriage choices are likely to be 
      wisely made? If so, how can this be done? 
   
 How can the disproportion in numbers of men and women in given 
 
      localities, which is an acknowledged cause of late marriages 
      and failure to marry at all, and which is largely due to 
      economic conditions, be mitigated? 
   
 Is the "revolt of youth," so called, a passing phase of rapid 
 
      social changes, or is it evidence that old institutions in 
      which the elders had superior power are becoming permanently 
      outgrown? 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER VII (HUSBANDS AND WIVES) 
   
     "First, the love of wedded souls; next, neighbor loves and civic, 
     All reddened, sweetened from the central heart." 
                     --E.B. BROWNING. 
   
     "Two shall be born the whole wide world apart 
     And speak in different tongues, and have no thought 
     Each of the other's being and no heed; 
     And those o'er unknown seas to unknown lands 
     Shall come, escaping wreck, defying death, 
     And all unconsciously shape every act 
     And bend each wandering step to this one end--That 
     one day, out of darkness, they shall stand 
     And read life's meaning in each other's eyes." 
                     --SUSAN MARR SPAULDING. 
   
     "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 
     I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 
     My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 
     For the ends of being and ideal grace. 
     I love thee to the level of every day's 
     Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light." 
     I love thee freely, as men strive for right. 
     I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. 
                     --ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
   
   "A home is not an accidental or natural coming together of human 
   souls under the same roof in certain definite relationships; it is 
   a work of art, to be builded upon fixed principles of life and 
   action."--HENRY WARE, in _Home Life_. 
   
     "True love is but a humble, low-born thing, 
     And hath its food served up in earthenware; 
     It is a thing to walk with, hand in hand, 
     Through the every-dayness of this work-day world, 
     Baring its tender feet to every roughness, 
     Yet letting not one heart-beat go astray 
     From Beauty's law of plainness and content; 
     A simple, fireside thing, whose quiet smile 
     Can warm earth's poorest hovel to a home." 
                     --LOWELL. 
   
   
 =Not Fancied but Genuine Happiness in Marriage Now Demanded.=--The 
 fairy tales ended with the wedding and "they lived happily forever 
 after." The dramas and novels of to-day are often devoted to telling 
 how they did not live happily ever after and what or who caused the 
 unhappiness. Although no one need be alarmed that some people get 
 divorced when marital unhappiness becomes acute, every right-minded 
 person wishes that every marriage should turn out happily. We now, 
 however, demand that it shall be genuine, not make-believe happiness, 
 and that places a heavier strain upon all concerned. We have grown 
 wise enough to see that holding people together who should never have 
 been brought into close relationship does not really conduce to high 
 family morality or social well-being. That, however, only makes it 
 seem the more important that we should somehow learn how to prevent 
 the marriage of those who cannot make their union a success. The part 
 that social control can play in preventing the attempt to marry by the 
 wholly unfit in body, mind, or work-capacity has been already 
 suggested, and that pressure of the community upon the individual 
 choice will, without doubt, largely increase as the bad results of too 
 great individualism in the family relation are more clearly perceived. 
   
 =Social Restrictions on Marriage Choices.=--There will, in time, be a 
 narrowing of the circle within which personal choices can be made, so 
 that the markedly defective in mind, the victims of disease inimical 
 to family well-being, and the pauper strains of inheritance will be 
 ruled out before young people have a chance to marry according to 
 their own inclination. 
   
 With such helpful narrowing of choices there would still remain many 
 dangers to be avoided if the divorce statistics are to be held within 
 bounds of social safety. 
   
 The part that the family elders once played in settling vital 
 questions of adjustment within the marriage bond has now, for the most 
 part, to be undertaken for consideration and decision by the young 
 people themselves. To name these most important questions of 
 adjustment and discuss them in the light of modern ideals and desires 
 is to get a better impression of the difficulties they indicate. 
   
 =Shall the Wife Take the Husband's Name?=--In the first place, the 
 matter of the name for the married couple must be now considered. 
 Shall it be one or two? Shall the new sense of personal dignity, so 
 common to the modern woman, increase the already spreading fashion of 
 retention of the maiden name, her inherited family name, as 
 permanently her own, untouched by the fact of marriage union? No one 
 can be cognizant of the conviction and practice of many feminists 
 without understanding that this is a real problem to be settled surely 
 before the marriage ceremony. There is already in the field a "Lucy 
 Stone League" to give the support of the practice of a great and 
 beloved woman to the fashion of keeping one's own name. The question 
 of the desirability of having children bear the same name as both 
 parents is left for the most part in abeyance by those who thus 
 advocate two names for the married couple. It may be that each child 
 is expected to bear as a second name his mother's and as a last name 
 his father's family name, as, for example, John Jones Jackson, Jones 
 being the mother's and Jackson the father's personal signature; but 
 when the child marries, by what name shall the family line be carried 
 on? 
   
 To most of us who see in the family name adopted by both husband and 
 wife at marriage a sign of family unity not to be lost without serious 
 embarrassment to offspring, and some danger of easy drifting apart 
 without the knowledge of others, the name seems not to be of vital 
 importance. Why, then, it is asked, should the woman always give up 
 her family connection as indicated by inherited name, and the man 
 retain his? The fact that the custom has grown up by reason of the 
 legal absorption of the wife's life in that of the husband is obvious, 
 and gives much color to the claim that now, when a woman is a 
 recognized personality in the law whether married or single, she 
 should keep the name by which her personality has become known. That 
 is easily seen to be advantageous in the case of professional women of 
 wide influence. The great singer, the great writer, any creative 
 genius or artist, continues, as a rule, to be known by the name under 
 which greatness has been achieved. In such cases, however, women often 
 bear two names, the professional name either of family inheritance or 
 a chosen _nom de plume_, and the social name, which is their husband's 
 and engraved on calling cards. The tendency now is increasing to keep 
 the one designation to which one is born and make no concessions to 
 conventional nomenclature. It must be remembered that in such cases it 
 is the father's name by which the married daughter is called and the 
 mother's maiden name is lost with all the rest of the silent majority 
 of her sex. The fact that men have given the wedded name for ages, and 
 that men are most often senior partners in the marriage firm, and the 
 fact that any other suggested plan gives two names for one family 
 instead of one seems to make that a part of the old inheritance that 
 may not cause great uneasiness if one accepts it without revolt. There 
 is a compromise method which long has been a custom among Friends and 
 is growing even more rapidly than that of holding permanently to the 
 full maiden name. That is the plan of keeping the father's name, or 
 the "maiden name," as a middle one, and adding the husband's name; so 
 that Miss Mary Jane Wood shall, on marrying John Hartley Stone, 
 become, not Mrs. John Hartley Stone, but Mrs. Mary Wood Stone. That 
 keeps in memory her family designation and yet gives her children a 
 chance to call themselves by the one name which is a sign of the 
 family unity. However the settlement may be made, the point is that 
 such a vital question, entering into the legal signature for business 
 purposes as well as into all social relationship, shall reach 
 conclusion before the two enter upon the marriage bond. 
   
 =Shall the Wife Take the Husband's Nationality?=--In the second place, 
 there is now a question of nationality to be settled, a most important 
 one in all its political and legal bearings. The old law made a wife 
 the subject of her husband's national law and took her automatically 
 away from her own country if her husband was born and was citizen of 
 another country. The national allegiance of her birth and her family 
 was thus automatically transferred to that of the man she had married. 
 The suffering of many a woman in the late war when her husband's 
 national allegiance made her legally an "enemy alien" to her own 
 beloved land has sharpened the claim that now, when women have the 
 franchise, they should have complete choice of the body politic to 
 which they owe allegiance. If they wish to marry men of another 
 country they shall have the determination of whether or not they shall 
 become naturalized by his government or whether they shall keep 
 political relation with their own native country. The League of Women 
 Voters is now hard at work to make the national allegiance of women, 
 as of men, a personal matter whether women are married or single. The 
 Federal Bill that is called for by this body would make it incumbent 
 upon all women of foreign birth desiring to use the franchise in the 
 United States to become naturalized, and would protect any woman on 
 marrying from the loss of her own national allegiance, whatever her 
 husband's might be.[7] Surely such a protection of individual 
 citizenship is best for both men and women, whatever their marital 
 state. It is, however, a matter that often comes up for adjustment in 
 international marriages. It is matter of importance that women of 
 foreign birth as well as men coming to this country from other lands 
 should personally seek for full citizenship and not have it handed to 
 them with a marriage certificate. It is equally of importance that no 
 person should lose allegiance to the country of his or her birth and 
 affection simply by reason of marriage. This question of what country 
 shall one continue to belong to after marriage is one for settlement 
 on high grounds of patriotism and civic duty before the marriage is 
 consummated. 
   
 =Who Shall Choose the Domicile?=--In the third place, the matter of 
 chosen domicile is now up for discussion or may be in the near future. 
 The law from time immemorial has given the choice of residence of the 
 family, wife as well as children, into the complete control of the 
 husband and father. A woman may be "posted" in the public press as 
 "leaving her husband's bed and board," and thereby the husband may be 
 released from any responsibility for her debts or support. The 
 inference is that married women have no rights in marriage that can 
 survive independent choice on her part of a residence apart from the 
 husband. Now we have a movement that if successful would place the law 
 behind an equal choice by married men and married women, of domicile, 
 and of all that goes with that possible separation of residence. There 
 are those who declare that separate residence for husbands and wives 
 might keep the flame of romantic love burning longer and more 
 ardently, since "familiarity often breeds contempt" and the absence of 
 the loved one often kindles desire. This is not, however, the general 
 feeling, and the demand for independent choice of domicile has many 
 side-issues not at present fully met, if at all understood, by those 
 who make the demand noted above. The legal right of choice of domicile 
 goes consistently with the legal obligation to "support," The law 
 still makes it incumbent upon a husband to give financial support to 
 his wife commensurate with his earnings or income and still more 
 demands of the father the full support of minor children. Naturally, 
 if he has these obligations to meet, a man must go where he can earn 
 sufficient to meet them. He may be unwise or mistaken in his choice, 
 but, having the responsibility, he must try to meet it as best he can, 
 and among the necessary elements in that trial are free movement to 
 the place or places in which he can find work. 
   
 If, therefore, the family are all to be kept in one residence, father, 
 mother and children, this economic aspect of the father's 
 responsibility must be considered. If the father and mother each "gang 
 their ain gait," and decide for business reasons or from personal 
 preference to live in separate places, perhaps far apart from each 
 other, then which one is to have the child or children? The old idea 
 that men should have the power to hold women in wholly unsuitable 
 surroundings, and that no matter what home was offered her a wife must 
 submit and accept, is long outgrown in all the States of this Union. 
 The wife has now the right to help choose domicile, and in point of 
 fact, at least among the older Americans, has often more than an equal 
 share in such determination; but to pass a "blanket law" that at once 
 gave the suggestion of two choices for the family domicile without any 
 qualifying statement of release of men from "support" clauses in the 
 family legislation as those clauses relate to wives might be neither 
 just nor wise. The one in the family upon whom is placed the heavier 
 economic burden for support of children must have much freedom of 
 choice of residence. To restrict that freedom might be to add to 
 present family difficulties without really giving women better chances 
 in marriage. Now, any woman who feels herself oppressed in the matter 
 of domicile has the remedy in her own hands. She can make complaint to 
 a court or she can leave her husband and no one can prevent her, and 
 she can establish a separate establishment if she has the means and 
 make herself eligible thereby to a practical if not a legal divorce. 
 But if the twain stay together, and mean to do so, there are mutual 
 considerations that require an adjustment, and there is now little 
 danger of women having to submit to injustice in the matter of choice 
 of domicile, except in cases where no home together would seem 
 desirable to either or to both. 
   
 The matter of choice of domicile is now in the United States so much a 
 mutual question and to be decided upon economic grounds, that it is 
 one of the things that it is well to discuss from the bottom up if two 
 people wish to marry, provided there are any reasons why the relative 
 merits of two or more places of residence are involved in the issue. 
 The reasonableness and generosity of the average American man quite 
 equals the like qualities in the average American woman; hence the 
 domicile question may well be left in abeyance in any struggle for 
 "equality of rights between the sexes" and confined to personal debate 
 and decision; but in that personal debate and decision it should have 
 recognized place. 
   
 =Shall the Married Woman Earn Outside the Home?=--The fourth question, 
 now sometimes a burning one, and one most intimately related to that 
 of choice of domicile, is that concerning the continuance of 
 professional or business connection by the woman after marriage. Shall 
 I keep on with my work or not? This is the problem that besets many a 
 woman when the question of marriage with the chosen one is imminent. 
 For the woman who is a teacher, and already established in the 
 educational field in the city or town where both the man and the woman 
 concerned find it easy to choose to live after marriage, there is a 
 probability that she can continue her work after marriage with 
 comparative ease. The laws that used to penalize the woman teacher who 
 married are rapidly ceasing to operate, and although the common legal 
 requirement for a two years' vacation from public school employment 
 when a child is to be born may exert a strong influence upon the 
 birth-rate (either for or against) the fact that marriage does not 
 disqualify for teaching and that teaching is so near the home interest 
 may lead to much continuance of that type of professional work after 
 marriage. The question, however, is not one for the woman alone to 
 solve. Many women find that the ideal of "taking care of his wife," 
 which long ages of law and custom have ingrained in man's nature, may 
 stand in the way of her earning outside the home after marriage. To be 
 settled right this question must be settled by full consent of both 
 parties and that consent may be hard to get from the man who fears 
 that he will be considered incapable if he "lets his wife earn." What 
 is to be done in such a case? That must be determined by the 
 possibility of compromise on both sides. 
   
 If the woman has attained a high position in some profession, law, or 
 medicine, as preacher, teacher, or nurse, as business manager or 
 welfare worker, the chances are that she feels she can best help in 
 the family life by hiring things done in the household, which she has 
 little skill, perhaps, to do herself, and keeping on with the vocation 
 for which she has been trained and in which she has already gained a 
 place. But she may have attained her vocational opportunity and to 
 keep it must continue to live in a locality remote from the man's home 
 and work. What then? To be near each other and to live together is the 
 chief desire of genuine lovers. That would be no home which had two 
 centres of vocational activity miles apart. Circumstances may compel 
 such separation for economic reasons long after marriage has bound two 
 lives together so closely that distance even cannot really separate 
 them. But at the outset, if two people are to belong to each other, 
 they must be able to combine their home life if that is to be a help 
 and not a hindrance to the joint affection that alone makes the two 
 one. The question of domicile, bound up with that of whether or not 
 the woman shall continue her vocational connection after marriage, 
 sometimes becomes acute in this manner:--the woman earns more than the 
 man and her place of earning is in a far-away location from his and 
 the transplanting of his life has no promise of economic readjustment. 
 Shall she give up her larger salary and go with him to a place in 
 which she is less likely than if single to gain a professional 
 foothold and they both make the smaller income do? Or shall she 
 insist, if he is willing, that the economic advantage of the married 
 firm requires his removal to the seat of her labors at any risk of his 
 getting another hold upon vocational opportunity? 
   
 Those who ask such a question should remember that the facts of life, 
 social and economic, all make the upsetting of the man in his work 
 seldom a safe or a happy solution. In the first place, the position of 
 a man who even temporarily depends upon his wife's vocational success 
 and relinquishes his own economic position, is far more difficult than 
 that of a woman who sacrifices her own professional standing to go 
 with her husband to a new centre. Any woman asks more of a man in the 
 way of sacrifice, both of his standing as a man and his chances as a 
 worker, if she demands that he take her income as the basic economic 
 element in the joint family treasury (when such demand entails a 
 change of residence and a giving up of assured income on his part) 
 than any man asks of a woman when the conditions proposed are the 
 reverse. No woman loses "caste" who depends upon her husband in an 
 economic sense. Perhaps the time will come when it will cost a woman 
 the loss of social prestige and of the best chance for work outside 
 the home (as it now does a man) when the choice is made to follow the 
 larger income from one locality to another. Now, however, it means 
 that a woman can adjust herself to such change far better than a man, 
 and hence that equal right to demand sacrifice and equal duty to 
 mutually help each other demand that where such acute problems arise 
 the woman shall give the man's relation to his work right of way. 
 Moreover, even those who, like Doctor Patten, believe that women 
 should continue vocational work after marriage place the chief 
 economic burden of the family permanently upon the husband and father. 
 The wife may earn outside the home if both agree and the opportunity 
 offers in the place where the man's work already is; but the 
 maintenance of the economic standing and the improvement of social 
 condition remain, as of old, with the man. And for the obvious reason 
 that if the woman has children they may take a large portion of her 
 interest and of her strength and energy and, in any case, the married 
 woman, if she really makes a home, must mix her vocational work with a 
 more or less extended devotion to that home-making. Also, although a 
 woman at marriage may be in receipt of a larger income from vocational 
 service than is the man she wishes to marry, he will be more likely, 
 if worth-while, to gain steadily toward a much larger compensation. 
 The positions which women fill are for the most part self-limited. 
 They are fast developing high qualities for routine work in the 
 professions, like school doctor and hospital clinician and workers for 
 legal aid and other like salaried employments. These are not highly 
 paid, but have manifest advantages for women in that they give a fixed 
 income, if small, and in that they allow for regulation of hours of 
 service that may easily be made half-time work in case of divided 
 effort. Hence, although at a given point in earlier life (when the 
 usual greater precocity of women give some women the advantage in 
 salary and position), a woman may have a higher salary at marriage, a 
 far greater rise in both income and leadership may be on the husband's 
 side as the years go on. 
   
 =Economic Considerations Involved.=--At any rate, the question of 
 whether or not the woman shall earn outside the home after her 
 marriage must wait upon the deeper question, shall she do anything 
 which will disturb or render more difficult the man's economic 
 adjustment? There are exceptions, a growing number of exceptions, but 
 as a general thing the question of domicile and the question of which 
 one shall give way when there is difficulty of both being well 
 situated in individual work in one place, must be settled on the basis 
 of the man's longer, larger, and more continuous responsibility for 
 the economic standing of the family. 
   
 The exceptions make their own excuse and shape their own defense. The 
 average married woman carries on two vocations if she keeps on with 
 her own work, one inside and one outside the home. The one in which 
 she earns outside the home must in the long run and the large way be 
 subordinated to the joint partnership of the household in which she 
 bears a larger share of the internal management and he the heavier 
 burden of the outside support. 
   
 Any thorough-going discussion of the questions involved in the 
 wage-earning of married women and mothers outside the home must 
 include study of actual expense of alternate plans. The fundamental 
 question may be one concerning the social value of the woman's 
 vocational work. The next must certainly be what would the family 
 treasury gain or lose by the housemother's continued vocational 
 service outside the home. In the suggestive and encouraging book by 
 Mrs. Mary Hinman Abel, entitled _Successful Family Life on the 
 Moderate Income_, this economic aspect of the problem is treated with 
 definiteness. In addition to the general conclusion reached by many 
 that a family income of from $2,500 to $3,000 must be reached before 
 continual hired help can be economically justified, Mrs. Abel shows by 
 tables at pre-war prices that unless a married woman has a high-grade 
 profession with a good independent income the duties performed by the 
 average housemother within the home cannot be hired without a distinct 
 economic loss to the family treasury. For example, reckoning 
 conservatively the cost of the full-time hired girl or working 
 housekeeper at $600 to $1,000 per year, and estimating the economic 
 value of the woman who does all her own housework except washing and 
 heavy cleaning at only fifteen cents an hour, the saving by the 
 average married woman who is competent and well and does all her own 
 work is a large one. There are the best of reasons, therefore, why, 
 for the woman who is in ordinary circumstances and not so averse to 
 household care and work as to insure her failure in it, the answer to 
 the question, Shall I keep on with my outside earning after 
 marriage?--should be in the negative. The old notion that all women 
 were domestic and would enjoy housework if only they could do it in 
 their own homes is indeed exploded. The natural differences among 
 women are now allowed. The advantages, social, economic, and in 
 matters of health and control of work-time and of leisure, which the 
 average housemother enjoys over the average woman who works at manual 
 labor under the factory system of industry, were, however, never 
 better known or more justly evaluated. The proof of this is in the 
 inclusion of training in household arts by the Smith-Hughes Bill, 
 under which the Federal Government makes large appropriations for 
 vocational training directly aimed at improving the efficiency of 
 women whose labor is confined to the private home. 
   
 It is a sign, among other things, of desired and needed flexibility in 
 domestic arrangements that there were listed in 1910 as married 
 twenty-five per cent. of the women at work in "gainful occupations." 
 Not all the conditions indicated by this count were socially helpful; 
 since in the textile industries, in which many married women are 
 employed, there are fewer children born and more die before the end of 
 the second year than in the average population. It does, however, 
 indicate that among those of higher opportunity in life there is a 
 growing disposition to treat the question of women's continuance in 
 vocational service outside the home after marriage as a real problem 
 and one to be settled in freedom, and with social approval of that 
 freedom, by the two persons most deeply concerned. Only, it must be 
 insisted, that all a married woman gains in salary or wages cannot be 
 reckoned as increase of the family income. The economic value of the 
 average housemother's contribution is now definitely computed and must 
 be reckoned hereafter as so much actually contributed to the family 
 income. And so far, if a woman is physically able, temperamentally 
 adjustable, and adequately trained for household tasks, she can in the 
 vast majority of cases serve her day and generation in no better 
 fashion than by assuming and carrying the multiple duties of the 
 private home. 
   
 Hence, although freedom means new choice, prudence and affection alike 
 oftenest point to the old paths of family service for the average 
 woman. As Mrs. Abel well says of the competent housemother who chooses 
 full and personal service to the home and the family, "At her best she 
 represents individual effort fully utilized. She fits her tasks 
 together; she utilizes bits of time; she invents short cuts in her 
 work," Of such it may be truly declared, in the new time as in the 
 old, that she translates every dollar of the family income into many 
 dollars' worth of comfort, of health, and of happiness. 
   
 =Is It Bad Form to Earn After Marriage?=--One more consideration, 
 quite new in its full significance, should be given place in any 
 discussion of the wife's relation to work outside the home. That 
 consideration is concerned with the use of her time not needed in 
 household tasks. The modern aids to those tasks, of which mention has 
 been made, give many women who assume full responsibility for the 
 housemother's work a considerable amount of strength and time which 
 may be used in some chosen way outside the strictly family service. 
 The general idea is that such time should be given in gratuitous 
 "social welfare work" or in some form of activity divorced from 
 regular vocations. An able President of the Federation of Women's 
 Clubs, the body most distinctly representing the interest and service 
 of women in volunteer social service in this country, has said, in 
 addressing her large constituency, "Sport is work we do without 
 pay--we are all sports." The sentiment was applauded and with evident 
 sense of superiority to the "paid worker." The feeling, so general in 
 many circles of society, that women lose "caste" if they work for 
 wages or salary, reaches its maximum of prejudice in the case of 
 married women. It is thought highly honorable to sell things in a 
 "Fair" for a good cause and come in contact with a crowd of strangers 
 in the process among people who would consider "keeping a shop," 
 unless from dire necessity, a very questionable proceeding. It is 
 thought most virtuous and wifely for a woman married to a minister of 
 the church to give her time and strength gratuitously in multitudinous 
 religious helps to the organization which usually counts on getting 
 the service of two first-class people for a second-or third-class 
 salary for one. But for the wife of such a minister, realizing that 
 the income is generally insufficient for proper living, to work 
 outside her home, even for a few hours each day, for pay, is to lay 
 herself and her husband also open to harsh criticism; even if her 
 house is kept well and her children properly cared for. It is also 
 thought by many people that the only really justifiable use of time 
 that can be spared from household duties is in furthering the 
 husband's work, if he is struggling up; or, if he has "arrived," in 
 these miscellaneous gratuitous social services in which the club-women 
 so abound. 
   
 There is great need that this judgment be revised. Not only is this 
 true in the interest of women whose devotion to a chosen vocation has 
 right of way in justice when the debate is on as to the use of any 
 left-over time she may save from domestic duties. It is also true that 
 we can not have the democratic feeling and influence from women of 
 social position which our political life so sadly needs unless it is 
 understood that it is as honorable for a woman, married or unmarried, 
 to earn money for her work as it is for a man with or without an 
 inherited fortune. The class feeling that makes all married women 
 range themselves with those of their sex who have inherited fortunes, 
 and leads them to place those who serve the community in salaried 
 positions as less unselfish and less honorable social workers than 
 themselves, is one to outgrow. An interest divorced from professional 
 standards or professional compensation is not necessarily nobler or 
 more useful. This fact makes the choice of women before marriage as to 
 the use of time that may justly be spared, even when the home makes 
 its heaviest demands upon them, a choice of social as well as of 
 personal significance. 
   
 Every year social effort once strictly of private provision and 
 support becomes a public service, with organized supervision and 
 standardized compensation. When such volunteer social effort becomes a 
 public service it is highly desirable that the trained women it 
 demands for its staff should (some of them, at least) be married 
 women. Otherwise, the same loss of efficiency that the rapid turn-over 
 of the women teaching staff of our schools occasions will be 
 discovered in our social work as it changes its centre of gravity from 
 the private to the public organization. 
   
 There is a far greater need from this point of view for reorganization 
 of hours and details of work so as to give more half-time or 
 quarter-time employment to women of proved ability, than for any 
 wholesale condemnation of the woman who works outside her home for 
 pay, even when her husband is able and willing to "take care of her." 
 It is for society to say, indeed, that women marrying and having 
 children owe first duty to the home. It is for women themselves to say 
 whether they shall use any time at their disposal after that duty is 
 met in continuing such relation to their vocation as is now possible, 
 or in being "sports." 
   
 The fact that men are trying to see both sides of this vexed question 
 and that women, as a rule, are trying to make adjustment that will 
 hold an equitable and happy balance between the personal and the 
 family well-being means that this problem will work itself to a 
 democratic result without social loss. 
   
 =Shall Parenthood be Chosen?=--The fifth question that should come up 
 for serious discussion and some measure of agreement in advance of the 
 wedding ceremony is that of children. Shall there be any? If so, how 
 many, if we can afford them? If so, how soon shall we try to call 
 about us the new life? If not, why not, and how shall we live together 
 without hope of offspring? These are vital questions. For want of 
 agreement, or at least of understanding of disagreement before 
 marriage, many unions are shipwrecked. 
   
 In the old days there were no questions of this nature. Every woman 
 must have as many children as nature allowed, and when she could bear 
 no more must give way to a new wife and a step-mother to carry on the 
 family life; and if there were more children in a family than the 
 father and family friends could support, they had to be cared for by 
 the community. The modern condition is the same in the case of those 
 below a certain grade of intelligence and self-control. But as human 
 beings become more rational in other respects, they apply reason, 
 common sense, and prudence to the great function of parenthood. 
 Indeed, so much is this the case that the social danger of breeding 
 only from below the higher levels is felt to be an increasing one. 
 There are not wanting those who believe that rationalism in parenthood 
 is wrong and should be prevented, if possible, but those are the 
 people who decry the use of reason in all other matters, except it may 
 be in the strictly economic field. The fact is that whatever may be 
 said on the side of ancient religious sanction and inherited 
 sentiment, the tendency on all sides is irresistibly toward the 
 personal choice in parenthood as in marriage. 
   
 =Some People Have a Right to Marry and Remain Childless.=--There are 
 many, however, who believe that no one should marry unless wishing and 
 expecting to have children. That is a belief which will doubtless be 
 more and more outgrown. There are young people, children of dependent 
 parents and near relatives, who see no way of starting a family of 
 their own, who yet should not be denied the comfort and help of 
 married life. The tragedies of sons and daughters made to drag out a 
 lonely existence and either condemning the one they love to like 
 denial or else giving up the hope of union and seeing their chosen one 
 wedded to another--the sort of tragedy that forms the subject of many 
 novels--is a tragedy to be outgrown. It may be that social burdens in 
 behalf of parents or other dependents can not be lifted to the extent 
 of making a completed family life possible to some young people. All 
 the more, two people who truly love each other and are bound to one 
 great sacrifice, namely, that of children of their own, should be able 
 to escape another, that of denial of marriage. 
   
 There are other cases in which marriage is right and childbearing may 
 be wrong. There are tendencies to disease, in which, although there 
 may be a long and useful life for the one bearing a family taint, it 
 may be socially wrong to risk carrying on that taint. If all who need 
 to know are agreed, and there is a chance of living many years of real 
 union together, no law should step in to prevent, and no inherited 
 view of the limitation of marriage to those seeking parental relation 
 should refuse assent to the union. There are many conceivable 
 limitations to parental functioning, even for those who are keenly 
 aware of the social significance of parenthood, which do not apply to 
 marriage of those truly mated in thought and purpose. It is, however, 
 the height of irrationality, and will more and more be seen to be 
 such, for men and women to enter a relation the natural result of 
 which, in the vast majority of cases, is the bearing of children, with 
 no idea on either side as to what is the ideal and the wish and the 
 purpose of the other party in the marriage union. 
   
 The question, again, for those who are agreed that they want to start 
 a family as well as begin a mating is definitely to be considered, 
 namely, that of the right time to begin the family they wish to have. 
 It may be, as many believe, that too hasty adding of the strenuous 
 discipline of parenthood to the often difficult task of adjustment of 
 two mature and forceful natures, such as marriage so often brings 
 together, is likely to give an unnecessarily hard start in the new 
 life. Two people who have just got used to themselves, perhaps, have 
 at marriage to get used to each other. It may be that they could 
 succeed better in this great task if they had not so often to adjust 
 themselves during the first year to the needs and masterful claims of 
 a baby. There is no form of tyranny equal to that of the infant, who, 
 assured of his right to unlimited service from all in sight, makes his 
 demands at all times and in all ways. He pays for his subjection of 
 parents and grandparents and they are all usually willing slaves. But 
 it is often a great advantage if the parents, at least, have had a 
 chance to make full acquaintance with each other's pet weaknesses and 
 each other's best qualities before "the baldheaded tyrant from No 
 Man's Land" makes his appearance. It is, therefore, clearly a matter 
 of frank and full discussion and settlement before marriage not only 
 as to the fundamental question of whether or not there shall be 
 children, but also if, as is the case in the overwhelming majority of 
 cases, the young people hope for offspring, when they shall begin to 
 call them to the home. 
   
 The thing of all others to be avoided is the outgrown idea that 
 heavenly magic attends completely to these matters. It is earthly 
 wisdom and unselfishness and good intent that are needed in this as in 
 all the great decisions of life. Hence, there can be nothing more 
 absurdly out of drawing with a rationalized civilization than any law 
 which forbids the serious discussion of this most vital of social 
 questions or one that forbids the full dissemination of scientific 
 knowledge needed by those who would do the right thing in the parental 
 as in all other relations of life. 
   
 =What Is the Just Financial Basis of the Household?=--The sixth 
 question that has right of debate before the marriage ceremony is that 
 of the financial support of the household and of the distribution of 
 the joint income. The use of the words joint income prejudges the case 
 on this point. The old idea was of one purse, of right that of the 
 "head of the family," and whatever it held was his to disburse. He it 
 was who determined how the wife should be fed and clothed and 
 sheltered. If he were generous and kind she fared well; if the 
 opposite she fared ill. Her legal right was only the same as that of 
 her minor child. Now the case is wholly different. In spite of some 
 inconsistent left-over laws that can make a showing of belated tyranny 
 when culled from old statute books, the financial right of the wife in 
 the household is generally recognized. It is, however, still true that 
 no logical system of financial sharing has been worked out so clearly 
 as to be accepted by the common mind. We still have talk of a wife 
 being "supported" when, as housemother, she works harder and more 
 hours than her husband. We still have listing of those housemothers, 
 who are the majority of the women of every country, as "without 
 occupation." It is possible for men to speak of "giving" their wives 
 what they think is needed for the household and without reference to 
 any personal preference of the wives in expenditure, as if it were an 
 act of charity and not a debt owed the family life. 
   
 On the other hand, some women, having achieved partial or entire 
 financial independence of the husband and earning handsome sums in 
 work outside the home, look upon all that the man earns as "belonging 
 to the family," and all that they earn as wholly belonging to 
 themselves. "What's John's belongs to us all; what is mine belongs to 
 me," said one wife, without any idea of the absurd injustice of taking 
 all the advantage that new conditions had made possible for women and 
 at the same time hanging on to all that old-time privilege gave to 
 wives. There is need of the strictest and most balanced thinking along 
 the line of the economics of the household. 
   
 If, as seems in the vast majority of cases the best plan, the husband 
 and father can be and is depended upon for the entire financial 
 support of the family in the matter of earning and the housemother 
 gives an actual service of great economic value in saving and service 
 (as the competent housewife assuredly does give), then what is earned 
 and what is produced by housework and management makes in justice one 
 family treasury. If to that is added some special earning outside the 
 home which the housemother is able to mix in with her family service, 
 then that also is a part of the family treasury. After the marriage 
 there should be a real partnership. There may be a separate account on 
 either side of the gifts of inheritance or savings preceding the 
 marriage, but after the twain are one in home-building they may justly 
 be one in a common treasury. Two bank-books they may have, it is true, 
 and perhaps better so, although many find one in the name of both 
 husband and wife sufficiently convenient. The main thing is to get 
 firmly in mind on both sides before any actual adjustments are 
 necessary what, on the financial side, is the right attitude and plan 
 of married life. The best way seems to be, for some people, at least, 
 the division of the family treasury into three distinct parts. The 
 first, and alas, in most families the much larger share, to be 
 dedicated to common household expenses. The excellent work of 
 specialists in family budgets shows us how this fund should be 
 distributed in details of rent or dwelling, cost of food, clothing, 
 reading, church, recreation, etc. Any one can now make up with 
 prudence and wisdom such an estimate in proportion to the known income 
 and the ascertained cost of living in any given locality. After this 
 common expense is provided for, with due regard for the duty of saving 
 for future needs, the remaining portion, be it much or little, should 
 be equally divided as the personal fund of the husband and the wife. 
 Some of those who have written on the family budget think that the 
 contribution of the housewife in work, for which wages would have to 
 be paid if she did not give this personal labor in the home, should be 
 estimated in wages value, and should go into her part of a separate 
 fund, after the common household expenses are deducted. That, it 
 seems, would not be fair, for if the man puts in his labor value the 
 woman should put in hers for the first and indispensable expense of 
 the common life together. What is to be made right is the old custom 
 of reckoning the savings and common property acquired after marriage 
 as "his" estate. It is the estate of both, and should be so 
 considered, even if he has earned outside and she saved and earned and 
 helped him earn from within the household only. 
   
 =What Shall be the Accepted Standard of Living?=--The final question 
 that must be considered by the two who are to marry and set up 
 housekeeping is the scale of living they shall aim to attain. It has 
 been well said that "the standard of living is what we desire; the 
 scale of living what we can achieve." What is desired often, and what 
 seems to the young only reasonable for all to have, is the scale of 
 living the parents' households have attained after a life of hard 
 work. It is a matter for profound ethical thinking to decide what 
 measure of increase in expense of home upkeep should follow upon 
 increase of income where there are children to be affected by changes. 
 It may sometime be seen to be a social duty to keep much farther 
 within bounds the natural desire to expand expense as income 
 increases; both for the reason that income may decrease with advancing 
 years for the parents and retrenchment be necessary when it is 
 hardest, and also for the more important reason that children 
 naturally make standards at the height of parental expenditure and may 
 find it thereby the more difficult to "begin at the bottom" when they 
 marry. At any rate, the young couple starting out must keep within 
 their means or suffer from the worst of fortunes, the dread of 
 arriving bills and the shame of inability to pay them. That means some 
 agreement before housekeeping begins as to what is involved in that 
 adventure. 
   
 A witty woman said, "I love to travel with my friend Mary, for her 
 economies and mine are the same." Some uniformity of temperamental 
 reaction both to regular economies and to occasional extravagances is, 
 if not an essential, a valuable basis for happy marriage. That means 
 that the engaged couple might well start a game of "Must Haves" and 
 "Would Like to Haves" in the moments that can be spared from other 
 pursuits, a game in which without the other's knowledge each should 
 write the secret wishes and requirements to be later compared for 
 mutual enlightenment. The woman who would gladly go with two meals a 
 day for a fortnight in order to get a ticket for the opera or 
 symphony, and the man who would sacrifice a needed new suit of clothes 
 with pleasure for a fishing trip, may be able to compromise on 
 essentials, but will find it difficult in the matter of extras unless 
 warned beforehand. Affection bridges many chasms, and sensible people 
 learn that even in the best regulated families father, mother, and the 
 children may all get some of their best times apart. A basis of mutual 
 understanding is, however, essential. The necessity to get at a common 
 plan for the economic standards of the household is a vital one. How 
 many men have run in debt for what they believed essential to the 
 wife's happiness because she had such things in her father's house, 
 without letting the wife know that economy was necessary, only to find 
 out that if full confidence had been given a mutual effort would have 
 secured better results. How many women have gone without things they 
 might have had for want of knowledge of their husband's income and 
 suffered fears that need not have been in the mind. How many also, 
 alas, both of men and women, have lived beyond their means from 
 selfish demand one upon the other, a demand which might have been 
 chastened, at least, if full knowledge of economic resources had been 
 attained before the scale of living was fixed. 
   
 All these items of suggested conference and decision given above are 
 counsels of prudence and wisdom. Many, perhaps most, however, of the 
 young couples starting out in life "go it blind" in all or some of 
 these particulars. The wonder is that these who start on the most 
 serious of compacts and the one leading to the greatest extremes of 
 both happiness and unhappiness with so little knowledge of each 
 other's condition, capacity, or deepest wishes, get along, on the 
 whole, so well. We see them on every side starting on the sea of 
 married life with gaiety of heart because the chosen one is obtained 
 for company and with no conception of the difficulties that may make 
 the voyage tempestuous. But they often make safe harbor of comfortable 
 comradeship for middle life and old age, and if they have had a harder 
 time than they need have had at least prove that "love is the greatest 
 thing in the world." 
   
 =The Need for Full and Mutual Understanding Before Marriage.=--The 
 rising tide of divorce, however, gives point to the plea of this 
 chapter for a more careful charting of the sailing course in advance. 
 The fact that so many get their discipline of knowledge and direction 
 as they go along and do not make shipwreck even if matrimonial storms 
 grow frequent or heavy, is a very good testimony to the native 
 goodness of men and women and to their ability to make good their 
 mistakes and work out success even from failure provided the 
 indispensable north star of unselfish affection leads them on. It 
 would be well, however, to lessen the failures if that can be done. 
 When men and women show what marriage can become for the wise, the 
 idealistic, and the loving, it gives a picture of satisfaction and 
 mutual service that makes most other human associations seem trivial 
 and short-lived. Only parenthood is equal or superior to marriage in 
 its possibilities of moral discipline and personal development. To 
 make it successful is worth striving for. 
   
 Literature, science, and art have many great marriages to their 
 credit--men and women brought together by identical tastes and similar 
 capacities, working together in high pursuits through a long life of 
 achievement. They illumine the way of life with a peculiar glow. 
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning sang: 
   
     "Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart! 
     Our ministering two angels look surprise 
     On one another as they strike athwart 
     Their wings in passing." 
   
 but her union with Robert Browning showed that they were nearer alike 
 than in her sad humility she had fancied. Jonas Lie, the Norwegian 
 novelist, and his gifted wife, it is said, "knew the felicity of a 
 perfect union," and he himself has testified, "If I have ever written 
 anything of merit, my wife has as great a share in it as myself, and 
 her name should appear on the title-page as collaborator." The joint 
 discoveries of the Curies are well known, linking husband and wife 
 together in a great gift to humanity. In humbler circles of the gifted 
 and the talented the married couples are becoming more numerous each 
 decade whose work as well as whose affection binds them together. 
   
 =The Supreme Satisfactions of Successful Marriage.=--Take it all in 
 all, although no particular marriage may be "made in heaven," the sort 
 of union that monogamic marriage has worked out at its highest reaches 
 is without a rival in depth of feeling, in satisfaction of 
 association, in wealth of comradeship, and in social value as a 
 foundation for family life and for initial training toward social 
 serviceableness. No wise person can do aught to lessen its opportunity 
 for ethical drill, or for that due mingling of attraction and duty 
 which make all the vital associations of human beings helps toward the 
 higher life. No wise person will continue in the ancient error of 
 mistaking show for substance in these weighty matters. 
   
 All who believe that the family is an institution whose gift to the 
 social order is not yet outgrown and whose possibilities of social 
 value are not yet fully developed, must work to make the right 
 marriages easier to secure, and the wrong ones less easy to be 
 consummated, and to purge the ideals of home of selfishness and of 
 superficiality by constant portrayal of the best in the married life. 
   
 The stage and the moving picture should more often portray the world's 
 marriage successes rather than perpetual reproductions of the marriage 
 failures. The novel should more often show how many people save, so as 
 by fire, the dreams of youth in rescue of their married life from 
 threatening ills. Such portrayal would not be against a realistic 
 ideal of art, but a more perfect and balanced use of realism. The rise 
 of people on "stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things" 
 is quite as dramatic as the succession of falls that land them in the 
 pit of despair. The struggles that succeed are quite as capable of 
 exciting emotional response as are those that fail. 
   
 Real life shows a larger measure of successful achievement than of 
 bitter failure, else would life not go on. Marriage at its highest is 
 yet to be used in any adequate measure as the theme of the artist and 
 the stimulant of response to art. 
   
 The day will come when "Main Street" will reveal its best and not its 
 worst; its richest, and not its poorest products, for the satisfaction 
 of universal sentiment. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON HUSBANDS AND WIVES 
   
 Are there any subjects upon which husbands and wives must be 
 
      in substantial agreement in order to secure a successful 
      marriage? If so, what are some of them? 
   
 Are there any radical differences in belief, respecting 
 
      religion, politics, education of children, ways of living, 
      business relationship, etc., which marriage may successfully 
      bridge, provided there is genuine and faithful affection? If 
      so, name some of them. 
   
 How can "engaged" couples make sure that essentials of 
 
      agreement, and non-essentials of agreement to differ, are well 
      understood in advance? 
   
 Are there any new spiritual relationships of men and women in 
 
      marriage made possible by the modern tendency toward the 
      democratization of the family? If so, what are some of them? 
   
   
 FOOTNOTES: 
   
 [7] This bill, the so-called "Cable Act," was passed September 22, 
 1922. 
   
 
 
 
 CHAPTER VIII (THE CHILDREN OF THE FAMILY) 
   
 The human being arrives: 
   
     "Immense have been the preparations for me, 
     Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me; 
     Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen; 
     For room to me the stars kept aside in their own rings, 
     They sent influences to look after what was to hold me; 
     Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me, 
     And forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me; 
     Now, on this spot I stand with my robust soul." 
                     --WALT WHITMAN. 
   
   "The child grows up in a setting of social functions of a type 
   higher always than that of his private accomplishment. He must grow 
   by gradual absorption of copies, patterns and examples."--BALDWIN. 
   
   "He is happy who comes with healthy body into the world; much more 
   he who goes with healthy spirit out of it. Nature has implanted 
   within us the seeds of learning, of virtue, and of piety; to bring 
   these to maturity is the object of education. All men require 
   education, and God has made children unfit for other employments 
   in order that they may have leisure to learn."--COMENIUS. 
   
   "The most critical interval of human nature is that between the 
   hour of birth and twelve years of age; this is the time when vice 
   and error may take root without our being possessed of any 
   instrument to destroy them; the first art of education, then, 
   consists neither in teaching virtue nor truth but in guarding the 
   heart from evil and the mind from error."--ROUSSEAU. 
   
   "A ladder leading to heaven is let down to every child, but he 
   must be taught to climb it. Education should decide for every 
   child not only what is to be made of its life, but should seek an 
   answer to the question, what was it intended that child should 
   become?"--PESTALOZZI. 
   
   "An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy."--OLD PROVERB. 
   
   "Come, let us live with our children!"--FROEBEL. 
   
   
 =Conditions to be Secured for Every Child.=--There are several 
 conditions which must be secured for every child to insure that it may 
 be born and reared according to high standards. 
   
 These may be listed as follows: 
   
 Two parents, to secure in advance a favorable social position. 
 
   
 A competent mother, to insure his first two or three years of 
 
         life in health, happiness, and growing power. 
   
   III. A competent father, to stand back of the mother and help make 
         a home adequate at least to the minimum of normal life's 
         demands. 
   
 Community surroundings that will make possible the successful 
 
         achievement of parental duty. 
   
 Census provisions for vital and social statistics that will 
 
         make it sure that every child is counted in the population 
         of his nation, state, and community, and that he is 
         accounted for in all social relationships. 
   
 State protection against industrial exploitation, vicious 
 
         influences, harmful use of leisure time, and generally 
         unwholesome conditions. 
   
   VII. Health standards in the community, fixed by experts and 
         maintained in essentials by public provisions. 
   
   VIII. Education standards, fixed by experts and maintained, at 
         least in normal minimum, by community provision. 
   
 Such vital relation between the family, the school, the 
 
         political system, and all cultural opportunities as shall 
         insure to each child his just share of the social 
         inheritance to which all are heir. 
   
 =The Need for Two Parents.=--The first point noted is the need of two 
 parents for every child. The illegitimate child is handicapped. It is 
 a sound social movement that aims to make every "slacker" father 
 accept his share of responsibility in the case of the unmarried mother 
 and either marry the woman or give financial aid for the child. It 
 does not thereby secure two actual parents for the child. The orphan 
 child, the half-orphan child is handicapped; more so if bereft of 
 mother than of father, but if the father dies or deserts after 
 marriage, all experience shows that even if the mother lives and is 
 capable and faithful, the child who lacks a father has many 
 difficulties to overcome. The child of parents who have come to 
 dislike each other is seriously handicapped. A forced tie between 
 those who no longer love each other creates an atmosphere often fatal 
 to comfort and happiness and one to which children, sensitive as they 
 are to the feeling of their elders, react most unfavorably. The child 
 of divorced parents is handicapped; perhaps not so often or so 
 seriously as when held for years in an atmosphere of mutual hatred, 
 suspicion, fault-finding, and distrust--handicapped, however, by many 
 social embarrassments, by shock to affection given, perhaps, to both 
 parents equally, and by the often great difficulty of finding a 
 suitable home for the child of the divorced couple. The child that is 
 not wanted and comes into a world hostile to his birth is handicapped 
 in proportion as the influence reaches him at the moment of conception 
 or lessens the power of the parents to give him what he needs before 
 or after he arrives. 
   
 There must, then, be two parents, in love, as in law, to start a child 
 right--two parents who live until he has reached age of independent 
 direction and support, two parents who pull together for themselves 
 and for him, two parents who are equally recognized in law as acting 
 for him in guardianship throughout his minority. 
   
 The recognition of some of these needs of every child has been more 
 general and intelligent than that of others. For example, the equal 
 guardianship of the father and mother, their mutual responsibility for 
 financial support when financially competent, their equal control over 
 the family life and their common pledge to the community of parental 
 care--this has not been recognized until recently, is not now in many 
 of the States of the Union and perhaps not perfectly in any one. 
   
 At an Annual Meeting of the Uniform Laws Commission, at Cleveland, 
 Ohio, Mrs. Catherine Waugh McCulloch, partner with her husband in the 
 firm of McCulloch and McCulloch, Chicago, Illinois, and representing 
 the League of Women Voters, secured an almost unanimous recommendation 
 for uniform laws giving equal guardianship to fathers and to mothers. 
 As Mrs. McCulloch is the successful mother of four children, besides 
 being Master in Chancery of the Supreme Court of Illinois in Cook 
 County, and has long represented the legal interests of women in the 
 largest organizations of progressive women in the United States, she 
 could, and did, speak with special authority in urging the right of 
 mothers to protect their children on equal terms with fathers, by a 
 "Uniform Joint Guardianship Law." 
   
 Some facts have given color to the claim of the extreme feminist that 
 if you can only get the right sort of mother the father is more or 
 less a negligible quantity. The history of the family, however, 
 proves, if it proves anything, that to actively engage two adults in 
 the business of rearing children is an immense asset to those 
 children. 
   
 The two parents insisted upon as foremost necessity for child-care 
 may, however, be of a poor sort, perhaps only furnished with good-will 
 toward their task. Even so, whatever the lacks may be, however small 
 the capacity, feeble the will and poor the purse, however 
 society-at-large has to make up for deficiencies in the parents, it is 
 at least one step toward a successful life to have two recognized 
 parents who mean to do the right thing by their offspring and never 
 fail in love toward each other and toward the children whom they call 
 their own. 
   
 =Every Child Should Have a Competent Mother.=--The second demand of 
 child-life is for a competent mother--competent in health, that the 
 baby may get really born alive, competent in nursing and household 
 skill, or in power to secure that skill from others, in order that the 
 baby may be sure of that first long start of two or three years toward 
 physical, mental, and moral sanity and strength. It is in those first 
 years that the child gains power to begin his own conquest of the 
 world at an advantageous point. That many women are not competent 
 physically for even the first test of childbirth we know from many 
 sources of inquiry. The facts brought out in legislative hearings by 
 those urging support for the so-called "Maternity Bill" amply prove 
 this. Taking the figures for New York State alone, in the year 1920 we 
 find a total of thirteen mothers out of every thousand dying in 
 childbirth, with an estimate from physicians that with proper care 
 two-thirds of these women could have been saved. A competent mother, 
 then, physically speaking, means not only one measurably strong but 
 one sufficiently cared for to prevent overstrain before the 
 birth-hour. Again, in New York State alone, we find that eighty-six 
 babies out of every thousand die before they reach the end of their 
 first year. This may be from ignorance on the mother's part, or it may 
 be from her physical weakness unequal to the care of the new baby. It 
 may be there are already too many children near that baby's age who 
 also make heavy demands upon time and energy. It may be that 
 discouragements from unhappy family conditions or worry over economic 
 disabilities sap the mother's vitality. It may be that taints of blood 
 doom the child and the mother. Whatever the cause, it is reason for 
 deep concern that a great state, like New York, for example, has a 
 rate of infant mortality nearly twice as high as that of New Zealand 
 and ranking eleventh in the twenty-three states of the registration 
 area in which the death of babies is set down with care. When we add 
 to this loss the death of at least 25,000 women each year in 
 childbirth, most of whom could have been saved under right conditions, 
 we are still more concerned. Of the 250,000 babies lost last year we 
 are safe in estimating at least one-half whose lives could have been 
 spared with even a minimum care. The effort now making all along the 
 line of social advance to give every child a decent start in life is 
 obviously necessary and wise. 
   
 If the mother is proved wholly incompetent in mind or character we 
 have acquired a social right to take her child from her and place it 
 where it can receive better nurture and training. We are beginning to 
 recognize the corollary duty of social aid to all women of good 
 character, motherly feeling, and any fair degree of intelligence in 
 their function of motherhood. There are those hopelessly incompetent 
 who should never be allowed to have children. There are far more with 
 power to bear and rear children successfully whom adverse 
 circumstances submerge to incompetency. These, we are now learning, 
 must be helped in some way, for society's sake even more than for 
 their own, if they are willing to undertake parental service to the 
 race. 
   
 The passage of the so-called Sheppard-Towner Bill is one answer in the 
 United States to the right of the child and its mother to life and 
 health. There are those who deplore the tendency to seek for such aid 
 to individuals through the Federal Government. The Governor of New 
 York State, for example, although a man of progressive ideas and 
 liberal point of view, opposed "starting aid to mothers and babies 
 from the Washington end," declaring that work for the "welfare of 
 citizens of any class should start at the locality to be benefited." 
 He would not have the people educated to depend upon the Federal 
 Government for benefits. He feared that the Sheppard-Towner Bill would 
 tend to "make the public expect to be nursed from the cradle to the 
 grave" and be a detriment to the public life rather than a benefit. 
 New York State made a good appropriation for its own aid to mothers 
 and babies, but did not apply for the Federal aid in addition. By the 
 middle of the second month of 1922, however, nearly thirty states had 
 accepted the Act as a welcome help in their welfare work, and few will 
 be left outside of its provisions by the end of the year. The fear 
 that such an Act would make the general government the active 
 controller and director of the lives of parents and their children in 
 most intimate ways seems not justified by the facts. The Bill, when 
 passed, simply provided money to be given to the states on the 
 fifty-fifty basis "for the purpose of coöperating with them in 
 promoting the welfare and hygiene of maternity and infancy." The 
 specific plans for each state are to be made by the state agency in 
 charge of the work and the only Federal supervision is that of 
 standardization, by which the Chief of the Children's Bureau, the 
 Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, and the Commissioner of 
 Education must approve those plans as "reasonably appropriate and 
 adequate to carry out the purposes of the Act" before the money of the 
 Federal Government is passed over to any state. 
   
 It is rather as a help to states desiring aid in this particular than 
 as a compulsory requirement that the Act is intended to operate. There 
 are those, however, who fear any extension of power of the National 
 Government even through influence acquired by subsidies for necessary 
 aids to the common life. It is a matter for thought and unprejudiced 
 study what form of public aid is, on the whole, the best for our 
 country. It cannot be denied, however, that different states have 
 differing burdens to carry for the immigrant, the ignorant, the 
 destitute, and the defective. It is at least desirable to press the 
 point that no state lives to itself and no one dies to itself. Disease 
 knows no boundary lines of political government and the death-toll of 
 mothers and babies does not halt at geographical limitations. We are 
 all one country insofar as bad social conditions are concerned. We are 
 all helped when any smallest country town most remote from the centres 
 of population is raised in its social standards and conditions. Hence, 
 perhaps, we may not fear national aid to each locality in need or feel 
 concerned as to what agency accomplishes a required social advance. 
   
 Ellen Key declared that every mother should be maintained by the state 
 during the first year of every child's life and that afterward each 
 child should have one-half its support from the state and one-half 
 from the father. That may not be the ideal. We may believe that to 
 thus reduce the father's responsibility would mean a dangerous 
 lessening of his energy and devotion to the family well-being. It is 
 true, however, that while there are so many in every community without 
 essentials for care in childbirth or for the early nurture of infants, 
 we must find some way of providing these essentials, or the state is 
 endangered at its vital centre. 
   
 =Every Child Should Have a Competent Father.=--The third demand of 
 childhood is for a competent father. That takes us at once into the 
 area of wages and economic conditions. When the Children's Bureau, 
 itself a testimony to the awakened social conscience in respect to 
 childhood, shows from careful investigation that in families where the 
 father earns only ten dollars or less a week more than twice as many 
 babies die before the age of two years than in families where the 
 fathers earn twenty-five dollars a week or more, we can see with 
 clearer vision than ever before that to give babies a fair chance in 
 life the father must be fairly paid for his work. 
   
 The following table shows this fact in graphic form: 
 =Economic Aspects of the Father's Competency.=--The death-rate of 
 babies in families in which the mother has to earn outside the home 
 under factory conditions of labor in order to secure absolute 
 necessities is so high that it is seen to be not socially thrifty to 
 thus place a double burden upon mothers. The death-rate and 
 sickness-rate of families in which the children do not have sufficient 
 nourishing food, in which the mother is half starved and wholly 
 deprived of rest and pleasure, and the father is under terror night 
 and day lest the rent money will not be ready when the landlord's 
 agent comes, cannot give us ease of mind. The families in which 
 unemployment is frequent or overwork keeps the father as well as the 
 mother under the pressure of nervous exhaustion, are the families in 
 which the right of the child to two competent parents is grossly 
 denied. The aid given the mother, by even the best of "Maternity 
 Bills," insofar as it transcends the wider dissemination of knowledge 
 and gives actual financial aid in economic distress, seems only a 
 makeshift. The sick have a social claim for social care and the 
 ignorant of all ages have a special claim upon the community for 
 instruction, whether from separate Commonwealth or from the Federal 
 Government, it matters little. The financial aid given, however, the 
 "material relief" that must be rendered in family emergencies, should 
 not be needed by the healthy, law-abiding, thrifty, honest, skilled, 
 or even half-skilled workman. He should be able to earn a necessary 
 minimum for himself and for his family by his own labors. We cannot 
 here enter into the economic problems involved, but must register a 
 conviction that real social progress must include not only a competent 
 father for every child but also a fairer chance for every man to 
 become that competent father through fairer sharing in the profits of 
 industry. Widespread and careful inquiry as to reasons for dropping 
 below the self-supporting line list as one cause of "necessity for 
 material relief, having in the family more than three children under 
 the age of fourteen." This fact must give us thought. At fourteen in 
 many states the child may begin to earn something toward his own 
 support. The question may well be debated whether or not an average 
 man in ordinary economic general conditions should be unable to care 
 for more than three children below the earning period if his wife is a 
 competent housemother and thus earns her part. If such a condition of 
 restriction upon family increase is accepted as inevitable and 
 permanent in our industrial order, then surely the cost of rearing 
 children must be far more widely distributed. In such a condition 
 there would be needed social help for fathers and mothers far more 
 definite and inclusive than merely the aid to expectant mothers. If it 
 is true that it takes from three and one-half to four children from 
 each married pair to keep up the population considered necessary for 
 national well-being, and if there is an increasing number of men and 
 women deterred from furnishing even two of that quota by the expense 
 involved, then it is high time that we consider at least how the 
 family burden may be more equally distributed. 
   
 =The French Plan of Family Extra-wage.=--One plan of meeting this 
 unequal social burden of parenthood and the social danger involved in 
 too few children born, France has devised by the family extra-wage.[8] 
 This is simply a provision by which married workers with children are 
 preferred before married workers without children, and much preferred 
 before bachelors, in the matter of wages. French work-people with 
 families, irrespective of their station, rate of pay, premium or 
 bonus, receive: 
   
 An indemnity of 200 francs at the birth of a child. 
 
   
 A suckling indemnity, which is given to the wife, of 100 francs a 
 
 month during the first year. 
   
 An indemnity of 3 francs a day for each child under fourteen years 
 
 of age, which becomes a part of the family income. The Paris district 
 alone for the first four months of 1920 shows 39,266 families in 
 receipt of these allowances, with 62,176 children benefited, at an 
 expense of 4,115,014 francs. The money comes largely from a pooling of 
 funds by combines of manufacturers in many industries, so that 
 although business pays the extra charge it is distributed equally 
 among all engaged in the same industry. The trade unions have not been 
 wholly pleased with this discrimination in favor of fathers and 
 mothers. They work for the strict equalization of wages. The national 
 need for more children of strength and health, however, and the effect 
 of low wages upon mothers and upon infant life have led to this social 
 measure. 
   
 Surely, this is a way not wholly unreasonable by which a society can 
 help pay for the children it demands. 
   
 =The Endowment of Mothers.=--In England, a different plan has been 
 developed, although not yet applied. _A Proposal for the National 
 Endowment of Motherhood_, advocated by K.D. Courtney, H.N. Brailsford, 
 Eleanor F. Rathbone, A. Maude Royden, Mary Stocks, Elinor Burns, and 
 Emilie Burns, has been published. In this plan the ideal is "that 
 within each class of income the man with a family should not be in a 
 worse position economically because he has a family than the single 
 man in that class." They demand that "the standard of living be not 
 lowered by children." The authors of this plan declare that in the 
 present system "The mother is still the uncharted servant of the 
 future who receives from her husband at his discretion a share in his 
 wages." They want the mother to receive from society, through the 
 Government, "a weekly allowance sufficient in amount to cover the 
 primary cost of physical subsistence, paid to the mother for herself 
 and for each of her children, throughout the period when the care of 
 the children necessarily occupies her whole attention." They claim 
 that such a plan would, in the first place, make "equal pay for equal 
 work" for men and women really possible, since the argument that "men 
 should be paid more because they have families to keep" would be 
 outgrown. They claim also that such a plan would remove economic 
 restrictions on parenthood which now often work social harm. They also 
 claim that the health of children requires this public allowance for 
 their care. 
   
 The authors of this plan, although frankly stating objections to this 
 point, claim that the payment of this allowance should be directly to 
 mothers "as the first step toward raising the status of women and 
 blotting out, in what has been called the noblest of professions, 
 those conditions which compare only with the worst of sweated 
 employments." The whole discussion of this plan is worthy most serious 
 attention of all interested in preserving the family from injury 
 through economic inequalities. 
   
 =Does This Plan Make Too Little of Fathers?[9]=--There is one 
 question, however, among others, to be asked of the authors of this 
 plan, and that is, Can not some means be devised to make the father's 
 share in the care of the children more definite and better rewarded, 
 less often shirked or incompetent, in any scheme for state subsidy for 
 the care of young children? The difficulties that inhere in all 
 subsidies for children are chiefly those that make people of small 
 intelligence and little conscience trade with the state for larger 
 subsidies for larger families, begotten by the less fit for parentage 
 and with an eye on the public purse. This catastrophe, not unknown in 
 the past history of England, must be avoided. If there shall develop 
 any scheme for equal sharing by all the community in the expense of 
 raising the coming generation then there must surely be no special 
 honor paid to those that have very large families. Better, for social 
 purposes, that no children above a reasonable number should in any 
 family receive a special allowance, even if older brothers and sisters 
 did do so. It may be that in France large families are desperately 
 needed. Not so in the United States. The number of five or six should 
 certainly be the limit for which any just scheme of family subsidy 
 should mulct the taxpayer. 
   
 =Just Limits to Number of Children in Subsidized Families.=--The 
 difference between the three under fourteen years which in so many 
 cases can be cared for unassisted by the average workman, and the four 
 and more that bring the family down to the danger-point of financial 
 dependence, might be a subject for consideration in any scheme of 
 family subsidy, and some clear idea of social need in family fertility 
 should be a part of any proposition to make allowance from the public 
 funds for each child under the earning age. In any case, the father's 
 share in the self-sacrifice and burden of parenthood should have some 
 clear recognition in any law dealing with such state aid. In the last 
 analysis, unless some extreme form of socialism is better than the 
 present industrial order and to be sought, the best way to help the 
 family is to make fathers and mothers competent to take care of their 
 own children without too great effort for themselves and without 
 injurious consequences to the children. Those Trade Union leaders may 
 be right in principle when they hesitate to accept any public family 
 aid scheme lest it make wages less rather than more and bring on a 
 condition in which heroic struggle for one's own, the very pith and 
 marrow of manhood in its relation to the family, be less esteemed and 
 less practiced. 
   
 We are confronted, however, both in the movements for aid to maternity 
 in care before and after childbirth, and in all the many provisions 
 for child-saving that publicly supported Boards of Health are 
 everywhere inaugurating, with a tendency of the greatest strength and 
 social appeal, tendencies toward a sharing by all of the burdens 
 heretofore borne only by the heads of families. Some way must be 
 devised by which such sharing will not cheat society of any gains to 
 character and to sense of family responsibility which old systems of 
 economic support of children have given the race. Some way must be 
 devised to recognize as economic assets of society the special 
 sacrifice and service of the housemother in her function of life-giver 
 for the coming generations and yet not ignore the father but rather 
 bring him nearer to competent fatherhood as social conditions make it 
 easier for him to bear his part of the family load. The place for full 
 discussion of these important considerations is not here, but the need 
 for the child to have a father who can be the efficient partner of the 
 competent mother in the task of rearing him must be always insisted 
 upon, else reform measures that help the mother will only take us 
 backward instead of forward. 
   
 =The Right of a Child to be Officially Counted.=--The next right of 
 the child we must consider is the right to be listed as a member of 
 the population. A registry of facts concerning himself and his 
 condition that will enable the community to see where he is, what he 
 is doing, and how he, in general, fares, is essential. The fact that 
 only about one-half of the Commonwealths in our Union have full 
 registration of births, deaths, health conditions, school attendance, 
 and other vital matters concerning each individual, and of immense 
 importance to society as a whole, is a confession of social 
 incompetency too shameful for a nation that calls itself civilized. 
 Where there is no adequate registration babies may be easily lost 
 sight of altogether. Children may escape the call to school and child 
 labor be unchecked. When an investigation of conditions in almshouses 
 and remote country districts of a certain southern state was made the 
 numbers of defective and blind and crippled children brought to light 
 was appalling. Yet one political leader of that state, at least, 
 declared when the investigation began that "it was not only 
 unnecessary but an insult to an enlightened state." The enlightened 
 state simply did not know how many children were born dead, how many 
 died the first month or year of life, how many went to school later 
 on, how many were not able to profit by instruction because of 
 congenital defectiveness, how many needed special care and training by 
 reason of some special handicap, and how many ran away from such 
 public institutions as gave poor harbor to those without family 
 protection. One of the fundamental rights, surely, of every child is 
 to be counted, to have the community of which he is a part know 
 something about him, and have his record kept where those interested 
 in his protection and care, in his health, his schooling, his 
 vocational training, may find out what they need to know in order to 
 aid his progress or check his wrongdoing. 
   
 =Every Child Should Have Social Protection.=--In the next place, the 
 demand of every child must surely be for community protection against 
 those who for greed or evil purpose would exploit his life. The first 
 law passed for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which aimed even 
 at parents who did not act a parent's part, was the Magna Charta of 
 child rights. After that the door was opened for all manner of 
 protective legislation for the benefit of the young. Yet we still have 
 many men and some women whose business it is, and a very profitable 
 one, to debauch youth or despoil children. 
   
 Surely the time has come when all decent people should unite to 
 abolish such evils. 
   
 =Child-labor.=--In the field of child-labor we have model laws, not 
 always well enforced, laws that aim to keep inviolate for childhood at 
 least a few years of schooling.[10] We have health laws which aim more 
 and more at reducing the diseases of children and making it possible 
 for all to share in the power and joy of normal existence. 
   
 Yet, although something has been done for the child who would 
 otherwise be at work in factory, shop, or sweated trade at home, there 
 are, it is said, still "Two Million Overworked Farm Children." In the 
 South, in some sections, the little black children still pick cotton 
 for the little white children to weave in mills. In the North 
 undersized and mentally undeveloped youth still testify to industrial 
 exploitation even where laws against child-labor are on the statute 
 books. The agricultural workers, numbering more than any other class 
 and spread all over the United States, count too many little children 
 in their lists. It is estimated that in our country there are 
 38,000,000 living on farms, and of this number only 8,000,000 adult 
 men are listed as laborers; we hence can well believe that children 
 and youth are a disproportionate element in the working of those 
 farms. This makes the slogan proposed by Owen E. Lovejoy, the 
 Secretary of the National Child-labor Committee, "Keep the Farmer 
 Through His Children," a highly compelling one. In the tobacco fields 
 of Connecticut, boys and girls ten years of age and over; in the truck 
 gardens of Ohio among the onion beds; in the Michigan sugar-beet 
 fields; in the California asparagus beds; in the Southern cotton 
 fields, where children as young as three years of age have been 
 found--in all these and on lonely farmsteads doing general work we 
 find these children. Cut off from regular schooling, herded often in 
 the poorest substitutes for homes, moving about from place to place 
 with fathers and mothers unskilled or handicapped by weak character, 
 these children are defrauded of every right of a child at every turn. 
 It is not true, as some complacently assert, that all is done that 
 should be to prevent the sacrifice of young life to the industrial 
 demands for large returns for investment. It is not true that such 
 organizations as the Child-labor Committee can rest content with 
 accomplished tasks and disband. 
   
 The exemption of agricultural labor from the legal protection of 
 children given in many states in the field of manufacture, and the 
 total lack of realization by the general public of the newer 
 conditions which specialized and scientific farming make for the 
 tenant hands, make this particular form of child-protection in farming 
 a question of supreme importance. 
   
 As this book goes to press the Supreme Court decision which declares 
 the Federal Child-labor Law unconstitutional places upon those working 
 through state channels a still heavier burden of effort at 
 child-protection. This decision of the Supreme Court may well be 
 understood as indicating no indifference to child-welfare but rather 
 as a call to clear the method of child-labor reform from any 
 entanglements of taxation or doubtful alliance with Federal 
 officialism. The principle of child-protection, whether by national or 
 state laws, holds the moral devotion of our citizenship more firmly 
 than ever before. 
   
 =Children Must be Protected in Recreation.=--The need for the 
 protection of children from commercialized recreation with its centres 
 set near all manner of vicious influences has aroused the conscience 
 of the nation. The investigations of social conditions near the Camps 
 of Training for our army in the Great War and many forms of social 
 service carried on by men and women in connection with the Red Cross 
 have given impetus to the general movement to "clean up the cities" to 
 make the rural communities and village centres more helpful to moral 
 living, and to make the streets safer for "the spirit of youth." 
   
 Yet the rural schoolhouses are so many of them lacking in provisions 
 of decency and of playground supervision, and the village 
 lounging-places are so often the scenes of vicious association, and 
 the absence everywhere of sufficient provision for healthful and 
 safeguarded recreation is so obvious, that we know we have still a 
 long and heavy task before us to accord children their admitted right 
 to social protection from moral evils against which even the best of 
 parents can not adequately stand alone. 
   
 =Standards of and Aids to Health.=--Health standards in the community, 
 fixed by experts and maintained, at least in minimum essentials, by 
 public provision, is the seventh right of children which society 
 should insure to each one. 
   
 The difficulties and dangers which inhere in any form of financial 
 payment to parents, either fathers or mothers, in aid of their 
 parental tasks, are not so clearly present, if present at all, in 
 special aids given to all the population in matters of public 
 sanitation, personal hygiene and the care of the sick. If we make our 
 public aid topical rather than by classes, and to all citizens alike 
 in definite aid, we avoid much of the taint of charity. Few, if any, 
 propose, for example, to give maternity aid to the rich. Fewer still 
 advocate old-age pensions for those of independent incomes of moderate 
 size. Many see, however, that health aids should be so distributed 
 and so universally offered and used that the standard of health may be 
 equally raised thereby for all. The idea that there are no people 
 between the rich, who can pay anything asked, and those poor who can 
 pay nothing for hospital care, diagnosis, or general medical and 
 nursing service, is becoming an exploded one. There is general 
 agreement among those most intelligent in such matters that what is 
 needed more than anything else in the field of physical culture and 
 physical care is provision for the people of small incomes who desire 
 to be self-supporting. It is a common saying that no one but a 
 millionaire or a pauper can afford a surgical operation or a trained 
 nurse. We are moving, too slowly, but still moving, toward some form 
 of provision of doctors, nurses, hospital and convalescent care, to 
 which people of refinement, of independent feeling but of limited 
 purse, can resort when they need such aid without a sense of 
 humiliation or incurring the danger of wholly unsuitable 
 companionship. Whatever difficulties there may be in securing adequate 
 aid of this sort to adults, there can be none in the case of children. 
 When we started Boards of Health we definitely outlined a path from 
 the doctor's office and the nurse's service to the public school and 
 from the public school to the home. We saw more clearly as the years 
 went on that that path must be worn by many feet if we would have 
 adults strong and well and ready for the work of the world. We have in 
 many Boards of Health (as so efficiently working in New York City 
 under Dr. Josephine S. Baker) Children's Departments, officered by 
 those specially engaged in baby-saving, in child hygiene, in the 
 health of school attendants, and in the general instruction of mothers 
 in the care of children. This is an achievement which needs only to be 
 more widely understood, applied and supported to be of the greatest 
 social value. We have now the Federal backing in these matters in many 
 provisions outside that of the special Maternity Aid Bill with its 
 fifty-fifty financial plan to make the general government partner with 
 the states and with the various local communities in health aid to all 
 the people. What we need now is to make the care of the minor child 
 seem to all, as it now does to so many, a duty that can be isolated in 
 the mind from any doctrinaire socialistic plans, a duty to include all 
 the population in wholly free health-service from the state. There 
 are differences which may well be stressed between schemes for placing 
 medical service of every sort under state regulation and wholly 
 supporting it by public tax, and any plan for radically abolishing the 
 capitalistic regime. 
   
 We are fast coming to a united conception of social duty as requiring 
 help to all parents that they may bring up their children in health 
 and give those children the physical training which they need. Let us 
 all, then, push hardest first for the standardization of health in the 
 case of children and youth and the best possible arrangements of 
 tax-supported aids to the realization of that standard. That is surely 
 one of the ways in which the parental burden of child-care can be 
 socially shared without starting embarrassing questions of radical or 
 conservative theories of logical next steps. 
   
 =Health Boards Should Help All Alike.=--We can, however, thus divorce 
 health activities from economic disputes only by making the 
 investigation of children, the provisions for free examination and 
 treatment, and the establishment of hospital and clinic facilities 
 exactly the same for the children of the rich and of the poor. A 
 recent investigation of the diet of children deduced from reports of 
 undernourishment furnished by doctors specializing in children's 
 diseases, showed that in some cities, at least, the children of the 
 well-to-do were as often underfed or wrongly fed as were the children 
 of the poor. Sometimes the fact that a family is financially able to 
 employ a nurse, but not intelligent or conscientious enough to employ 
 a competent nurse, results in worse conditions, as to food and other 
 particulars, than are found where poor mothers do the best they can 
 with limited means. 
   
 =Items of Work in Child Hygiene.=--The standards of health and the 
 public provisions for their realization, which even now in the crowded 
 city of New York are so ably enforced by "The Division of Child 
 Hygiene," show that "the hazardous business of being a baby" is much 
 reduced in risks. The list of details of work undertaken by that 
 Division of Child Hygiene as so fully reported in the document of 1914 
 and in later publications may be of use if here repeated. They are as 
 follows: 
   
 Control and Supervision of Midwives. 
 Reduction of Infant Mortality. 
 
   III. Supervision of Foundlings Boarded in Private Homes. 
 Inspection and Supervision of Day Nurseries. 
 Inspection of Institutions for Dependent Children. 
 Medical Inspection and Examination of School Children. 
 
   VII. Vaccination of School Children. 
   VIII. Enforcing of Child-labor Law in Issuing Work Certificates. 
   
 For this many-sided work physicians, trained nurses, and various other 
 helpers are required. Could the public purse be drawn upon for a more 
 vital public necessity than this list indicates? 
   
 When it is remembered that from forty to fifty per cent, of births are 
 in charge of midwives in the foreign-born population and that the 
 condition of housing and of water, air and food supply are deplorably 
 inadequate in manufacturing centres, and that in rural communities 
 there are few doctors and nurses and little hospital service, it will 
 be seen that the idea of having Federal aid for this large health 
 requirement was not one of concentration of power in the Government 
 (as some have thought), but rather of a diffusion of standards and 
 better sharing in all parts of our country. The health crusade is not 
 bounded by state lines, diseases may cross those lines without 
 consciousness of any check. The help toward the abolition of all 
 preventable illness, the protection of child-life from all manner of 
 preventable weakness, abnormality and suffering, seems to be the 
 business of society in general, if anything can be so called. The 
 children must be saved if the nation is to prosper. It used to be 
 thought that a high birth-rate was a sufficient indication of national 
 well-being. It is now seen that a low death-rate and a high level of 
 strength and vitality, of health and mental power, are still more the 
 required national asset. 
   
 As Dr. Helen D. Putnam well says, "Democracy must finally depend on 
 its department of education for establishing the right: for mothers, 
 intelligence, health, economic opportunity to care for their babies; 
 for babies, either rich or poor, intelligent, physically competent 
 caretakers," If this be true, then the work of Health Boards and 
 kindred agencies is a part of general education as it has long been a 
 part of accepted charitable duty. The children stand first in line for 
 receipt of that health education because they are the promise of the 
 future. 
   
 We must take humane care of all the misfits, all the crippled, all the 
 weak, all the defective, all the abnormal and the insane. This is now 
 admitted. We must prevent, so far as we are able, such weight and 
 burden falling upon our children and our children's children, as 
 charity now presses upon us. In this matter, at least, "we must begin 
 with the grandfathers if we would reform the world." 
   
 =The Educational Rights of All Children.=--The right of every child to 
 a minimum of education, which was our eighth point, is also conceded, 
 and the duty of making public provision in tax-supported schools for 
 these essentials of reading, writing, fair knowledge of arithmetic and 
 the rest, is acknowledged. The idea, however, that some people have 
 that all the children in the United States have an elementary 
 schooling is erroneous. This is not a treatise on education, and 
 elsewhere the statistics of length of schooling per year for the 
 different parts of the country and of dearth of school seats in cities 
 and famine of teachers everywhere must be considered. From the side of 
 the family, however, the claim must be made that equal rights in some 
 accepted minimum of school training, and that determined in quantity 
 and quality of teaching by those who know what education means, should 
 be the demand of all fathers and mothers. In the older time young men 
 going through college on the way to one of the three learned 
 professions then listed, law, theology, and medicine, taught often in 
 the country school to earn an honest penny. Such teaching on the way 
 to some form of vocation deemed far more honorable was not of a sort 
 to make teaching a profession in itself. Later, some measure of higher 
 education was given young women in Normal Schools to fit them for 
 teaching little children, and the teacher of the elementary school 
 became, thereby, a professional. To-day few young men teach to help 
 themselves through college and only a few choose teaching as a 
 profession. To-day, also, the profession of teaching, which once was 
 almost the sole opening for higher vocational work for women, now 
 competes with a large number of professions or types of business or 
 applied art, and fewer women proportionally are headed for the 
 schoolroom when they leave college or normal school. 
   
 This tendency to take other lines of work increased to unprecedented 
 extent during the Great War, which opened new worlds of paid work to 
 women. This gives us the present teacher shortage, which all who know 
 conditions feel to be the most serious menace to universal education. 
 There are not only not enough teachers to go around, there are still 
 fewer teachers fit to teach. If it is the right of every child to have 
 a good education in essentials, to be well taught as far as he goes in 
 schooling, how shall that right be realized if the teacher famine 
 continues? 
   
 =The Use of Married Women as Teachers.=--The interest of the family is 
 specially concerned in one way to ease that shortage of teachers. That 
 way is the use of married women in the public schools. All women who 
 have "verified their credentials" as good teachers should be held on 
 to when they marry with all possible strength of appeal to fulfil a 
 social duty as a part of the teaching force of the locality where they 
 live. The old absurdity of making women resign from the teaching force 
 when they issued wedding cards, or conceal the fact of their marriage 
 if they were not scrupulous, so as to keep their positions, is fast 
 passing. Few communities hold on to this penalizing of the woman 
 teacher when she marries, but many school boards retain a sentiment 
 against urging the continuance of any married woman on the staff. This 
 must give way to an intelligent understanding of two things: one, that 
 experience in teaching is an immeasurable asset to the schools and 
 must not be lost in so great proportion of women as it has been; and, 
 in the second place, that teaching lends itself in unique manner to 
 half-time work, to vacations for maternity duties, to combining of two 
 or three married women in positions that might be filled by one 
 spinster, and to other social expedients favorable to married life; 
 and that all that is needed is good sense and some skill of 
 administrative adjustment to keep the larger majority of good teachers 
 in the field after they are wives and mothers. 
   
 Moreover, from the point of view of the family, it is injurious for 
 social practice to keep women who have the qualities of good teachers 
 from marrying lest they lose their beloved profession. It is one of 
 the best, although one of the least tried, ways of bringing the school 
 and the home together by giving a good many teachers a clearer idea 
 from personal experience of what the home needs from the school, and 
 giving mothers a clearer idea of the reasons for school rules by 
 having them serve in both capacities. The normal school education of 
 women was obtained by appeals based on the fact of the first half of 
 the nineteenth century that unless women teachers were secured and 
 trained for the task the elementary school could never be enabled to 
 fill the need of the public school system. The fact of the early part 
 of the twentieth century should be as deeply pressed, the fact that 
 there are not enough women teachers of education and character for 
 elementary school service unless we mix teaching and marriage for many 
 of them. This fact should make a social appeal to-day equal to that of 
 Horace Mann's great mission. 
   
 If we are to have enough elementary school teachers and continue to 
 increase the number from the most fit women for the task, we must also 
 institute a new social backing for the profession. In this connection 
 one is obliged to deal with the disrespect shown the average teacher 
 of little children and even of the high school and college instructor 
 as compared with leaders in other professions. The teacher of little 
 children is most often a woman, and if a woman away from home and 
 especially in some rural communities is very nearly a social outcast. 
 The "teacherage" is just beginning to be called for as the suitable 
 home for the teachers of a school; a "teacherage" which can become a 
 social centre if near the school building, and thus be uniquely 
 useful. The jointure of all the best homes in a community with all the 
 wisest teachers in that community, not alone for the occasional 
 discussion of "School Problems" or "Home Problems," but for some 
 common public work which will link both teachers and parents to the 
 larger life of the community--this is a necessity if we would have 
 enough teachers of the right sort. 
   
 The attention to the physical details of school housing, school 
 gardens, school playgrounds, school lighting and seating, all these 
 the family life which furnishes the children must be keen about in 
 the interest of each child. The curriculum must not be left to a 
 school board chiefly interested in other matters than text-books, 
 except it may be for a business interest in the latter. The supply and 
 testing of teachers must not be left to a body more concerned in 
 getting places for relatives and friends than for securing the best 
 available teaching staff. 
   
 In all the things that experts should direct, and in all the things 
 that mean health and comfort and happiness to individual children, 
 parents, even if not very learned, should have a voice and seek to 
 make their convictions work to actual progress. 
   
 =Individual Sharing in the Social Inheritance.=--For the last point of 
 our list, namely, the right of every child to be made a conscious heir 
 to the social inheritance of his time and place in the world, little 
 need be said. The tendencies in American life which give thoughtful 
 people the most satisfaction are the tendencies toward extension of 
 culture privileges in public libraries, lectures, tax-supported and 
 educationally supervised playgrounds, in young people's organizations 
 like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, in summer camps (not all for the 
 rich), in vacation houses full of the flavor of the best of life, in 
 the varied clubs and classes of the settlements, in the pageants and 
 other forms of pictured world-life--all these, and more that might be 
 named, show an exuberance of effort to share with utmost speed and 
 fullest generosity the things that seem to the privileged few the most 
 precious heritage of our race. 
   
 Yet, with all our effort so much more needs doing that multitudes live 
 and die wholly ignorant of the world they have come to or of the 
 race-life of which they are a part. Doctor Du Bois, in his classic 
 appeal for human comradeship for all, _The Soul of Black Folks_, has 
 shown what suffering comes to the cultured black man who finds all 
 cultured men and women of white races forcing him to be an alien 
 because of his skin. There is a sadder and more terrible, because 
 unconscious, deprivation; it is that of any one, white or black, rich 
 or poor, who loses the chance to partake of the culture of the past. 
 The man or woman, whether able to accomplish much or little on the 
 practical side of vocational service, whose outlook is bounded by the 
 narrow, the superficial, the personal, the ephemeral, is missing the 
 best part of his social inheritance, the capacity to "look before and 
 after and pine for what is not." 
   
 Such a little time we are here! Even a Methuselah might wish to have 
 in his mental furnishings the glory of the past and the prophetic hope 
 of the future. All children, not merely a fortunate few, should have 
 this sense of a group-life of which each is a part, should be able to 
 see life and see it whole in the social inheritance that belongs alike 
 to each one of us. Children make a large order upon each generation as 
 they come into a vast group of all that have been and reach 
 consciously toward the expanding life of the coming time. 
   
 The family must begin that culture by which the order shall be filled, 
 but no family can answer even the least of the social demands by 
 itself. "Culture," says Emerson, "shall yet absorb chaos itself," 
 Every child has a rightful citizenship in that order-giving world of 
 thought, of history, of poetry, of art, of science, and of religion. 
   
 What a nation we might become if only every child had this, its right, 
 recognized and fulfilled! 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON THE CHILDREN OF THE FAMILY 
   
 The eighteenth century was called the century of man, the 
 
      nineteenth century, of women, and the twentieth, that of the 
      child. What facts justify this statement? 
   
 What are the main elements in the modern standard of 
 
      child-care, child-protection, and child-nurture? 
   
 What of these elements can and should the private home supply, 
 
      and what must be the community provision and control? 
   
 In trying to effect both private and public conditions 
 
      favorable to the best development of child-life, what should be 
      the scale of values used, or what should be the order of 
      effort? 
   
 Dr. Alice Hamilton, in a Chicago study of I,500 families, found 
 
      that the infant death-rate in large families of six children 
      and over was two and one-half times greater than in small 
      families of four children or less. Was that an indication that 
      infant mortality rises with fecundity or was it one of many 
      indications that the better-to-do have smaller families? In any 
      case, should such statistics always include the statement of 
      the social standing and the income of the groups studied? 
   
 In _The Child_ of August, 1920, Miss Julia C. Lathrop 
 
      summarizes the Child-welfare Standards proposed by the 
      Children's Bureau as follows: 
   
      (1.) Minimum standards for children entering employment: 
   
 Minimum age, sixteen years in all employments; 
 
               eighteen years in mines and quarries; twenty-one 
               years for girls as telephone or telegraph messengers; 
               twenty-one years for special-delivery service of U.S. 
               Post Office; prohibition of minors in dangerous, 
               unhealthy, or hazardous occupations. 
   
 Minimum education, compulsory education for all between 
 
               seven and sixteen years for nine months of every year. 
               Between sixteen and eighteen years those legally 
               employed to attend Continuation Schools at least eight 
               hours a week. 
   
 Physical minimum, annual examination of all working 
 
               children under eighteen years of age; prohibition of 
               work unless found to be normal in physique and health. 
   
 Hours, minors not more than eight hours a day or 
 
               forty-four hours a week, and prohibition of 
               night-work. Continuation School attendance to count as 
               part of working-day. 
   
 Wages, minimum determined by wage commission or similar 
 
               agency. 
   
 Vocational guidance and employment supervision. 
 
   
 Employment certificate as needed protection against 
 
               industrial exploitation. 
   
      (2.) Minimum standards for public protection of health of 
           mothers and children: 
   
 Maternity aids; B. Infants; C. Pre-school children; D. 
 
               School children; E. Adolescent children. 
   
      (3.) Minimum standards in relation to children needing special 
           care: 
   
 Adequate income; B. Assistance to mothers; C. State 
 
               supervision; D. Removal of some children from their 
               homes; E. Home care; F. Principles governing 
               child-placing; G. Children in institutions; H. Care 
               of children born out of wedlock; I. Care of 
               physically defective children; J. Mental hygiene and 
               care of mentally defective children; K. Juvenile 
               courts; L. Rural social work; M. Scientific 
               information. 
   
      (4.) General minimum standards: 
   
 Economic and social; B. Recreation; C. Child-welfare 
 
               legislation. 
   
   Read the above and compare your local conditions with these 
      standards. Do you think all these demands necessary? 
   
   
 FOOTNOTES: 
   
 [8] Described briefly in _The Survey_ of November 12, 1921. 
   
 [9] In New Zealand, which has so many "modern improvements" in 
 government, the proposition has been made to fix a basic wage for a man 
 and wife without children, and make it the same as for a single man. In 
 addition to this sum, each employer would be required by law to pay 
 into a State Fund a sum slightly in advance of this wage for the single 
 man and the childless married man, and that excess sum would be 
 distributed in the form of a children's allowance to each parent 
 according to the number of children. It is estimated that under this 
 plan the total sum paid out in wages would not exceed that now 
 distributed, but the receipt by the workers would be proportioned to 
 responsibilities. 
   
 [10] See publications of the National Child-labor Committee. 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER IX (THE FLOWER OF THE FAMILY) 
   
   "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in 
   faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in 
   action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the 
   beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" 
   
     "Sure, He that made us with such large discourse, 
     Looking before and after, gave us not 
     That capability and godlike reason 
     To fust in us unused." 
                     --SHAKESPEARE. 
   
   "The apostolic of every age are ever calling for a higher 
   righteousness, a better development of the human race, a more 
   earnest effort to equalize the condition of men."--LUCRETIA MOTT. 
   
   "To every period its leaders: and the rise of every leader is 
   according to his watching for opportunity; and the chief quality 
   of leadership is the jewel of equity, by which alone the obedience 
   of men is justified."--ARAB SAYING. 
   
     "He presses on before the race, 
     And sings out of a silent place. 
     Like faint notes of a forest bird 
     On heights afar that voice is heard; 
     And the dim path he breaks to-day 
     Will some time be a trodden way. 
     But when the race comes toiling on 
     That voice of wonder will be gone-- 
     Be heard on higher peaks afar, 
     Moved upward with the morning star. 
     O men of earth, that wandering voice 
     Still goes the upward way: rejoice!" 
                     --EDWIN MARKHAM. 
   
   
 =The Proportions of Genius to the Mediocre.=--In Dr. T.S. Clouston's 
 suggestive book, _The Hygiene of Mind_, he estimates that at least 
 four-fifths of the human race are legally "sound" and of average 
 capacity. Of the remaining one-fifth who are "unusual" he and other 
 investigators name only one-tenth of one per cent, as entitled to the 
 distinction of "Genius." Clouston adds to this a class of "lesser 
 genius," often extremely useful to the race but often personally 
 unhappy from ungratified ambition or lack of temperamental balance. He 
 lists "reformers" for the most part in this class and "inventors who 
 do not succeed." He also specifically indicates a class of "all-round 
 talent" from which successful social and political leaders are drawn 
 and heads of big business and administrators of large enterprises in 
 educational fields. Dr. Lester F. Ward, on the contrary, believed that 
 we estimate the rate of genius and potential genius far too low and 
 that special talent is vastly more common than the usual observer 
 thinks. He says, "What the human race needs is not more brains but 
 more knowledge." In his clarion call for the better education of all 
 people of every race and condition, he affirms his faith in 
 environmental opportunity and a finer personal development as the 
 chief things needed to send the race onward. Professor Woods, of 
 Dartmouth College, writing on "The Social Cost of Unguided Ability," 
 confirms this conviction of Doctor Ward.[11] He declares that "for ten 
 men who succeed there are probably fifty more who might succeed with 
 adequate development and specialization of effort." He shows how 
 "education as an agency in the selection of personal ability fails 
 because of undue abbreviation of the period of training for most 
 individuals and the omission of elements of training of real 
 significance for the purpose of adjusting individuals to the specific 
 task." When we note that before the fifth elementary grade is reached 
 there is a drop in attendance showing only 80 per cent. of those found 
 in the second grade, and in the sixth grade only 66 per cent., and in 
 the seventh grade only 50 per cent., and in the eighth grade less than 
 40 per cent. remain of those entering the first and second grades, we 
 see good reason for his statement. When the high school statistics are 
 added, with the drop year by year in attendance until at graduation 
 only one in fourteen pupils remains to the end, we feel that this 
 author is right when he says that "Society suffers less from the race 
 suicide of the capable than from the non-utilization of the 
 well-endowed." 
   
   [Illustration] 
   
 =Eugenics.=--When Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and one of 
 the first to apply to human beings the ideas of "selection for better 
 breeds," published in 1873 his article on "Hereditary Improvement," he 
 used the word "Stirpiculture" as indicating the application of 
 evolution to the method of improving mankind by the selection of the 
 superior in the process of reproduction. He later changed the 
 designation to "Eugenics," which is now held as the term best applying 
 in this connection. In 1891 Dr. Lester Ward himself said, "Artificial 
 selection has given to man the most that he enjoys in the organic 
 products of earth. May not men and women be selected as well as sheep 
 and horses? From the great stirp of humanity with all its multiplied 
 ancestral plasms--some very poor, some mediocre, some merely 
 indifferent, a goodly number ranging from middling to fair, only a 
 comparatively few very good, with an occasional crystal of the first 
 water--why may we not learn to select on some broad and comprehensive 
 plan with a view to a general building up and rounding out of the race 
 of human beings?" So keen an observer and philosophic thinker as 
 Doctor Ward, however, could not long accept the first allurement of 
 this idea. He soon began to show with his convincing power that "the 
 control of heredity is possible only to a master creature. Man is the 
 master creature of the animal world. Society is the master of its 
 defectives. But normal people are their own masters. Any attempt on 
 the part of society to control the choice of partners in the marital 
 relation would be tyranny." Recognizing the need for "negative 
 eugenics" fully, and declaring in its name that "mental and physical 
 defectives of society should be kept from perpetuating their defects 
 through propagation," he insisted that "eugenists must recognize and 
 admit the enormous force of personal preference" in marriage. 
   
 Doctor Ward gives a figure--as above--which might be used to indicate 
 the conclusions of Galton, in his _Hereditary Genius_, and of Ribot 
 and others. Doctor Galton himself gave in his volume on the _Social 
 Order_ a chart somewhat more discriminating. In any case, however, the 
 eugenists must depend upon the mass of the mediocre for a supply of 
 geniuses and those of exceptional talent and depend upon the process 
 of reproduction for securing that supply. Doctor Ward, on the 
 contrary, looks to education, controlled and improved environment, and 
 the stimulus for all people to be gained from more scientific 
 knowledge more widely distributed. In his famous article, entitled 
 "Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics,"[12] Doctor Ward says that 
 "eugenists tend to emphasize unduly the intellectual qualities" and 
 "manifest more or less contempt for the affective faculties." 
 "Nature," he thinks, "is far wiser and seeks to prevent all extremes." 
 He also reminds us that "much that is called genius is pathologic and 
 linked to the abnormal and the insane." Perhaps few would agree with 
 Doctor Ward that "genius is scattered somewhat uniformly through the 
 whole mass of the population and needs only favoring circumstances to 
 bring it to conscious expression." But that thought challenges 
 attention. He would improve mankind, first, by getting rid of error 
 through the full use of demonstrated scientific knowledge and, second, 
 by a "nurture" in accord with the laws of progress. 
   
 =Euthenics and Eudemics.=--The pioneer treatment of "Euthenics," or 
 "The Science of Controllable Environment," with its "Plea for Better 
 Living Conditions as a First Step Toward Higher Human Efficiency," 
 was given by Ellen H. Richards in 1910. Doctor Ward, in alluding to 
 this, reminds us that "there is a tendency for the avenues of progress 
 to become choked and normal upward movements checked" and that "we 
 must at all times take vigorous action and in the direction of the 
 betterment of the human race." In respect to "Eudemics," or the 
 doctrine of the welfare of the masses of the people-at-large, Doctor 
 Ward uses the term first suggested to Doctor Dealey, of Brown 
 University, by Doctor Koopman, Librarian of that University, with 
 approval, and gives it a meaning of the greatest social helpfulness. 
 In his view it is not a misfortune that society is being to so great 
 an extent recruited from the so-called "lower classes." If there are 
 signs of decadence anywhere, he thinks, they are not in the 
 "proletariat;" they are among the "pampered rich," not the "hampered 
 poor." 
   
 =New Types of Genius.=--Again, his plea is for universal education in 
 real knowledge and true inference from facts of life and a universal 
 sharing of the really best things to secure a just quota of genius and 
 talent from all classes. It seems clear that we are not obliged to 
 limit our hopes for "flowers of the family" to the few at the top of 
 the social pyramid. For the testimony of history agrees rather with 
 Doctor Ward than with the extreme eugenists, and we have often had 
 arising from the common life splendid examples of human capacity and 
 achievement. When the eugenists list their double columns of those 
 whom humanity takes pride in and those of whom humanity is ashamed it 
 is most often from the degenerative or defective members of society 
 that the second list is taken. From the great common life of average 
 condition, neither too rich nor too poor, too cultured nor too 
 ignorant, for "human nature's daily food," one rises now and then to 
 leave a mark high up on the list of great ones of the earth. Hence, 
 humble fathers and mothers can build magnificent hopes on the newborn 
 baby of their love. It is to be considered also that there is 
 difference of opinion as to what constitutes genius and what may be 
 called exceptional talent. One sociologist thinks that there are but 
 three really important classes of men, namely, "Mechanical Inventors, 
 Scientific Discoverers, and Philosophic Thinkers." Another type of 
 judgment may consider that genius shows itself almost exclusively in 
 those creative minds that give us great music, great pictures, great 
 sculptures, great temples, and great books of poetry, drama, and the 
 novel. Another type of mind, now growing fast among us in this 
 machine-dominated industrial era, may find genius the most appropriate 
 name for the master engineer or business-builder who rules a wide 
 realm of successfully administered economic order. There is, also, 
 although it is not often bold enough to claim loud voice, a small 
 section of those who look for supreme excellence in religious or 
 ethical attainment, a line of genius in mastery of the Way of Life. 
 Certainly serviceable goodness, that which does big things for others' 
 safety or help, may be given some place among the specially talented. 
 For example, the little French girl of nine years of age who, bereft 
 of her mother by the accidents of war, has brought up almost unaided 
 five little brothers and sisters, the youngest only seven months old 
 when her task began, and for two years, it is said, washed, cooked, 
 and dressed her charges, and "saw to it that those old enough went to 
 school where she went herself and took prizes for her scholarship," 
 might well be called one of the "unusual." The prize of 500 francs 
 awarded this "little mother" after two years of such able family 
 engineering and personal care of those dependent upon her shows that 
 some people at least rank those with ability to do social services and 
 the high purpose to achieve the best possible for others' welfare as 
 having a place In the company of the specially talented. 
   
 In an inconspicuous book called _The New Party_, edited by Andrew Reid 
 and containing selections from many "labor" leaders, these words 
 occur: "We have had politics for politics' sake, religion for 
 religion's sake, science for science's sake, literature for 
 literature's sake, art for art's sake: we want politics for justice, 
 religion for right, science for happiness, literature for love of 
 humanity, and art for the social pleasure of all." Those who can thus 
 translate the separate achievements of mankind which taken at the top 
 have won the title of works of genius are beginning to be seen above 
 the human horizon as among the great of earth. 
   
 It is still, however, as of old, the man or woman who has a special 
 gift of voice or pen or brush or sculptor's tool or command of 
 instrument or ability to compose music or to write literature fit to 
 live forever, or build temples that command wonder and admiration, or 
 who in some form of creative activity makes his mark upon history, who 
 is most often spoken of as a genius. It is now only a little while 
 since we began to add to this list the scientific, the commercial and 
 the political genius. The military genius has held a place for ages, 
 but his specialty is losing standing as a social asset, and we can 
 foresee a time when he must learn constructive rather than destructive 
 methods of action in order to qualify for the "Hall of Fame."[13] 
   
 =Only Men in Lists of Geniuses.=--Genius along any line has for its 
 topmost reaches the names of men only. Few women have even attained 
 the secondary place of the talented. When we remember that higher 
 education for women is a child of less than a hundred years' growth, 
 and that all the higher walks of achievement in the intellectual, the 
 political, the scientific, and the industrial field have been 
 masculine monopolies in custom and even in law for ages after men had 
 opportunity of specialized development and work, this is not a sure 
 proof of the intellectual and vocational inferiority of women. Until 
 women have had several centuries of equal education and freedom of 
 activity with men no one can tell what they can do in any special 
 line. It is therefore idle at this date for any one to argue either 
 for or against the possibilities of a more balanced list of the sexes 
 in those at the top of human achievement. 
   
 What we are now beginning to be sure of is that all talent is 
 precious, all special power a social asset, all leadership to be 
 conserved, and all real genius a priceless treasure--hence, that all 
 children who are gifted, whether boys or girls, shall be developed to 
 the height of social power. This means that although every gifted 
 child is born in a private family, society must see to it that its 
 chance for right nurture and fitting education is not limited to the 
 resources of any private family, especially to those of the poorer in 
 economic power. 
   
 Galton estimates two hundred and fifty in a million as in the 
 "distinguished class," If, as Doctor Ward and others think, many more 
 might be able to qualify for that position if favorably situated, then 
 society, which is the loser by every undeveloped person, must learn to 
 know the possibilities of children as indicated by scientific study 
 and lessen the present waste of potential talent. Dr. Carl Kelsey says 
 "Heredity determines what a man may become, but environment determines 
 what he does become." This is not entirely true, perhaps, since many 
 noble and wise have risen from untoward surroundings, but it is 
 largely true. 
   
 =Social Need to Learn What Children Are.=--If society is to really set 
 about the business of getting from the mass of mankind all the 
 intellectual and moral power and all the real leadership that may be 
 available for social uses, then surely we must learn first to know 
 more about all the children in every family. How can this be done? In 
 many cases children are slow in development and may have powers quite 
 unsuspected until the time for most skilful cultivation has passed. In 
 many cases parents are so partial that "all their geese are swans." In 
 other cases the nervous excitability may be such that precocity leads 
 to overstimulation and later there is arrest of development, and the 
 promising bud does not develop into the flower of the family. In any 
 case, the parents alone can not, as a rule, attain full comparison and 
 due balance of judgment even between their own children and certainly 
 not as between their own and the children of other parents. 
   
 ="Charting Parents."=--There is, to be sure, a new plan of "Charting 
 Parents" to find out what they are able to do and what they are 
 actually doing in the moral training and physical care of their 
 children. "The Parents' Score Card," prepared by Dr. Caroline Hedger, 
 of the Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund, and published in the 
 _Woman's Home Companion_ of March, 1922, aims to enable fathers and 
 mothers "to size themselves up as parents." The points to be noted and 
 on which parents have a rating as good, bad, or indifferent, comprise 
 those concerning "physical defects attended to," "adequate supervision 
 of athletics and recreation," "regulations concerning the below-weight 
 or nervous child," on "team-work in parents" (whether they pull 
 together or apart in the discipline of the child), and some very 
 drastic examination points on "fault-finding," "lying to child," 
 "punishing when angry." The chart deals, in general, with the 
 character influence of the parent. It is said that only one child in 
 three hundred had a perfect "score card" in an investigation of a 
 large number of children, and hence only a small proportion of parents 
 could be supposed to measure up to all the requirements of the 
 parent's outline of duties. 
   
 This new device of putting parents to the test is being adopted in 
 many differing ways by health boards, by school boards, by children's 
 courts, by church committees of investigation, and by the 
 superintendents of charitable agencies. This all means that a standard 
 of child-life is being attained, a measure of the normal, divergence 
 from which is an indication of the abnormal, either in capacity or 
 condition. This is a wholesome movement, although sometimes carried 
 out in unwise and unsympathetic ways. This should enable parents to 
 find out if they have average children and what to do with defects 
 that are remediable. This is also one of the ways by which we measure 
 the social need to help parents who are themselves handicapped in any 
 way to do their duty by their children. 
   
 What we need, however, is more than this--we need some definite 
 knowledge of what sort of children we have in one generation with 
 which to build the next generation. We need to be able to take account 
 of our social stock as we go along. To do this the home must be 
 supplemented specifically and adequately by the school. In the school 
 we have opportunity of wide study of varying types, of comparison of 
 differing rates of progress, of getting at actual knowledge of actual 
 quality and capacity in a child as related to the like in other 
 children. This investigative function of the school has been used for 
 the most part to ascertain what children were defective. This is 
 useful. We need, also, to use it with far more ingenuity to ascertain 
 what children are most promising and most likely to dower the race 
 with special gifts. 
   
 =New Observation Records for Children.=--A very important "Observation 
 Record for the Selection of Gifted Children in the Elementary Schools" 
 has been drawn up by Julie A. Badanes, which has been published with 
 an introduction by Dr. Saul Badanes. In this introduction it is well 
 said that "the idea of establishing a norm for every school year" is a 
 new one. The measurement of intelligence by Binet dates only back to 
 In the treatment of the "Intelligence of Pupils," Meumann 
 
 declares "that the problem of measuring the intelligence of school 
 children is the basic problem in education." Recently William Stern 
 has dealt at length with "The Selection of Gifted Children in Public 
 Schools" and with related elements of investigation of the 
 intelligence of children. William H. Allen, in his book, _Universal 
 Training for American Citizenship_, has, as Doctor Badanes notes, 
 given a chapter to the "Training of the Specially Gifted." We are all 
 concerned with growing earnestness in the problem of getting in 
 democracy the leadership which all social organization requires. It 
 is, therefore, of the most intense interest to all thoughtful people 
 how the flower of the family is nurtured and in what manner it is made 
 to bloom. 
   
 This "Psychological-pedagogical Observation Record," which has been 
 devised as an aid in finding out if a child is specially gifted, and 
 if so in what way its gifts should be developed and how it should find 
 its way to achievement, is very suggestive. Any parent might well 
 study its itemized outlines for help in effort to understand the child 
 that is unlike the average. The "Record" requires attention to the 
 "general condition of the senses and nerves," to "memory and power of 
 learning," to qualities of "imagination," to strength and expression 
 of "emotions," to facility in "language," to "manner of work," to 
 "relation to home and community life," and in respect to "adaptation 
 to new demands." These things are vital not only to know about and 
 understand as respects one personality but to compare on the same 
 basis a number of personalities in order to get a ranking that is just 
 and useful for guidance in education. Suppose a father and mother feel 
 sure that a child of theirs is one of the exceptional, the gifted, 
 perhaps of great talent, even possibly a genius in the making. They 
 may get much help in arriving at sober judgment by many books and 
 treatises now available. But far clearer would be their own approach 
 to the matter in hand if they could study some such chart as is here 
 alluded to and get a clear direction as to what to look for and how 
 to measure what they find. If such parents, however, would be really 
 assured in their first appreciation of their child they need the 
 coöperative observation and fuller opportunity of comparison which a 
 teacher of a school, who is herself or himself a good psychologist, 
 can place at their service. All of us can see our own children at 
 their best; few can justly estimate what the power of that best may be 
 in a competitive world. 
   
 =What to Do with the Specially Gifted Child.=--The child may be one of 
 the few elected to leadership in some field. All who watch and study 
 and understand may agree that it is the gift of its birthright. Then 
 what is there to do? The question often arises, Shall the other 
 children in the family be given less opportunity in order that this 
 gifted one may have the larger chance which genius and great talent 
 really demand for fulfilment of promise? There was no doubt of the 
 answer to this question in the minds of those who believed that a 
 special gift carried with it special privilege provided the special 
 gift discovered were of a sort understood by all. For many generations 
 a boy feeling a "call" to the ministry of religion as rabbi, priest, 
 or preacher would be sure to have, if necessary, all the resources of 
 his family at his command and all possible aid of friends even at the 
 sacrifice of the elementary education of his brothers and sisters. In 
 the same way in a more limited circle the child who could do any 
 creative work of imagination in art would be considered entitled to 
 any self-sacrificing devotion of other members of the family which 
 might be needed to carry forward his work. In a larger way many have 
 looked upon all higher education as solely for those who have shown a 
 power of potential leadership. Not long ago the old saying was 
 revived: "Colleges are for the exceptional individuals who may become 
 the world's intellectual élite." On the other hand, the growth of 
 State Universities and of many forms of adult education, and the 
 offering of college courses in the evening to those employed in 
 earning-work during the day, show that the opportunities of culture 
 are more and more made free to all and that the conviction is growing 
 that it is not alone leaders who should be educated but that the 
 common life must be raised in mental and moral power in order for true 
 leadership to work effectively for the advance of social well-being. 
   
 In the family the genius or near-genius is likely to get all that 
 should be its privilege and often more. And this not only from pride 
 in his talent and from desire to give that talent its proper chance of 
 expression but because genius and near-genius have often a 
 self-protecting and self-acquiring quality that make sure of much 
 unselfish care from others. If, as has been said, "The genius is 
 composed of a man, a woman, and a child," and there is much in life to 
 give color to that idea, then it is easy to see why the flower of the 
 family so often gets the larger share of every family advantage and 
 when the family resource fails is sure to find friends and helpers on 
 every side to help on his development. This is not unjust provided the 
 talented member can serve well in this specialty. The great trouble is 
 that many think themselves geniuses and find others, in youth at 
 least, to confirm their judgment of themselves, who are only a trifle 
 above the commonplace. This leads too often to selfish claims upon 
 others that tire even the family affection. It would be well on this 
 account, if no other, if every child could be wisely and adequately 
 diagnosed in respect to mental power so that fewer mistakes would be 
 made in confounding greatness with showiness or creative power with 
 mere discriminating taste. 
   
 If the family really cuts off the education and vocational 
 opportunities of the less gifted below the point required for average 
 success in life, in order to give greater advantages to the gifted 
 one, it is an injustice. The mediocre have their innings now, and it 
 is one of the great demands of democracy, both within and without the 
 family, that the commonplace shall not miss its chance for learning 
 how to serve and enjoy the best it can. The family life must be for 
 all, the one place in which no life is wholly sacrificed to another 
 life. 
   
 What, then, shall be done for the gifted whose talent, like that of 
 music, for example, means a high demand for expensive culture? The 
 answer we are beginning to give is that social agencies shall aid the 
 parents in securing that culture. Aristocracy had its "patrons" for 
 artists. Democracy must have its special educational aids for the 
 gifted. Already that demand is being met in countless ways that will 
 readily occur to all. Meanwhile, there is the public school organized 
 to meet the needs of the "average child." At first the grade-system 
 had a Procrustean bed that made it impossible to meet the needs of 
 those below the average and almost as difficult to meet the needs of 
 those above that average. We started special schools and special rooms 
 for those subnormal, retarded, slow, or specially difficult to manage. 
 Now we are beginning to consider how we can best make the 
 tax-supported public school serve the interests of the specially 
 gifted. The first thing we see clearly now is to find out which 
 children are exceptional on the upper side, and for that the newly 
 devised forms of scientific observation and measurement may be useful 
 if care is taken to mix every formula with common sense, patience, and 
 human sympathy. The next essential is to decide whether the children 
 who can go faster shall be passed along through the grades by special 
 arrangement more rapidly or whether they shall be kept on the regular 
 track of school promotions and be given extra lessons to "enrich their 
 curriculum." The part of wisdom, it would seem, is to find out what 
 kind of gift the exceptional child has and hasten his regular course, 
 or add to it, in accordance with his type of talent. If he is to be 
 one of those who are to mix with men and lead others in professions 
 that demand administrative and executive power, the chances are that 
 he should have the regular course in the usual order and add studies 
 that will early give him the facts of practical life and an 
 acquaintance with many phases of political, business, and scientific 
 activity that would serve in such work as he is likely to find to do. 
 If, on the other hand, the gift is creative, and the career nature has 
 seemingly marked out is one where the impulse will come from within, 
 and some special technical training can alone give that impulse 
 expression, then the chances are that the sooner such a child "gets 
 through with school," emerges from formal education into his own 
 atmosphere and his own free alignment with the masters in his own art, 
 the sooner he will really begin to be educated for his task. It seems 
 to be true that the more a human being is set apart by nature for a 
 specialty of art the less he gets from all teachers save those in his 
 own field of interest. It seems also true that the wider a human 
 being's range of dealing with other human beings in business, in 
 politics, in religious organizations, in educational work, the surer 
 it will be that "all is grist that comes to his mill" and there can be 
 no study that is at all worthy that fails to enrich his mind. Hence, 
 the new tendency to examination for the sake of finding out the 
 specially gifted children and giving them the special opportunity in 
 education which they need and will profit by, must be one guided 
 toward details of differing gifts as well as toward quantitative 
 power. 
   
 =Genius Universal in Nature.=--If any family has in it a real genius, 
 that family shines forever in the reflected light of its choicest 
 treasure. Yet a genius belongs to no family, even to no country. Such 
 belong to the world. Mary, we are told, "pondered the things in her 
 heart" which marked the boy Jesus out from all the other lads who 
 played about the carpenter shop of Joseph. And it is not alone poetic 
 imagination that shows her as troubled as well as humbly proud at the 
 testimonies of His coming greatness. Many other mothers of those 
 destined to high achievement have had misgivings as the shadow as 
 truly as the sunlight of that greatness passed across their vision. 
 For true greatness is solitary and often dedicated to tragedies of 
 experience. The family life may be the only refuge from a 
 misunderstanding world while the hero lives and only after death may 
 the high quality of his service be known to all. 
   
 =Genius Its Own School-master.=--The most comforting thought to 
 parents who have children "different" and perhaps different in ways 
 not yet appreciated by the world around them, is this: nature, which 
 takes care that we shall not have too many geniuses and doubtless will 
 still take such care when we grow wise enough to give all the children 
 a chance to prove whether or not they are geniuses--nature sees to it 
 that the most gifted among the children of men carry within themselves 
 their own school-master. If the regular lines of education do not suit 
 their needs they promptly emancipate themselves from the useless 
 pedagogy, and going after what they personally demand for inner 
 nourishment, get it at all hazards. Sometimes, not infrequently, all 
 the gifted child needs is a library and a chance to be free, or a 
 studio and the companionship of an artist and just his own sort of 
 training, at the time he can best appropriate it. 
   
 =Varieties of the Gifted.=--Happily all the flowers of the family are 
 not geniuses or specially talented. Some are just beautiful to look at 
 and yet unspoiled by flattery. It is a great gift of nature to be able 
 to give happiness just by allowing people to look at one! The contour 
 of the face, the turn of the head, the light in the eye, the freshness 
 of the complexion, the grace of the movement, and the sweetness of the 
 voice all go together, if the manner and the feeling only match the 
 coloring and the form, to make it well worth while just to be alive. 
   
 And some flowers of the family are not beautiful but charming, those 
 of tact and graciousness and understanding of others and consideration 
 and unselfish behavior. These are they of whom one has said, "The 
 charm of her presence was felt when she went, and men at her side grew 
 nobler, girls purer, as all through the town the children were gladder 
 who pulled at her gown." 
   
 Some flowers of the family bloom late and come to their beauty only 
 when some disaster threatens destruction of the home or some sorrow 
 wrecks its happiness. Simple, plain, unassuming, neither very wise nor 
 very strong in other matters, they have a heart that can love with 
 such intensity that it warms the coldest spot and is the refuge most 
 sought when misfortune appears. 
   
 And sometimes the flower of the family is but a memory of one who 
 early passes on. Emerson sang in his beautiful "Threnody": 
   
     "The gracious boy, who did adorn 
     The world whereinto he was born, 
     And by his countenance repay 
     The favor of the loving Day,-- 
     Has disappeared from the Day's eye; 
     Far and wide she cannot find him; 
     My hopes pursue, they cannot bind him. 
     ...................................... 
     Nature, who lost, cannot remake him; 
     Fate let him fall, Fate can't retake him; 
     ........................................ 
                                     the feet 
     Of the most beautiful and sweet 
     Of human youth had left the hill 
     And garden,--they were bound and still." 
   
 It is of such that affection speaks most tenderly. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON THE FLOWER OF THE FAMILY 
   
 How far should the general family life be burdened for special 
 
      development of the genius, the near-genius, and the specially 
      talented member? 
   
 What added social provisions should we seek to secure to aid in 
 
      the self-training of the specially gifted? 
   
 What type of education may lead more surely to the discovery of 
 
      talent and special faculty in the mass of children? 
   
 Should the chief aim be to bring the subnormal or backward up 
 
      to grade or to give a free and helpful range of opportunity to 
      natural qualities of leadership? If both should be aimed at 
      equally, how can the public school aid in the double task? 
   
 A suggestive list of Books for Parents, issued by the 
 
      Federation for Child Study, headquarters at 2 West Sixty-fourth 
      Street, New York City, includes several of special value in 
      determining the mental powers and special requirements of 
      children diverging from the average quality and capacity. Read 
      at least one of the books indicated and compare local 
      provisions for examination of children with those advocated as 
      desirable. 
   
   
 FOOTNOTES: 
   
 [11] See _American Journal of Sociology_ for November, 1913. 
   
 [12] See _American Journal of Sociology_ for May, 1913. 
   
 [13] See chapter on "Democracy and Distinction," in _Social 
 Organization_, by C.H. Cooley. 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER X (THE CHILDREN THAT NEVER GROW UP) 
   
 "It was perhaps an idle thought 
       But I imagined that if day by day 
       I watched him and seldom went away, 
     And studied all the beatings of his heart 
     With zeal (as men study some stubborn art 
       For their own good) and could by patience find 
       An entrance to the caverns of his mind-- 
     I might reclaim him from his dark estate." 
                     --SHELLEY. 
   
     "One man, at least, I know, 
     Who might wear the crest of Bayard 
       Or Sidney's plume of snow. 
                         Behold him, 
       The Cadmus of the blind, 
     Giving the dumb lips language, 
       The idiot clay a mind. 
     Wherever outraged Nature 
       Asks word or action brave, 
     Wherever struggles labor, 
       Wherever groans a slave,-- 
     Wherever rise the peoples, 
       Wherever sinks a throne, 
     The throbbing heart of Freedom finds 
       An answer in his own. 
     Knight of a better era, 
       Without reproach or fear! 
     Said I not well that Bayards 
       And Sidneys still are here?" 
                     --WHITTIER'S tribute to Dr. Howe. 
   
   
 =The Defective Children.=--Not those who die young, full of promise, 
 to leave a memory of exquisite budding loveliness cut short by 
 untimely frosts, but those who live on from infancy to childhood and 
 from youth to physical maturity and even on to old age, yet never 
 become responsible adults--these are the children we must consider. 
   
 The demand of the eugenists that such, if obviously defective, should 
 be prevented from bringing forth after their kind is clearly the only 
 social wisdom. The statistics of social pathology all point to mental 
 defectiveness as the prolific cause of crime, immorality, vocational 
 incompetency, illegitimacy, family failure, and marital tragedy. In a 
 recent study of one hundred families in which feeble-mindedness was 
 obvious, a study carried on by the Massachusetts Society for the 
 Prevention of Cruelty to Children, immorality was found in 58 per 
 cent. of them; extreme filth and bad home conditions were found in 30 
 per cent.; and in 47 per cent. one or more members of these families 
 were public charges. Where the mother is subnormal there is almost 
 certain to be a line of feeble-minded progeny, and in this study, 
 while there were only 7 per cent. of the fathers hopelessly deficient, 
 in 25 per cent. the mothers were notably defective in mind. 
 Thirty-seven of these families showed illegitimate children--a far 
 larger number than the average of normal population. Physical 
 deficiencies also figured largely in these family records. 
   
 This particular study takes us into the region where Doctor Fernald, 
 Doctor Goddard and many others have prepared material for convincing 
 the public mind that no one thing so increases social degeneracy and 
 so adds to the sum of human misery as the unprotected freedom of 
 defectives to procreate and pollute the family currents.[14] This is 
 not a treatise on social pathology and elsewhere must be found the 
 details of investigation and information that justify this statement. 
 What is here attempted is only a study of what should be the attitude 
 of fathers and mothers toward feeble-minded children if such should be 
 their tragic problem. 
   
 =Custodial Care of the Defective.=--In the first place, the attitude 
 of mind of the parents, if they are themselves normal, is to be 
 considered. What gives us feeble-minded children from feeble-minded 
 parents is clear. The social prevention for carrying on known 
 degeneracy cannot be too strongly stressed, and hence the first duty 
 of normal parents is to consider the social danger of leaving a 
 feeble-minded child, especially a feeble-minded girl, to any chance of 
 parenthood. This leads to the question of removal from home of 
 feeble-minded children to permanent custodial care in institutions 
 provided especially for their segregation, possible teaching and 
 thrifty use of small work-power. Alexander Johnson, who has done so 
 much in the United States to make all philanthropy wise and effective 
 and particularly has helped to form public opinion concerning right 
 methods of care and training of the feeble-minded, tells us that 
 "one-half of the mentally defective can become one-third of a normal 
 person," can be made happy and useful to the extent of considerable 
 aid toward self-support if under constant supervision and given the 
 trained care of special teachers. 
   
 There are few private homes in which any feeble-minded boy or girl can 
 attain such a condition. The children who are "different," if having 
 the sole devotion of father and mother, may be protected and made 
 happy in the measure of their power for happiness. But if there are 
 other children in the family neither they nor the afflicted one are 
 comfortable. The measure of feeble-mindedness is usually the measure 
 of unhappiness when the normal and abnormal are in close 
 companionship. In most families it is not possible for either or both 
 parents to give entire time, strength and devotion to one subnormal 
 child. Where it is, there is no security that death will not prevent 
 the permanency of that devoted care. Hence, it is generally safer and 
 better for all concerned to place the feeble-minded in collective 
 homes where their own kind are cared for exclusively and where 
 segregated control can be complete and permanent through life. There 
 is no horror of such places for those who have seen what flowers of 
 happiness and what miracles of devotion may be found in "Training 
 Schools for the Feeble-minded." 
   
 The affectional side of the nature of a mental defective may be of 
 unusual strength and may find special objects of love among those 
 still more handicapped than itself. Those visiting intimately in such 
 School-homes may see a higher-grade imbecile caring for a lower-grade 
 with patience and devotion; they may see the competitive element in 
 training, reduced in levels for the accommodation of the slender 
 stock of mentality, producing on that lower level the same good 
 results that normal children gain from trying to imitate and to excel. 
 Small attainments are sources of pride in a class of defectives which 
 if exhibited among the normal would give bitter experience of 
 contrast. By making the standard of behavior and of attainment suited 
 to their little power, the delight of conquest over difficulties need 
 not be denied to the feeble-minded. 
   
 Hence, again, it is far from wise and often far from most loving to 
 keep the child who can never grow up in the company of those who 
 follow the usual path from infancy to maturity. This means, of course, 
 if this idea of the more general use of special homes for the 
 subnormal is to be carried out, a large increase in provision of such 
 homes. Such large increase is often opposed by short-sighted economy. 
 The expense of establishing and maintaining such homes in adequate 
 number and of scientific and humane provisions is counted over and 
 taxpayers made alarmed at the sum total. What is lacking usually in 
 the count is the sum total of the enormous sums society now pays out 
 for the unregulated and socially dangerous neglect of this class of 
 unfortunates. Doctor Goddard's "Kallikak Family" and many other 
 accurate showings of what it costs to leave uncared for one 
 feeble-minded girl in unbefriended freedom should convince any sane 
 person that the most wasteful extravagance any community can commit is 
 such neglect of what Mr. Johnson has called "the divine fragments" of 
 humanity. 
   
 To make provision for the insane is seen to be a social necessity and 
 the family more than any other social institution profits by the 
 hospitals and asylums for the treatment and care of such. The relief 
 of having an insane relative taken away from the home, after months 
 and perhaps years of anxiety, fear, and suffering on the part of every 
 other member, cannot be too strongly pictured. The effort now making 
 to secure early treatment for the first symptoms of mental derangement 
 and to give even "border-line" cases and exceptionally "cranky" and 
 nervous people special treatment in mental hygiene marks the 
 beginning, we must believe, of effective preventive work in this line. 
 The feeble-minded, however, have a claim of perpetual childhood upon 
 the parental sympathy, and that, together with common ignorance 
 concerning their condition or numbers and the social dangers inherent 
 in their neglect, give us the alarming discrepancy in numbers between 
 the feeble-minded in suitable segregated care and those left to find 
 their way or lose it in the usual walks of life. Since Doctor Seguin 
 wrote his _Treatise on Idiocy_ in 1846 the verdict of science and of 
 philanthropy has been accumulating as to the need for the full and 
 complete protection of all who cannot manage successfully, even in the 
 simplest details, their own lives and the lives of those with whom 
 they are most closely related. Yet to-day, it is claimed by many 
 observers, we have only about fifteen per cent, of those requiring 
 special protection on this account adequately cared for by society. 
   
 The family must be relieved of personal care of its insane, its 
 lower-grade feeble-minded, and its moral idiots. It must be so 
 relieved for the sake of the normal members of the family. It must be 
 so relieved still more for the sake of lessening vice, crime, 
 degenerative tendencies, and actual waste of public money in public 
 court procedure and in other public institutional provisions. 
   
 To induce the state of mind in parents which will help on the better 
 and more adequate social care of these afflicted members of society, 
 the sense of shame and the keen suffering from social stigma in such 
 cases must be mitigated. It must be seen that although it may be the 
 fault of one or both parents that such a child has come into the 
 world, it is an added and deeper fault, even in many cases a social 
 crime, to leave that child in ordinary relations of life. It is true 
 that what Dr. Caleb W. Saleeby well calls "racial poisons" are often 
 the cause of the damaged germ plasm that starts the handicapped human 
 being along his devious course. Alcohol, syphilis, and other elements 
 of degenerative action may have doomed the child and in such cases the 
 father's or mother's sin or carelessness is the cause of the child's 
 tragical condition. In such cases the dullest conscience must feel 
 remorse. It is, however, not always the fault of the immediate 
 parents. It may be a far more remote inheritance that has started the 
 degenerative psychosis that results in either insanity, 
 feeble-mindedness, dipsomania, or "general debility of character." 
   
 =Heredity.=--Prof. E.G. Conklin says, "Heredity may be defined as the 
 appearance in offspring of characters whose differential causes are 
 found in germ cells." Doctor Galton says "the two parents between 
 them contribute on an average one-half of each inherited faculty, or 
 each parent one-quarter. The grandparents contribute between them 
 one-quarter, or each one-sixteenth." The responsibility for a poor 
 specimen of humanity, therefore, is not solely the parents'; they may 
 share it with a considerable group. Many a defective obviously owes 
 his condition to some remote ancestor, "to the third or fourth 
 generation," as the old Scripture said; and many a charming trait, for 
 which the immediate parents would like to take credit, is really a 
 gift from some great-grandparent. 
   
 This fact should make it easier for parents of defectives to bear the 
 burden and easier to make it seem less a shameful confession of 
 individual responsibility and more a sad confirmation of the fact that 
 we are all members one of another and no one lives to himself alone. 
   
 =Difficulties in Care of Morons.=--The case is clear as to treatment, 
 so all enlightened social workers and social students agree, in 
 respect to the obviously defective or insane. The difficulty is to 
 care protectively and yet justly for the higher-grade defective or 
 what is now called the "moron." Doubtless we should all see it best to 
 begin at the lower levels of defectiveness and abnormality for 
 pressure upon society to socially protect in segregated institutions 
 all the afflicted. The point at which compulsory methods should be 
 used might be placed at a widely differing level by many most 
 acquainted with the need for some form of social control of and for 
 this class. Parents in particular would resent any snap judgment and 
 should do so as to the mental condition of children not obviously 
 imbecile. It is certain that the high-grade moron makes much trouble 
 and gives social tragedies without number, but it is still more 
 certain that no social machinery has yet been devised ingenious enough 
 to really classify such persons and place them where they can do no 
 more harm. As Dr. Lightner Witmer well says in his warning against 
 careless diagnosis, "In training clinical examiners I advise them not 
 to diagnose a child as feeble-minded unless they feel sure they have 
 sufficient facts to convince a jury of twelve intelligent men that the 
 diagnosis of feeble-mindedness is the only logical conclusion to be 
 drawn from the facts." It is undoubtedly true that many high-grade 
 imbeciles or morons would be adjudged not feeble-minded by most 
 juries. It is also undoubtedly true that many youths who are 
 "peculiar" or "backward" or unusually susceptible to influence from 
 others or especially lacking in power of self-control are in social 
 danger and need some form of social protection more effectual than is 
 required in the case of the normal child and youth. Higher grades of 
 abnormality and those less understood must be approached, however, 
 both in matters of examination and of care, from different angles of 
 observation from those used in discovery and treatment of the 
 obviously imbecile. 
   
 In this connection mention must be made of the efforts to give 
 supervision of special sort and under official direction to those able 
 to earn their own living or partially so, at least, and who yet need 
 special protection and care. _The Proceedings and Addresses of the 
 Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Sessions of the American Association for 
 the Study of the Feeble-minded_ contain specially valuable articles on 
 "Extra-institutional Care" and on education of the higher-grade 
 defectives. Two articles published in _Mental Hygiene_ of April, 1921, 
 on the vocational elements in such extra-institutional care are most 
 enlightening as to possibilities in this difficult field. The first of 
 these, entitled "Experiments to Determine Possibilities of Subnormal 
 Girls in Factory Work," by Elizabeth B. Bigelow, shows that certain 
 kinds of routine work may be followed successfully by girls who are 
 mentally under the normal. The second article, "Vocational Probation 
 for Subnormal Youth," by Doctor Arnold Gesell, of Yale University, 
 shows how the courts may use probation power and agency in the 
 interest of self-support and a helpful industrial relationship. The 
 new Children's Code recently recommended to the Connecticut 
 Legislature by a special Commission advocates giving Juvenile Courts 
 power at discretion to establish the status of "Vocational Probation," 
 under the supervision of officers of the Court, in place of commitment 
 to an institution, provided helpfully supervised employment may be 
 found for the boy or girl in which they may become self-supporting. 
   
 =The Colony Plan.=--The Report of Dr. Anne T. Bingham, Psychiatrist of 
 the New York Probation and Protective Association, based upon 839 
 mental examinations of girls and women coming under notice because of 
 breaking the laws or because manifestly in moral danger, is an 
 important study. Doctor Bingham highly recommends the "Colony Plan" 
 for the care of the higher-grade feeble-minded. In this plan small 
 groups of those who show mental deficiency or any special need of 
 social care are established under necessary supervision and control in 
 colonies, near their own homes if possible, and given suitable work in 
 the profit of which their families may share if destitute. The natural 
 homes of such girls and women are often lacking both in helpful 
 discipline or moral protection and to leave them in full charge of the 
 parents is often the worst possible neglect. This Colony Plan is 
 described in an article by Charles Bernstein, entitled "Colony and 
 Extra-institutional Care for the Feeble-minded," published in _Mental 
 Hygiene_ for January, 1920. The needed supervision, protection and 
 care for higher-grade morons is difficult to secure unless some form 
 of official control is initiated. That official control is often only 
 available for those who have already suffered some serious consequence 
 of their abnormal condition. What we need to work out is a better and 
 more effective means for helping the family to do what is needed for 
 the mentally handicapped child. 
   
 =Mental Hygiene.=--No adequate treatment of this vital movement can be 
 given here, but the family need for social provisions along this line 
 must be urged. Few families can afford the money, few parents have the 
 wisdom, to secure the right sort of special treatment for minds not so 
 diseased as to be legal subjects for insane hospital care or for 
 institutions for the feeble-minded, which yet make the family life 
 miserable and the family success difficult. There is growing a 
 conception of the need, especially in our complex modern life, that so 
 often unsettles or overburdens the mind, to have all manner of free 
 clinics and economical methods of care for those who can not well care 
 fully for themselves. This movement will go on until the mental 
 invalid of every sort will find as ready social sympathy and as 
 adequate social aid as does the physically weak, ill, or crippled. 
 Such a serviceable little pamphlet as that of Mr. Brady's on "Mental 
 Hygiene in Childhood" gives useful suggestions. Meanwhile, the family 
 interest is keen and must become more active and commanding in ridding 
 society of the inducing causes of diseased germ plasm. The whole 
 "social-hygiene" movement, so-called, is in the direction of cutting 
 off the supply of the defective and making every family less likely to 
 have children who never grow up. 
   
 The call during the War, and a call heeded by many who had been 
 ignorant of all the facts taught them in training camps, was "Keep Fit 
 to Fight," The call of peace, and may it be heeded as the facts of 
 inheritance are better known by all, is, Keep Fit for Parenthood. The 
 sins of youth, so often sins of ignorance, carelessness, and unbridled 
 passion, which doom childhood to blindness, to congenital deficiency 
 of all kinds, to permanent twist of mental powers, or to lack of 
 ability to meet life's demands--these sins of youth will be less in 
 evidence when education is fitted to life's full responsibilities of 
 choice instead of being side-tracked in narrow lines of scholarly 
 acquirement alone. 
   
 Meanwhile, for the parents whose children number one or more of the 
 handicapped there is the comfort of securing for such all that science 
 and special arts of teaching and institutional provision can give to 
 make the life of those who can never grow up at least comfortable and 
 free from exploitation by evil influences. That some of the noblest 
 and best of men and women are giving their lives in wise and loving 
 ministration to these least among the children of men is proof of the 
 overmastering power of human sympathy. Meanwhile, again, we are 
 finding out that the more discriminating observation of children and 
 their more truly scientific rating will take many children from the 
 lists of the "backward" and the "difficult" and even the supposed 
 feeble-minded into the ranks of the educable toward full normality. 
   
 =Special Rooms in Public Schools.=--The special rooms in the schools 
 and the special schools in the school system and the school nurses and 
 school doctors and the visiting teacher, with her power of making 
 connection between the home and the school and playground, all show 
 that we are coming to a point where every child will have a better 
 chance for having his mental and moral as well as his physical 
 diagnosis correctly made. And such a diagnosis we have already learned 
 often shows that no congenital doom marks the child labelled 
 "different," but rather some curable bad condition in his life that 
 needs only wisdom and economic power to correct. The "Observation 
 Cards" to which allusion has been made as helping toward discovery of 
 the specially gifted may also, if used with discriminating judgment, 
 show that many whom we thought lagged behind their mates from native 
 disability can be made to keep up with the procession if they are 
 rightly fed, have enough sleep, get a chance at fresh air, and are not 
 made the victims of industrial exploitation. 
   
 The new gospel of environmental change in the interest of better 
 physical, mental, and vocational opportunities for all, includes not 
 only the better care of all incompetent for self-control, 
 self-support, and self-direction, it also is coming to include a far 
 more searching investigation of the causes of degeneracy and 
 backwardness, and many children are thereby lifted from the hopeless 
 classes to the group of those requiring only special care and teaching 
 to be able to be classed as normal. 
   
 =Training the Nervous System.=--Professor James said, "The great thing 
 in education is to make the nervous system the ally, not the enemy. 
 For this we must make automatic and habitual as many useful actions as 
 we can and carefully guard against growing into ways which are likely 
 to be disadvantageous." His advice for self-discipline is to "seize 
 every first possible opportunity to act on any resolution made, and on 
 every emotional prompting in the direction of habits one aspires to 
 gain." Professor Thompson, in his book on _Brain and Personality_, 
 says, "We can make our own brains, so far as special functions or 
 aptitudes are concerned, if only we have wills strong enough to take 
 the trouble." These and many other admonitions in the direction of 
 more effective mental training show the trend of modern education. How 
 many a will has been weakened by bad methods of family influence! How 
 many nervous systems made the enemy of education rather than its ally 
 by bad family conditions! 
   
 The Parent-Teacher Associations are doing valiant service in bringing 
 to the home the best thought of the school and in bringing to the 
 school the best feeling of the home. It is not too much to hope that 
 when the jointure between real education and pure affection is made 
 more complete we may lessen the toll of incompetent personality and 
 raise the social standard of human powers. In this connection one 
 vital thought must not be over-looked, namely, the social advance we 
 may reasonably expect from the new power of women to select the 
 fathers of their children. Doctor Sumner said, "During the ages of the 
 man-family men could not make up their minds what they wanted woman to 
 become." If that be so, it is still more true that now, as the age of 
 the man-and-woman-family begins, women are undertaking to make up 
 their own minds as to what they want to be and to do and are attaining 
 a freedom of sex-selection such as they have not had before in the 
 civilization we call our own. Doctor Todd says truly, in his _Theories 
 of Social Progress_, that "from now onward the centre of selection is 
 shifted from without to within, from passive adaptation to active 
 self-determination;" and he adds, "To rationalize sexual selection and 
 make it serve progress will be to revise the 'mores' and inject into 
 them new principles." While women had no real power to select their 
 mates in marriage; while their economic helplessness led them almost 
 universally to marry as a means of support even when no real affection 
 softened and sanctified the process; while they had no power over laws 
 or customs, or knowledge of actual life outside the household, and 
 hence had to take wholly on trust the character and protestations of 
 the man they married; while women were in this subject condition they 
 could not contribute to family life either a high standard of choice 
 of parental quality or a forceful demand for previous purity and right 
 living in the husband. Hence, women have up to a recent time been more 
 sinned against than sinning if they passed on defective germ plasm or 
 doomed their children to suffering lives. 
   
 =Responsibility of Women in Marriage.=--Now the case is different. No 
 woman of usual physical strength or natural ability or average 
 vocational efficiency is necessarily tempted to make "marriage a 
 trade." If she has any strength of character she can make her own way 
 and find many good things in life for herself. She can, therefore, 
 exact such a standard of character and attainment from any man who 
 seeks her in marriage as he may well demand of her and can pass by as 
 incompetent to family demand all who do not measure up to the 
 requirements. 
   
 This may mean (in some circles of society, it is already coming to 
 mean) what Wallace indicated when he said, "Woman is to be the great 
 selective agent of the future." This cannot be, however, unless women 
 hold themselves to the best standards that men in the past have 
 exacted of their sex and so holding themselves (where the race needs 
 that they should stand) hold men also where the race needs that men 
 should find their place. The defrauded children of every generation 
 call with pathos of unique appeal upon men and women that the "racial 
 poisons" shall be abolished, and evil inheritance be checked, and that 
 every potential father and every potential mother shall hold sacred 
 the torch of life to pass it on the brighter for their handling. 
   
 Meanwhile, such agencies as "The Committee on Provision for the 
 Feeble-minded," with its central office in Philadelphia, and the 
 "National Committee for Mental Hygiene," with its headquarters in New 
 York City and its important quarterly publication, together with local 
 associations of similar type, are at work, as is well stated by one 
 national body, "to disseminate knowledge concerning the extent and 
 menace of feeble-mindedness and to suggest and initiate methods for 
 its control and ultimate eradication from the American people." On 
 such social effort afflicted parents of a defective child may depend 
 for aid and direction. 
   
 In Whittier's tribute to Samuel Gridley Howe, the pioneer in this 
 social care of defectives, one false hope is pictured, namely, that 
 "the idiot clay" could "be given a mind." That hope could not be 
 realized. The gates of destiny close at birth for many of the children 
 of men. What we can do and are now beginning to try earnestly to 
 accomplish is to prevent so many idiots from burdening the currents of 
 life, to wipe out the social disgrace of leaving neglected wanderers 
 on the highways of human effort who are unable to find the path of 
 safety and of success, and to make a protected place of guidance and 
 possible training for all the weak-minded and abnormal. We can, now we 
 increasingly understand, do more than this; we can help with ever more 
 ingenious and devoted care to give the merely slow and backward a 
 better chance at life's opportunities and help to make these least 
 able to adjust themselves easily to the common ways of the world more 
 amenable to life's discipline and happier in life's restrictions. 
   
 =The Call for Preventive Work.=--The new call for social service for 
 the children that never grow up is along new lines of preventive work 
 as truly as in demand for more tender care of all who cannot be helped 
 radically toward self-control and self-direction. The family, once 
 overwhelmed by tragedies of abnormality, can now be aided as never 
 before in lessening or in bearing the burden of such troubles. For the 
 less seriously handicapped yet specially in need of social 
 consideration--the blind, the deaf, the crippled, those of cardiac 
 weakness, and the children born tired who might become rested and 
 strong--the family has helps in education, medical treatment and work 
 opportunities suited to the particular need, such as no previous era 
 could furnish. Agencies for finding employment for the handicapped now 
 show ingenuity of the highest sort in fitting the work to special 
 needs, and the way in which the blind are taught to rise above their 
 misfortune in happy use of the faculties and powers they actually 
 possess is marvelous. The deaf have as yet been able to triumph over 
 their misfortune in less degree, but the art of reading from the lips 
 and other educational devices used in their behalf make their 
 condition so superior to that of the deaf-mutes of old that it is 
 cause for gratitude to every parent of a deaf child. The crippled 
 children now are seen not to be different from other children in their 
 educational rights and as needing only more consideration of physical 
 requirements to be fitted for useful work. 
   
 The significance of the removal of educational provisions for the 
 blind, the deaf, the crippled, and the invalid children from the 
 provisions of Boards of Charity and their assignment to departments of 
 state and local Boards of Education, is great. It shows that we are 
 becoming as capable in the community-at-large of understanding the 
 radical difference between those who are defective in mind and those 
 who are merely handicapped by loss of some special sense or some 
 physical power as loving and wise parents have been when either 
 defective or handicapped children have called upon them for special 
 care. The children that find it harder than most of their age and 
 station to grow up to full enjoyment and use of life's opportunities, 
 because of some weight of affliction, are, we now know, entitled to 
 all the training that the normal child receives and whatever else of 
 special education their condition requires. The children that can 
 never grow up to mental maturity, even with all that educational 
 ingenuity can offer, are the permanent members of Society's Infant 
 Class. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON THE CHILDREN THAT NEVER GROW UP 
   
 What is the modern social program in respect to the care and 
 
      training of the feeble-minded? 
   
 What should fathers and mothers of the feeble-minded do to help 
 
      realize that program? 
   
 How far should social control compel the segregation or 
 
      sterilization, or both, of those obviously unfit to become 
      parents? 
   
 What can be done by mental hygiene to lessen the numbers of the 
 
      insane, the "queer," the weak-willed, and the slow-minded? 
   
 The consensus of experts seems to indicate that the first need 
 
      is to segregate in suitable institutions under permanent 
      custodial care all the markedly inferior who cannot be 
      self-supporting and who lack power of self-protection against 
      the grossest forms of exploitation; the second need is to 
      introduce new methods of supervisory control and humane 
      protection and training in the care of those who are not normal 
      but who, under favorable conditions of vocational guidance and 
      direction and with a new home environment suited to their 
      peculiar needs, may become wage-earners and fairly useful 
      members of society. In the town for which you seek better 
      conditions, which of these efforts is most needed at the 
      present time? Is it to meet the needs for institutional care or 
      for supervision adequate and well applied for those left either 
      in their own homes or placed in colony-care? 
   
   
 FOOTNOTES: 
   
 [14] See "Mental Diseases in Twelve States," as reported in 1919 by 
 Horatio M. Pollock, Ph.D., Statistician New York State Hospital 
 Commission, and Edith M. Forbush, Statistician of National Committee 
 for Mental Hygiene, published in _Mental Hygiene_ of April, 1921. 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER XI (PRODIGAL SONS AND DAUGHTERS) 
   
     "Because of fathers' sins the cost 
     Is counted in the children's blood; 
     They starve where once they might have stood 
     Content and strong as bird or bee."--H.H. 
   
   "The primary function of social science is to interpret men's 
   experience in passing from stage to stage in the evolution of 
   human values."--ALBION W. SMALL. 
   
   "Every wrong-doer should have his due. But what is his due? Can we 
   measure it by his past alone, or is it due any one to regard him 
   as a man having a future as well? As having possibilities for good 
   as well as achievements in bad?"--JOHN DEWEY. 
   
   "Judge not, that ye be not judged. He that is without sin among 
   you, let him first cast a stone."--JESUS. 
   
   "The Sage is ever the good Saviour of men; he rejects none. For 
   the good men are the instructors of other good men and the bad men 
   are the material for the good men to work upon. The good I would 
   meet with goodness, the not-good I would meet with goodness 
   also."--LAO-TSZE. 
   
   "The good man is apt to go right about pleasure and the bad man is 
   apt to go wrong. It is only to the good man that the good presents 
   itself as good, for vice perverts us and causes us to err about 
   the principle of action."--ARISTOTLE. 
   
   "I cannot but think that the extreme passion for getting rich, 
   absorbing all the energies of life, predisposes to mental 
   degeneracy, to moral defects, or to outbreaks of insanity in the 
   offspring."--MAUDESLEY. 
   
   "Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world or out of it which 
   can be called good without qualification except a Good 
   Will."--KANT. 
   
   "The object of moral principles is to supply standpoints and 
   methods which will enable the individual to make for himself an 
   analysis of the elements of good and evil in the particular 
   situation in which he finds himself,"--JOHN DEWEY. 
   
   "I call that mind free which resists the bondage of habit, which 
   does not live on its old virtues, which does not enslave itself to 
   precise rules, but which forgets what is behind, listens for new 
   and higher monitions of conscience, and rejoices to pour itself 
   forth in fresh and higher exertions."--CHANNING. 
   
   
 =Who Should Hear Sermons on the Prodigal Son?=--A young woman deeply 
 interested in social service was asked by the warden of a prison to 
 address its fifteen hundred inmates on a Sunday morning when they 
 should be all assembled in Chapel. Hesitating at undertaking such a 
 difficult task, she asked the warden what he would think she should 
 talk about. "Anything you like," he said, "except this: don't speak on 
 the prodigal son, for the last fourteen ministers and speakers have 
 read that parable and talked about it." "Indeed, no," answered the 
 young woman, "that parable is not for them. They should be taught what 
 is justice to the elder brother and preached to from the text, 'Work 
 out your own salvation.'" It is really a bit difficult to find just 
 the right audience for a preachment on that appealing parable. The 
 harsh-natured fathers who most need its lesson are not likely to be in 
 church when it is read and the tender fathers often need to be 
 stiffened up to work with all the rest of society to make the prodigal 
 behave better; and the elder brothers, the hard-working "sons of 
 Martha," who have to save in order to pay the taxes for the 
 institutions and agencies that take care of the prodigal, should not 
 have the fact that their sacrifice and service are usually taken as a 
 matter of course unduly emphasized when they meet their fellows. 
   
 The fact is that the prodigal, like the genius, is often one who takes 
 life's practical affairs so lightly that until he is really hungry in 
 the far land whither he has taken himself for pleasures denied at 
 home, he seldom considers how his behavior affects the rest of the 
 family. Moreover, the prodigal is often such a charming and engaging 
 creature that all is forgiven him many times more than is good for his 
 soul, and who, therefore, has many fatted calves set before him in 
 renewed festivals over his repeated home-comings. 
   
 Yet, when all is said in the way of caution against overindulgence of 
 the wayward, the one thing about parental love that marks it as the 
 supreme type of affection is the fact that it holds all its own in 
 permanent bond whatever the character of the child or his return for 
 devotion. 
   
 =Distinction Between the Mentally Competent and Defective in Criminal 
 Class.=--The parent who has a prodigal son or daughter to-day has the 
 benefit of much social wisdom and much educational treatment of the 
 wayward, unknown in the past. In the first place, we are learning to 
 sort out in the criminal and vicious classes those who are mentally 
 responsible and those who may be supposed to be the helpless victims 
 of their instincts and tendencies.[15] If it is true, as one has said, 
 that "the test of sound moral character is that it possesses coherence 
 under liberty and has learned those various arts of adaptation to 
 ever-varying circumstance which make it a working quality, constant, 
 rational, and automatic," we must perceive the intimate connection 
 between mental power and moral competency. In point of fact, we now 
 know that the overwhelming majority of criminals and constantly 
 vicious persons, in ordinary times when no social hysteria of recent 
 war gives a "crime wave," come from the mentally feeble or perverted 
 types. 
   
 The draft examinations in the Great War gave a shock to all students 
 of social conditions in their revelation of the widespread 
 deficiencies, physical and mental, of young men of our country. Mr. 
 Henry Wysham Lanier, writing on this topic, shows "that out of a total 
 of fifty-four millions of men twenty-six millions were either in the 
 Army or Navy or registered and ready for call," and that of these 
 "three millions out of thirteen were unfit to serve their country as 
 soldiers." Nearly three-quarters of a million had some mechanical 
 incapacity, defects in bones, joints, etc. About one-half million had 
 imperfections of sense organs and nearly as many serious troubles of 
 the circulatory system. A third of a million showed nervous and 
 mental incapacity for the soldier's work. About 300,000 had 
 tuberculosis or severe venereal disease. About the same number had 
 skin or teeth ailments. Altogether, the first severe examinations 
 weeded out as unfit for the service nearly one-third of those who were 
 drafted. 
   
 In addition to the revelation of physical and mental defects in the 
 average young manhood of our country, it was found by further 
 examination that five and a half millions of our young men were 
 illiterate. These facts show that in the mass of people from which 
 criminals and vicious people are recruited, large numbers have defects 
 of body, mind, or education, which handicap them in pursuit of an 
 honest living or in the search for helpful pleasures. The step to be 
 taken in order to help the family to deal justly and humanely, but 
 with due response to social duty, with the prodigal sons and 
 daughters, may be briefly outlined as follows: 
   
 First and foremost, the weeding out from every field of competitive 
 life those manifestly incapable of holding their own in 
 self-protection and self-support. The unemployable among the 
 unemployed, the hopelessly criminal and vicious who cannot be rescued 
 from their condition, the more permanently backward among the school 
 pupils, the incompetent among parents, and the dead weight of the 
 "born paupers," all these must somehow be socially carried with least 
 expenditure of social force and at least cost to family stability and 
 family well-being. We have not yet learned to do this, but in every 
 field of social effort the primary need is to see what is the right 
 thing to do. When the ideal is accepted we are already a long way 
 toward learning the lesson of the method to be pursued to carry out 
 the ideal. 
   
 =Moral Invalids.=--In the second place, when we have really 
 ascertained who among criminals and the habitually vicious, and who 
 among the recipients of "material relief" who are constantly returning 
 for more aid, and who among the unmarried mothers, and who among the 
 dependent children are really feeble-minded or morally imbecile, we 
 must segregate these as fast as we are able to supply the right 
 artificial environment for their weakness and treat them as incurable 
 moral and mental invalids. We must cease to deal with such as with 
 responsible human beings, who might do better if only they would. The 
 "indeterminate sentence" is a step toward such treatment, but it is 
 often rendered wholly futile by being mixed with "reward of shortening 
 term for good behavior in prison." Good behavior inside prison walls 
 gives no proof of ability to take good care of one's self outside 
 those walls; it may be only a proof that the moral weakling has to 
 have an external conscience and a strict watch in order to be amenable 
 to even simple rules. The parole system is also liable to great 
 misunderstanding and serious social dangers when it is used without 
 the most scientific knowledge of the mental power of the man or woman 
 concerned, and without utmost care in selection of work-place and 
 living conditions of the paroled prisoner. The essential thing in all 
 social effort to do justice to the wayward is to find out about them 
 and manage for them the essentials of environmental influence. If, as 
 many think, after careful study of large groups of wayward and 
 criminal, more than half, almost two-thirds of those who come before 
 the law for punishment are of less mental capacity than normal 
 children of twelve years of age, then we must take social care of them 
 as we would undertake to do if they were really under twelve. And the 
 parents of prodigal sons and daughters must help with all the might of 
 their parental affection in inspiring and supporting a public opinion 
 to that end. 
   
 =Rehabilitation of the Competent.=--In the third place, for the 
 one-half to one-third of criminal and habitually vicious left after 
 the mentally incompetent are given proper care, we must use all the 
 rehabilitation methods that society has devised and be more ingenious 
 than we have yet been in adding to them. When such methods as Thomas 
 Mott Osborne used fail, they generally fail because they are applied 
 to those whom we should put under perpetual care, those indicated 
 above as incompetent to life's demands. To try and make over a nature 
 too weak in fibre to have anything of will or determination to "stitch 
 to" is to have a response only when under constant supervision, and 
 inevitable backslidings follow as soon as self-control is called for. 
   
 It is true, however, that many who have gone far wrong make good and 
 reach to a high attainment of character. They are the "occasional 
 criminals," the "fallen" who met with extraordinary temptation, the 
 too hardly used by fate, the too early exposed to evil influences, the 
 wild natures too strictly curbed by mistaken methods of control, the 
 orphans without parental love and guidance, the victims of broken 
 family life, the "under-dogs" that could not make a way out to 
 successful vocation or to happy human companionship. These occasional 
 criminals among men, and the women or girls leading to sex 
 temptations, may be often saved if so as by fire, and live to help all 
 others to a stronger and better life than they have known. As this 
 book is written the news comes of the death of such a woman in 
 Chinatown of New York slums, a girl who had descended to the depths of 
 vice but who came up at the call of the Salvation Army and spent the 
 life left to her in helping others, such as she had once been, to hear 
 and obey that call. Some men show such power of moral recovery as to 
 put to shame those never tempted to a fall. These prove that mental 
 power and the raw material of character, even after many untoward 
 experiences, may take a fresh start and enable men and women to "rise 
 on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things." 
   
 =The Right Use of Leisure Time.=--In the fourth place, the agencies of 
 social protection of child-life must coöperate with all parents, 
 whether those parents are wise or foolish, strong or weak, in 
 preventing occasional criminality and preventable vice. 
   
 The helpful use of leisure time is a vital factor in the prevention of 
 vice and crime. The pioneer study of "Public Recreation Facilities" in 
 the _Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science_ of March, 
 1910, indicates lines of social service in this particular which have 
 been followed to great social advantage. 
   
 =The Moving Picture.=--The influence of the "movies" is the strongest, 
 the most all-compelling influence to which children have ever been 
 subjected. There has never been an agency that so appealed to all the 
 senses, especially to the eye with its supreme registry of 
 impressions, and we have so far let it play upon child-life with 
 little direction from the educative process. What it is right and 
 helpful to read is not always right and helpful to put upon the stage, 
 with the more vivid and popular appeal to eye and ear and with the 
 lessened opportunity of the drama to explain and soften and balance 
 the presentation of tragedy and evil. What the drama may safely give 
 to the smaller and generally older audiences which it draws may not be 
 suitable from any point of view, either of art or of moral influence, 
 for the coarser and more pronounced representation of the moving 
 picture. There is a place for film presentation that is unique and it 
 may easily become the greatest educational agency in all recreational 
 life. That place, however, seems self-limited to pictures of life that 
 can be imitated without social harm, insofar as very young children 
 are concerned. 
   
 =Needed Supervision.=--Although much will inevitably be given in the 
 moving pictures which contains incidents that any wise person would 
 not take part in for themselves, the main ideal and the outcome of the 
 situations must be such as to leave a tendency toward good and not 
 toward evil, if children and youth are safely to receive its strong 
 impressions. This is understood by those who are "trying to elevate 
 the moving picture," but too often the reformers and the educators are 
 so far removed from the main sources of control of any business or art 
 centre that they only brush the outskirts of the agencies that purvey 
 to public amusement and fail to reach any citadel of real control. 
 There is a general uneasiness, however, among many people of all 
 classes, even those usually very easy-going about any social 
 influence, as they read the tales of children testifying in the courts 
 as to their "hold-ups" and their burglaries that they did them "like 
 the movies" they had seen. It is surely true that the next thing we 
 must do is to tame these "movies" and make them work in social harness 
 for the better, and not the worse, in the lives of children and youth. 
 What line of cleavage may be drawn between what the elders may see and 
 what should not be allowed so vividly to impress the younger minds, no 
 one can predict. The recent public announcement of a determination to 
 cleanse and uplift the moving picture business from within its own 
 management is a most hopeful sign. But surely no parent can throw all 
 the blame of any evil influence of a film exhibit upon the managers of 
 a theatre! Where are the parents, and what are they about, that they 
 do not know what pictures their children see and how often they go to 
 any place of amusement? 
   
 =The Automobile and Its Influence.=--The same thing is true of the 
 automobile, that now so often takes the youth of the well-to-do 
 classes too swiftly away from necessary social safeguarding. The 
 inventors and makers of these machines are not responsible that 
 criminals use them for unprecedented escape from arrest, and boys and 
 girls go to destruction of honor and purity in a whirl of wind and 
 dust. As in all the new inventions and discoveries, we have gained 
 more control over material things than we have yet learned how to use 
 for either our physical or moral good. We shall sober down, no doubt, 
 and learn to wholly profit by the new wonders of motion and of 
 recreation. 
   
 =Parents Need Social Help in Moral Training of Children.=--Meanwhile, 
 the parents who are trying to make the right atmosphere and secure the 
 right influences for their children have a more difficult task than in 
 any previous time; for the young can so much more easily take on all 
 the new appliances as a part of their daily life and can so swiftly 
 change from old ways to the unaccustomed. Some of the most selfish and 
 cruel of the prodigal sons and daughters of our time find it easy to 
 escape from any parental appeal in the air or by the whirling wheels 
 of the machine or in any of the various ways by which space and time 
 are now annihilated. And "out of sight, out of mind" is true of their 
 psychology. All of which makes it clear that to-day, as in no previous 
 time, we must all stand or fall together. The old home privacy is for 
 the most part gone, the old home isolation wholly departed. All 
 recreation is more and more in the open and appeals at one and the 
 same time to all youth. The standards have to be raised for all or 
 they cannot be held firm for the favored few. Democracy, which aims to 
 make all better, may work to make all cheaper in taste, more vulgar in 
 language, less capable of fine expression of noble ideals, unless a 
 social conscience and a social intelligence take command of the common 
 life. 
   
 It is, therefore, to-day, not enough to call upon parents to try and 
 keep their own sons and daughters from the prodigal life, it is a 
 necessity, stronger than ever before, to make the influences which all 
 must share what all careful and wise parents wish for their own 
 children. 
   
 This is a mighty task, one that in the United States of America, with 
 its cosmopolitan population, and its multitude of people with a 
 smattering only of education or culture but with economic ability to 
 gratify their undeveloped tastes, is more vast and more pressing than 
 any nation has yet tried to accomplish. While we are working at it we 
 may well comfort ourselves by remembering that each generation has to 
 meet new problems, and that somehow, even when the young start wrong 
 or meet with overwhelming temptations or fail to get at the right time 
 the impulse toward the best which they need, life has them in hand and 
 teaches by experience much which helps them onward. The tendency of 
 life is toward strength and health and goodness and idealistic aims 
 and choice of the best each person knows. It is true, and the best 
 thing in human experience, that what parents cannot do for those they 
 love, life itself does for them, perhaps with needless suffering that 
 the wise and loving parent would have saved them had they but heeded, 
 but with a thoroughness which experience alone can give. 
   
 =Parental Love for the Black Sheep.=--The attitude of parents toward 
 the black sheep who does not change his ways of evil and does not 
 become a comfort but remains always a burden and sorrow, is one of the 
 saddest and one of the noblest of human exhibits in sympathy and 
 affection. A woman of the finest nature who as a girl was captured in 
 imagination by a man of brilliant quality but of peculiar cruelty and 
 wickedness of nature, and guilty, after their marriage, of many 
 crimes, had two sons. One was like herself and became a man honored by 
 all, and of the greatest help to his mother. The other seemed the 
 image of his father in all ways, personal beauty, brilliant talent, 
 and a naturally depraved character. He landed in prison, sentenced for 
 many years for forgery and long-sustained robbery of a bank. His 
 mother said with truth that she never had had a moment's relief from 
 the most wearing anxiety until he was safely behind prison bars, where 
 he could no longer torture his young wife or hurt anyone else by his 
 wrong actions. Yet that mother, when he was breaking her heart by his 
 actions and most willing to do it, never failed in love, in patience, 
 in deep understanding of his moral twist and incapacity. 
   
 A girl born of ordinarily intelligent and moral parents became a 
 prodigy of sex perversion and the accomplice of thieves and murderers. 
 She gave untold misery to all her family, but the father never gave up 
 his search for her when she left the home and never failed to give her 
 succor and the most tender care when she came back worn and ill, and 
 at last left all other interests in life to snatch her away from bad 
 companions and try to establish her in a new place and a better 
 surrounding. 
   
 The story of the prodigal son was taken from life itself; it is the 
 moving story of the one greatest affection of the family bond, that 
 for the bone of bone and the flesh of flesh, the child that needs most 
 the tenderness of the parent, the child that has worn out all other 
 patience and lost all other consideration and has only the claim of 
 its deep need to insure its parent's service. 
   
 =Children's Courts.=--Society has lately become wise and humane enough 
 to establish Children's Courts for Juvenile Delinquents. These, 
 beginning merely in "Separate Hearings" in Boston Courts, and assuming 
 definite and autonomous form in Chicago, have become more widespread 
 and more inclusive in character. Now we are securing, as by a recent 
 State Law in New York, the County Courts for children, in which the 
 limitations of local sentiment and neighborhood reluctance to testify 
 of family conditions are surmounted and yet the near-at-hand interest 
 in the children is preserved. 
   
 All modern philanthropy tends toward dealing with wayward boys and 
 girls as those who need and should have not punishment but education, 
 necessary but kindly restraint, protection from bad surroundings and 
 training toward self-support. To this we are adding Domestic Relations 
 Courts dealing with juvenile delinquents not, as some one has said, 
 "so as to punish parents for the wrong-doing of their children," but 
 rather as indicating the recognition of the fact that one member of 
 the family cannot be "saved" without an effort to save all the other 
 members, and that in the family relationship there are permanent bonds 
 that courts should recognize and seek to enforce and make more helpful 
 to every individual concerned. 
   
 =Domestic Relations Courts.=--When the history of cases coming before 
 either Children's Courts or Domestic Relations Courts is studied, 
 certain facts of social condition stand out prominently as causes for 
 juvenile delinquency. First of all, the broken family, one in which 
 there has been separation of father and mother, is a cause of 
 child-neglect and consequent wrong-doing. The death of either parent, 
 also, is often the cause of such unhappiness or privation in the home 
 as to induce disobedience to law and bring the child before a court. 
 The lack of employment by the father or his too low wages, which 
 reduces the family income dangerously and makes the mother attempt to 
 be both breadwinner and care-taker of the home, and hence lessens 
 family comfort and sends the children on the streets for amusement, is 
 also a cause often appearing as a reason for delinquency. The evils of 
 housing congestion, too many families living in one building or in one 
 neighborhood without chance for privacy, choice of companionship or 
 household arrangements conservative of domestic virtue or happiness, 
 these evils constitute a heavy indictment of society in the returns of 
 Children's Courts. The complex problems which the immigrant faces, 
 with his children early learning the language of the country to which 
 he has come, while it is to him a sealed book, are responsible for 
 much juvenile delinquency. Jacob Riis has told us, in compelling 
 description, the story of the evolution of the "gang" and of the 
 "tough" from the children of parents who, well-meaning and in their 
 own ancestral land capable of parental control, here lose command of 
 the family life because the children have to become the interpreters 
 and representatives of the family in the new country to a degree that 
 reverses the natural order of dependence and direction in the family 
 life, and gives the children undue power of leadership in family 
 affairs. As Professor Cooley wisely says, "It is freedom to be 
 disciplined in as rational a manner as you are tit for." We might give 
 the converse of this truth in the statement that it is not freedom but 
 dangerous tendency toward anarchy and disaster to be called upon for 
 rational decisions in advance of our intelligence and will-power, and 
 a tragedy to lose the habit-drill of parental control in the period of 
 life when that is a necessary foundation for wisdom in independent 
 choice. The child of the immigrant often lands in the Children's Court 
 not because he is bad or stupid or even mischievous by nature, but 
 because he is too early forced by circumstances into a position of 
 command and of unrestricted choice in action, due to the ease with 
 which the young can learn new ways and the difficulty of the old in 
 mastering strange language and manners. 
   
 =Dangerous Rebound from Ancient Family Discipline.=--Again, the 
 Children's and the Domestic Relations Courts bear testimony to the 
 fact that to-day we are in a rebound from inherited forms of 
 discipline of children and youth which have given to all, immigrant 
 and native-born alike, a feeling that society exists for their benefit 
 and that they owe nothing to society in return. The very 
 standardization of child-care by public demand, in matters of health 
 and education, of free books and free recreation and free music and 
 free parks and playgrounds and even free lunches in schools, and free 
 baths and medical and nursing care--all that is increasingly called 
 for and provided out of the public purse for the nurture and 
 development of child-life--tend toward giving children and youth the 
 idea that the world belongs to them. 
   
 The old crushing and often cruel pressure of older life upon the young 
 is happily gone. The new ideals of education, within the school and 
 the home, which emphasize the right of each human being to its own 
 development into a unique, a free and a happy personality, are ideals 
 that must grow in realization more and more if we are to have fit 
 people for making democracy work toward the rule of the best. It is, 
 however, profoundly true that we have gone farther in demand for and 
 effort toward individual freedom than we have in any translation of 
 the old social pressure upon the individual conscience and life to 
 assume social obligations and bear them worthily and usefully. There 
 is a dry rot at the core of any class or any nation which turns its 
 inmost psychology toward what it can get from life without regard to 
 what it should give back to life. Too many children and youth in 
 conditions in which, happily, the old despotism of age is outgrown, 
 have unhappily missed the old sense of obligation and old call to 
 service which the earlier forms of family and school discipline 
 implanted in all responsive natures. 
   
 =Do Modern Youth Need New Community Disciplines?=--There is abundant 
 evidence that William James was profoundly right when he suggested a 
 need in youth for some required devotion to "the collectivity that 
 owns us," some "moral equivalent for war" and the military drill of 
 older forms of civic order. When the Athenian youth took his oath of 
 devotion to the city of his birth, he signalized his coming of age and 
 expressed the ideal of service of each to all and all to each. This is 
 not the place for detailed discussion of what is lacking in modern 
 training of American Youth analogous in spirit and effect to this 
 classic custom. It must be insisted, however, as we discuss the 
 conditions that make for juvenile delinquency, among the children and 
 youth otherwise normal and capable of useful life, that we have not 
 done all that democracy demands when we have made children healthy, 
 sent them to tax-supported schools, prevented them from too early 
 earning at "gainful occupations," and instituted all manner of 
 recreative and stimulating provisions for their free use. We must also 
 give them some sense of what Seneca meant when he said, "We are all 
 members of one great body; remember that each was born for the good of 
 all." We must also burn deep into the consciousness of youth in some 
 fashion that shall be through our modern mechanisms as effective as 
 were the old "Fraternities" of primitive life, and as are still the 
 outworn but persistent forms of military discipline, that idea of 
 subordination of private whim to public well-being which lies at the 
 base of all true and ordered social advance. The Children's Courts are 
 a response to the effort of society to give each child a fair chance 
 in life. There are needed, also, devices of education and of 
 compulsory social service and social obedience which may tend to give 
 society a fair deal from every adult. 
   
 Prodigal sons and daughters, therefore, who are abnormal, weak, 
 morally invalid, must be cared for in the way easiest and best for the 
 social whole. Parents must help and not hinder in that task. 
   
 Prodigal sons and daughters who are normal save for some accidental 
 divergence from legal or actual right-doing must be helped to come 
 back into the line of social usefulness. And, above all, the facts of 
 juvenile delinquency should give us impetus, strong and intelligent, 
 toward a social and family discipline that shall make freedom and 
 happiness of childhood a way to social order and never a pathway 
 toward social degeneracy or personal wrong-doing. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON PRODIGAL SONS AND DAUGHTERS 
   
 What has been the general trend of social ideal and practice 
 
      in the treatment of the criminal and the vicious? 
   
 What part has the family played in restraint of evil tendency 
 
      or in responsibility before the law for offences against social 
      order? 
   
 What part should the family now play in these vital social 
 
      matters? 
   
 What is "sentimentality" and what is "justice" in dealing with 
 
      the prodigal? 
   
 What can be done through physical and mental examinations, by 
 
      experts, of all children, to prevent development of 
      criminality, vice, and waywardness? 
   
 In 1724 the English law held any one legally responsible for 
 
      action subversive of law and order unless he was "totally 
      deprived of his understanding and memory and doth not know what 
      he is doing, no more than an infant, than a brute or a wild 
      beast." Since 1843, the criterion of responsibility under the 
      law is "knowledge of what is right or wrong in the particular 
      case." Following the same line of change, our statutes now ask, 
      in addition, if the person on trial is generally competent to 
      understand and to obey social rules of conduct. Is this trend 
      toward the lessening or toward the increase of crime and vice? 
   
 What does social well-being require shall be done for and with 
 
      those proved incapable of social habits? 
   
 Head "The Socially Inadequate; How Shall We Designate and Sort 
 
      Them?" by Harry H. Laughlin, Carnegie Institution, Cold Spring 
      Harbor, Long Island, in _American Journal of Sociology_, July, 
 This is an attempt to introduce a blanket term under 
 
      which feeble-minded; insane; criminalistic, including 
      delinquent and wayward; epileptic; inebriate, including drug 
      habitues; diseased, including tuberculous, lepers, and others 
      with chronic infectious diseases; blind, including all of 
      seriously impaired vision; deaf, including those with seriously 
      impaired hearing; deformed, including the crippled; and 
      dependent, including orphans, old folks, soldiers and sailors 
      in "homes," chronic charity-aided folk, paupers, and 
      ne'er-do-wells, may be listed. This article attempts to make a 
      classification inclusive, yet subject to minute subheading, 
      which may make reports more definite in listing human beings. 
   
   Is such an attempt wise, and if so, how would each member of this 
      group classify the "socially inadequate?" 
   
   
 FOOTNOTES: 
   
 [15] See a valuable study by Dr. Bernard Glueck, Director Psychiatric 
 Clinic at Sing Sing Prison, entitled, "Concerning Prisoners," and 
 published in _Mental Hygiene_ for April, 1918, showing the need for 
 mental examination of all convicted persons as an indispensable basis 
 for right understanding and treatment of prisoners. 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER XII (THE BROKEN FAMILY) 
   
 "Every social ill involves the enslavement of individuals. Freedom 
   is that phase of the social ideal which emphasizes 
   individuality.--All mankind acknowledges kindness as the law of 
   right intercourse within a social group.--The ideal of service 
   goes with the sense of unity.--A likeness of spirit and principle 
   is essential to moral unity. The creation of a moral order on an 
   ever-growing scale is the great historical task of mankind, and 
   the magnitude of it explains all shortcomings."--CHARLES H. 
   COOLEY, in _Social Organization_. 
   
     "The sanctity of oaths 
     Lies not in lightning that avenges them, 
     But in the injury wrought by broken bonds 
     And in the garnered good of human trust. 
     'Tis a compulsion of the higher sort, 
     Whose fetters are the net invisible 
     That holds all life together. 
     'Tis faithfulness that makes the life we choose 
     Breathe high and see a full-arched firmament. 
     We may see ill 
     But over all belief is faithfulness 
     Which fulfils vision with obedience. 
     No good is certain, but the steadfast mind, 
     The undivided will to seek the good; 
     'Tis that compels the elements, and wrings 
     A human music from the indifferent air." 
                     --GEORGE ELIOT. 
   
     "Genuine government is but the expression of a nation 
     Good or less good; even as all society 
     Is but the expression of men's single lives-- 
     The loud sum of the silent units."--E.B. BROWNING. 
   
   "There is no other genuine enthusiasm than one which has travelled 
   the common highway--the life of the good man and woman, the good 
   neighbor, the good citizen."--THOMAS GREEN HILL. 
   
     "Let me not to the marriage of true minds 
     Admit impediments. Love is not love 
     Which alters when it alteration finds, 
     Or bends with the remover to remove: 
     O no; it is an ever-fixed mark, 
     That looks on tempests, and is never shaken; 
     It is the star to every wandering bark, 
     Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. 
     Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
     Within his bending sickle's compass come; 
     Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
     But bears it out even to the edge of doom." 
                     --SHAKESPEARE. 
   
   
 =The Problems of Divorce.=--Having treated in some detail the subject 
 of "Problems of Marriage and Divorce" in a former book, _Woman's Share 
 in Social Culture_, and also in articles published in _The 
 International Journal of Ethics_, _The Harvard Theological Review_, 
 _Harper's Weekly_, and other magazines, this chapter, to avoid 
 repetition, will simply rehearse in brief outline the points of view 
 previously expressed. 
   
 In the valuable and suggestive treatment of the family by Professor 
 Ellwood in his book, _Sociology and Modern Social Problems_, he says 
 that "divorce is but a symptom of more serious evils that in certain 
 classes of American society have apparently undermined the very 
 virtues upon which the family life subsists." If that be so, then no 
 tinkering with the laws which aim at preventing divorces will reach 
 the seat of the difficulty. The treatment must be more radical, and 
 the character of individuals be made more noble and strong, if the 
 family is to be made more stable and marriage more successful. 
   
 =Frequency of Divorce in the United States.=--The first point to be 
 noted in any discussion of the broken family is the frequency of that 
 social tragedy in the United States. The pioneer study by Professor 
 W.P. Willcox, made in 1885 and reported in his volume entitled _The 
 Divorce Problem_, showed the fact that we had in this country at that 
 time more divorces per year than were recorded in all the other 
 so-called Christian countries put together. For 1905, statistics show 
 nearly 68,000 divorces in the United States as against the highest 
 number from Germany, which is only a trifle above 11,000, and from 
 France, 10,860, and running down rapidly to the number of 33 in 
 Canada. In England, in 1905, there was but one divorce to 400 
 marriages. In the United States, in the same year, one divorce to 
 every 12 marriages. Since that count was taken, there has been no 
 evidence of a halt in the tendency of the United States to lead the 
 rest of the Christian world in this matter of separation of those once 
 joined together by marriage vows. In some of the States, the showing 
 is more pronounced on the side of free divorce than in other States, 
 since in Washington, Oregon, and Montana one divorce to every five 
 marriages is reported, in Colorado and Indiana one to every six, and 
 in Oklahoma, California, and Maine one to every seven marriages. We 
 need not accept the doleful suggestion of Professor Willcox that if we 
 go on this way, "by 1950 one-fourth of all marriages will be 
 terminated by divorce, and by 1990 one-half so terminated," for it is 
 not necessary or likely that we shall "go on" in this particular. 
 Already, movements toward the strengthening of family ties and the 
 better training of youth to responsibility, movements that tend to 
 make marriage less brittle, are inaugurated. 
   
 =Cannot Now Make Family an Autocracy.=--There are several points that 
 all must agree upon if we are to stay the rush to the divorce courts 
 and yet not attempt the futile task of turning the family order back 
 to the patriarchal or the monarchical types. In those types there was 
 little or no legal divorce, it is true, but in them inhered social 
 evils that often killed the spirit of marriage, and doomed the 
 children of enforced unions to physical weakness, mental 
 defectiveness, moral taint, and affectional suffering. 
   
 First of all, it should be noted that, although the divorce statistics 
 are serious indictments of American life and bode ill to American 
 society, they are not wholly a testimony to bad conditions. They are 
 also a testimony that he who runs may read, to the determination of 
 men, and especially of women, to exact a higher reality of mutual 
 love, mutual respect, mutual service, and mutual coöperation within 
 the marriage bond. 
   
 =New Standards of Marriage Success.=--When it was decided to 
 investigate the causes for the backwardness of school children, why so 
 many "failed to pass" and were "retarded" in the march from grade to 
 grade in the elementary classes, the first inquiry took no note of the 
 exactions of the grade standards. All who failed to move on at the 
 scheduled moment for "promotion," in any school examined, were listed 
 as "backward." Later, it occurred to the investigators, that the first 
 thing to find out was whether or not a given grade standard was one 
 that true pedagogy would approve, and second, whether there was a 
 serious discrepancy in that grade standard between the different 
 schools from which the children came for examination. 
   
 In much the same way the first inquiries as to the evil of frequent 
 divorce seemed to take for granted that all who sought divorce were in 
 circumstances that might have been socially and usefully continued 
 within the marriage bond. We know better now. We know that the first 
 question to ask about a broken family is: What was its condition 
 before the break? Did justice, and a fair estimate of the quality of 
 the union and its effects upon the man and the woman involved, and 
 their children, demand that the family hold or be held together, or 
 was there a condition that made society more interested in the ending 
 than in the continuance of that union? 
   
 If, as is beginning to be understood, it is not for the interest of 
 society that men and women should marry who are so physically 
 diseased, or mentally defective, or morally perverted as to make them 
 injurious members of a family circle, is it not as clear that in many 
 cases such persons when married are not helpful members of any family; 
 and if so, again, is it not clear that there is justification in 
 social need itself for the removal of such persons from the family 
 circle they have already polluted or injured in vital ways, to prevent 
 their doing more harm to family life? 
   
 Whatever may be thought by many who view all divorce with horror, 
 there is a tendency within that movement toward free divorce, toward 
 the freeing of the currents of generative life from evil influence, 
 from despotism, from degenerative tendencies, and from the worst forms 
 of social wrong-doing. There is, also, of course, in that movement, a 
 testimony which should make all earnest lovers of their kind learn 
 how to urge socially therapeutic treatment, a testimony to human 
 weakness, to a lack of the sense of responsibility, to a love of 
 personal pleasure at any cost to moral obligation, and to a need for 
 social control of the whole family relation. 
   
 The causes, in our country, for which more than 90 per cent, of the 
 divorces are granted, are the serious ones of adultery, cruelty, 
 imprisonment for crime, habitual drunkenness, desertion, and neglect 
 to provide for the family. This indicates that in most cases there has 
 been a failure on the score of basic family requirements from husbands 
 and wives, and from fathers and mothers, before the court was called 
 in to break the legal bond. Does this also indicate that such failure 
 of character has increased among our people to the extent of its 
 increased legal recognition in divorce? We can not think so. There are 
 special reasons why all bonds of intimate association are strained in 
 modern life, with its separate industrial, social, and educational 
 affiliations for each individual. But that all of us are going 
 downward, or most of us, is not a provable contention and should not 
 be an undemonstrated inference. 
   
 =Dangers of Extreme Individualism in Marriage.=--The primary fact is 
 that we have allowed individualism in marriage to go beyond limits 
 which are socially safe, just as in the economic order and in the 
 administration of political affairs, we have supposed that the 
 "let-alone-policy" would work social good. No other civilization has 
 been able to secure successful family life without some support, 
 supervision, control, and aid to the married couple and their 
 children, from without. We cannot return to the collective family of 
 other days. We must learn how to make society in general work toward 
 the ends of stability and social order in the family, as in other 
 social institutions, and by methods that reverence and secure personal 
 freedom and fit well into a democratic state. 
   
 =Free Love Not Admissible.=--Professor Ellwood says that "while 
 material civilization is mainly a control of the food process, moral 
 civilization involves a control of the reproductive process, that is, 
 over the birth and rearing of children." He argues from this that 
 social organization "precludes anything like the toleration of 
 promiscuity or even of free love." Most students of social history 
 will agree with this statement. We may, therefore, say that the 
 attitude of law, of custom, and of social standards, must be that of 
 demanding legalization of permitted sex-relationship, and the effort 
 to make legal sex-relationship permanent where possible without 
 sacrifice of the substance of family life to its outward form. 
   
 =Must Work Toward Desired Permanency in Marriage.=--This means a quite 
 new approach to the problems of marriage and divorce. It means the 
 inauguration of legal and educational mechanisms in the interest of 
 making people want to stay married, rather than toward an effort to 
 make people stay wedded when they wish to separate. In this, more, 
 even than in any other field of social effort, we should take heed to 
 and obey the advice of Dr. Lester Ward "to use attractive rather than 
 compulsory methods of reform." 
   
 =Needed Changes in Legal and Social Approach to Divorce.=--What are 
 the main points of change in our legal and social approach to the 
 divorce situation, which the modern need for social control through 
 democratic measures demands most clearly and strongly? They are, 
 first, a longer period of delay between reception and granting of the 
 request of a man and a woman for a license to marry. Several State 
 legislatures are now considering statutes which require an "interval 
 of three days" between the application for and the granting of 
 marriage licenses. This is certainly a short enough time in which to 
 find out if either of the parties is likely to commit bigamy if the 
 license is granted, if both of the parties are really of adult age 
 claimed, if either of the parties is afflicted with an infectious 
 disease that would make marriage dangerous to the other party, if 
 either of the parties has been a resident of a criminal or pauper 
 institution, if either or both of the parties are competent to 
 financial support of the twain, if there is any "just cause or 
 impediment" against the legal union. We may find it wise to return to 
 the old "three weeks publishing of the banns" in order to know what 
 the state is about in granting and what two people are about in 
 demanding a marriage license. In the second place, there are limits 
 outside of which society should not allow legal marriage to receive 
 its sanction. During the legal interval required there may develop 
 knowledge of facts that make it a social crime for one or the other or 
 both parties to be allowed to start a new family. This is matter for 
 serious and long-continued study, and the experimentation of our 
 different Commonwealths in determining the useful or necessary 
 restrictions upon legal marriage is not without value. The main thing, 
 however, is for society to recognize that there are just restrictions 
 upon marriage and that this is proved by the actual social burden 
 which unfit persons place upon their fellows when marrying and 
 bringing forth after their kind. The third point, which must be 
 emphasized more strongly than has been the case heretofore, is the 
 need of making the state, through its courts, the ally, not the enemy, 
 of marriage permanency. As it is now, the Divorce Court exists to 
 secure divorces. Its very existence invites to its use. The court 
 procedure in all cases of marital unhappiness which has become acute 
 enough for legal freedom to be sought should be a court procedure that 
 aims at arbitration, at "trying again," at winning harmony by just 
 concessions from either or both the parties, a court procedure 
 consciously and definitely set to the task of making more marriages 
 successful even when they have developed difficulty of adjustment, 
 rather than one allowed to act as a means of easy separation of even 
 fickle, selfish, and childish people on grounds of superficial 
 difference. 
   
 =Prohibition of Paid Attorneys in Divorce.=--_The absolute abolition 
 of any paid service of any attorney in the interest of getting anyone 
 a divorce, is a primary social demand._ The establishment of a 
 "Divorce Proctor" service in a Domestic Relations Court, with sole 
 jurisdiction over applications for divorce, is a second vital social 
 demand. Some form of legal provision which would make judges of a 
 special and honored class the paid representatives of society's demand 
 for marriage to be as permanent as individual justice will allow is 
 essential to any genuine divorce reform. The often highly-feed 
 advocate of personal wish of two dissatisfied people, the agent that 
 deals with divorce problems as a lucrative trade, is one cause of the 
 prevalence of divorce among the idle and pampered rich. Those who have 
 greater social opportunity than they have brains or conscience to use 
 them aright, and who can pay lawyers so extravagantly, give us a heavy 
 total of marital separations and of remarriage of divorced persons in 
 the United States. 
   
 Judges, the best and the wisest, must sit on all cases where the 
 breaking up of a family is the issue, and all privately paid attorneys 
 (in other kinds of social arrangement and difficulty also a hindrance 
 rather than an aid to justice) must be banished from every divorce 
 court and from every divorce proceeding, both of the richer and of the 
 poorer classes. 
   
 =Divorce Proceedings Should be Heard in Secret.=--Newspapers should 
 not be tempted or allowed to gain advantage from the weakness, the 
 folly, or the vice of any member of any family which may be revealed 
 in such divorce proceedings. The fact of whether or not a divorce 
 applied for is granted, the fact of whether one or the other party or 
 both have received freedom, the fact of whether one or another was 
 pronounced guilty of treason to the marriage bond--these are all 
 subjects for news. The reasons for these decisions of wise and good 
 judges should not be given to the public in detail. The main 
 objections to the present publicity of divorce proceedings is, first, 
 that publicity is generally in proportion to the wealth of the 
 parties, as is also the prolongation of the proceedings; and second, 
 that such reports are generally of a demoralizing nature for the 
 public to read; and third, and not least, that few if any couples 
 seeking a divorce are without fathers or mothers or relatives, 
 children, or near friends, to whom the public revelation of the 
 marital unhappiness or the personal wrong-doing of the parties 
 involved is a pain and a shame. 
   
 =Earlier and Better Use of Domestic Relations Court.=--Another way by 
 which society should undertake to supply in newer and more democratic 
 forms the supervision, the control, and the support to the individual 
 married couple and their children, which the older collective family 
 organization sought to supply, is an earlier and a better use of the 
 Domestic Relations Court, or of some advisory agency to prevent the 
 breaking up of families. There should be something analogous to the 
 old "family council," some body of advisers well known and well 
 equipped for actual service, to help the bewildered and the unhappy. 
 The religious ministry should be able to supply such help. It often 
 does do so. The circle of friends may sometimes contain those of 
 wisdom and understanding who give needed aid toward a resumption of 
 broken relations on a higher and more enduring plane. There is 
 needed, however, something between the court to which people go for 
 relief from bonds, and the solitary struggle with difficulties before 
 that relief is sought, something which, if related officially to the 
 Domestic Relations Court, would be of a more flexible and private 
 nature than most of its proceedings. We need more an aid to avoidance 
 of marital rocks than a rescue, as from a life-boat, after the 
 shipwreck. 
   
 There are many forms of advice and help which the teachers and medical 
 practitioners in mental hygiene are now developing and offering which 
 may be used later on, when we are wiser, in this work of preventing 
 families from breaking up. Regularly constituted "social doctoring" 
 for the prevention, even more than for the treatment of social disease 
 as it manifests itself in family life, is surely called for. 
   
 =The Children to be Affected Society's Chief Care.=--Above all, we 
 must place the children affected by any decision that gives society a 
 broken family in the front rank of interest and of protective care. If 
 the paid attorney were eliminated, divorces would certainly be 
 lessened in number. If publicity were avoided in all divorce 
 proceedings, much of the harm to children arising from separation of 
 married couples would be avoided. If, in addition, there were advisory 
 aid to the confused and unhappy, many now drifting to complete 
 division of interest and affection would be enabled to start on again 
 toward better realization of married opportunity. If, in further 
 addition, the Domestic Relations Courts were changed with the 
 supervisory care of all children whose parents were legally separated, 
 and the well-being of those children made the chief legal concern even 
 if it required the complete separation from both father and mother, 
 more fathers and mothers would hesitate to place themselves where 
 their parental control and their parental influence would be so 
 minimized. Yet who doubts that among the rich as well as among the 
 poor such judicial protection and care of the children, whom the 
 broken family leaves without true parental care, is needed? To give 
 children into the hands of either parent alone is in many such cases 
 no fitting substitute for the normal home influence. In any case, 
 there should be an external conscience and an external solicitude 
 enlisted in the interest of every child whose parents have made such a 
 failure of marriage and the home that the divorce court is the only 
 refuge. 
   
 This does not ignore the fact that many couples separate to the 
 advantage of the children, that many parents are quite innocent of any 
 cause for the broken family, that many times there is a rehabilitation 
 of the family life on other lines that means full nurture and 
 development for the children. The fact remains, however, that the 
 average child of divorced parents has to meet difficulties and face 
 disadvantages in life which the child of permanently united fathers 
 and mothers does not suffer, and, for such, some exterior protection 
 and supervision should be provided. 
   
 =A Uniform or Federal Divorce Law.=--Many persons deeply interested in 
 lessening the number of divorces in the United States place much 
 dependence upon a "Uniform Divorce Law" for the whole country, as 
 giving a basis for wise legislation. Recently, Senator Jones, of the 
 State of Washington, introduced in the Senate a resolution proposing a 
 new amendment to the Federal Constitution by which, if it passed, 
 Congress would have power "to establish and enforce by appropriate 
 legislation uniform laws as to marriage and divorce." The fact that a 
 couple may be legally married in one state of our Union and illegally 
 practicing bigamy or adultery in another state gives a plausible 
 reason for such a Constitutional Amendment. And perhaps the searching 
 investigation and discussion which would precede such a definite 
 change in our national law, if such change were made, would be of 
 great use in clarifying the public mind, and securing a consensus of 
 opinion as to what should and what should not be allowed in this 
 matter. Yet it is doubtful if such a law would, in itself, bring down 
 the number of divorces, now estimated by those advocating the law as 
 "one in every eight to ten marriages," or prevent the ratio of 
 increase in divorces to increase in population (now estimated "as 
 increase in population in a given period, 60 per cent., and increase 
 in divorces in the same period, 160 per cent."), or really mend our 
 family ills. The dependency upon Constitutional amendments and upon 
 legislation of every kind has, many believe, reached the utmost limit 
 of social serviceability in this country. The deeper question in all 
 such propositions is this: What, under the Constitution as first 
 affirmed and later amended, is proper subject for Federal legislation, 
 and what should be left to state and local action? We have not reached 
 a political unity as to the basic elements of just and effective 
 political method in the division of social control between the nation 
 and the various states. The habit of rushing to the National Congress 
 for Federal legislation with no plan or logical aim in relation to 
 such division, is one that may well be curbed. 
   
 =Education Our Chief Reliance.=--Meanwhile, all must insist that 
 education, character-training for strong, unselfish, noble 
 personalities, is our main dependence, and must ever be in the effort 
 to make family life more stable, and more socially helpful. Men and 
 women must be made competent to self-control, and steadied with a 
 sense of obligation to others, and animated by an ideal of 
 faithfulness to contract, and of devotion to securing mutual rights in 
 a mutual plan of life together. Such education for character, must be 
 our chief dependence in efforts to lessen divorces, as in the effort 
 to do away with all social evils. There is no magic in marriage, there 
 is no magic even in parenthood, to make weak, and selfish and 
 superficial and ignorant and stupid and despotic people into guardians 
 of the best interests of home. A man or a woman is successful in the 
 family order, only on the same basis as is demanded in all other 
 relations of life, the basis of justice, good sense, right feeling, 
 and an honest effort to realize high ideals. 
   
 =Helps Toward Family Unity.=--What remains for society to do, after 
 general moral training has worked its full service of individual 
 preparation for good intent and wise choices and competent mastery of 
 family arrangements, must be done or attempted on the basis rather of 
 helps toward permanence, than of prohibition of release from marriage 
 mistakes and wrongs. 
   
 We have left undone much we should have done to make it easier for 
 young people to find their true mates, to start right in married life, 
 and to bear the burdens of parenthood without stumbling on the way. 
 Let us not add mistakenly to the duties left undone the attempt to do 
 things we should not, namely, to overbear instead of aiding the 
 personal life. 
   
 There is nothing that works more tragedy of suffering than broken vows 
 in marriage, whether the fact of the actual separation be publicly 
 acknowledged or not. How many a disillusioned man or woman has felt 
 with the poet: 
   
     "To look upon the face of a dead friend 
       Is hard; but there is deeper woe-- 
     To look upon our friendship lying dead 
       While we live on, and eat, and sleep-- 
     Mere bodies from which all the soul has fled, 
       And that dead thing year after year to keep 
     Locked in cold silence on its dreamless bed." 
   
 =Shall Society Favor the Remarriage of Divorced Persons?=--Now that 
 the moral sense of most people allows another trial on Love's Rialto, 
 there are many individuals who can leave "that dead thing" to find its 
 own grave, and in the light of some new and dearer affection go on to 
 a renewed promise and joy of life. Can we think that wrong? Who shall 
 dare to say that alone of all mistakes of youth, a mistaken choice in 
 marriage shall be for all life a sentence of doom? Who shall dare to 
 limit the power of rehabilitation of the family order, even when what 
 has failed is the central heart of married love? Our gospel of hope 
 and courage, and renewal of opportunity, and rebirth of affection must 
 know no limits if we would rightly trust the spirit within our being. 
   
 But for the shallow, and the selfish, and the pleasure-seeker without 
 reverence for the right way of life, and for the scoffer at all high 
 moods of feeling and of ideal aim, there can be little to justify his 
 flitting about on the very outmost limits of true love. For such, some 
 check must be had in ordered rules and legal bonds, in order that the 
 race-life shall go on in safety and in social health. Meanwhile, 
 although there is much to give us pause and to demand serious study 
 and earnest and wise social work in the situation revealed by the 
 divorce court statistics, there is nothing that need give hysterical 
 alarm lest the home is being destroyed and the family abolished. On 
 the contrary, there probably was never a time when so many people were 
 really happy, each and every member of the family, in the home 
 relation; and hence never a time when it was clearer that to keep the 
 home stable and permanent, and make marriage successful in the vast 
 majority of cases, we have only to get better and wiser people in 
 larger proportion. 
   
 To understand the real reason for marital unhappiness and for family 
 instability, to know that such reason inheres primarily in personal 
 character and not in any statute, is to begin work for the real cure 
 and prevention of such unhappiness and instability. The broken family 
 may be a sad necessity, alike for individuals concerned, and for the 
 well-being of society. To prevent that tragedy is a social duty than 
 which none is more pressing or more open to social effort. 
   
 =Turning From Compulsory to Attractive Methods of Reform.=--To 
 undertake that social task, the psychology of social effort must be 
 turned from compulsive methods of prevention of legal divorce, when 
 such divorce is sought, to ways of making marriage choices wiser, 
 marriage experience more sane and better balanced by sense of 
 obligation to the nearer and more remote of social relations, and by 
 putting at the command of all, the helpful sympathy and the social 
 guidance that can alone hold to firm and noble lines the wavering and 
 the weak. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON THE BROKEN FAMILY 
   
 Is the admitted increase in divorce wholly a testimony to 
 
      moral degeneracy? If so, what can be done about it? If not, 
      what else does it indicate? 
   
 What are the main points to work for in order to reduce the 
 
      number of divorces, and to remove the social evils of which 
      divorces are only the symptom? 
   
 Should the social psychology be directed principally toward 
 
      preventing people from getting divorce or from remarrying after 
      divorce, or toward making marriage so generally successful that 
      fewer people want to separate? 
   
 What is specially needed in education both of youth and the 
 
      adult in the United States in the interest of family stability 
      and family success? 
   
 Make a list of causes that in your opinion justify legal 
 
      separation or divorce and find out whether or not these causes 
      are named in the statutes of your State. If they are not, what 
      should be done about it? 
   
 What is done for and with the children of legally separated and 
 
      divorced persons in your State? 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER XIII (THE FAMILY AND THE WORKERS) 
   
   "It is all work, and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed, 
   articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred world. For the 
   thistle a blade of grass, later a drop of nourishing milk, later a 
   nobler man. Man perfects himself as well as the world by 
   working."--CARLYLE. 
   
   
   "Every man's task is his life preserver."--EMERSON. 
   
     "What was his name? I do not know his name. 
     No form of bronze and no memorial stones 
     Show me the place where lie his mouldering bones. 
       Only a cheerful city stands, 
       Builded by his hardened hands; 
         Only ten thousand homes, 
           Where every day 
           The cheerful play 
         Of love and hope and courage comes; 
     These are his monuments, and these alone,-- 
     There is no form of bronze and no memorial stone." 
                     --EDWARD EVERETT HALE. 
   
     "Let us now praise the artificer and the workmaster 
     Who is wakeful to finish his work. 
     These put their trust in their hands 
     And each becometh wise in his own work. 
     Though they sit not in the seat of the judge, 
     Nor understand the covenant of judgment; 
     Though they declare not instruction nor utter dark sayings 
     Yet without these shall not a city be inhabited 
     Nor shall men sojourn therein. 
     For these maintain the fabric of the world 
     And in the handiwork of their craft is their prayer." 
                     --ECCLESIASTICUS. 
   
   
 =Changes from Ancient to Modern Forms of Labor.=--The change from the 
 domestic and handicraft stage in industry to the capitalized, 
 power-driven, machine-dominated, and highly specialized work-system of 
 the present day has been often described and is a part of all the 
 economic problems of modern times. We do not need here to rehearse the 
 details of that change or to speak of its effect upon workers in 
 general. What we must do, however, is to trace specifically some of 
 the results of that industrial change in the constitution and in the 
 development of family life. 
   
 In the old order the worker owned his tool, selected his material, 
 controlled the process of his task, and often was master of the sale 
 of the finished product. Hence, as has so often been shown, the 
 character of a man was so obviously a part of the stock-in-trade of 
 the worker, his judgment, probity and skill were so clearly causes of 
 his success in handicraft, that the ethical training of life came 
 definitely through the exercise of work-power. Now, as we are often 
 reminded, the worker is divorced from the management and control of 
 his work-process and is a "hand," merely attached to a machine that 
 others must choose, buy and install, the product of which is in only 
 an infinitesimal part his responsibility and of the profit from which 
 another takes the lion's share. This has made many feel that ethical 
 training in life must come to the worker from his leisure hours only, 
 and that his task must be always merely a routine one, to be got 
 through with as soon as possible each day in order that he may "live" 
 in the hours left from work. This idea cannot be accepted by anyone 
 who realizes the character-drill that may inhere in any form of useful 
 labor. The need is to permeate the methods of modern industry with the 
 creative spirit, to mix the management of all business and 
 manufacturing with the brains of workmen as well as of directors and 
 to make a new connection, strong, obvious, and thought-compelling, 
 between the worker and the control and responsibility of his work. 
 While this is being accomplished the results of the change from 
 handicraft to machine work in the family order must be understood and 
 unsocial elements in that change minimized. It must be remembered that 
 among the opportunities of character-training in work lost by the man, 
 the woman and the child and youth, by the change in industrial 
 methods, is the constant influence of the home life while at work. The 
 old industries clustered about the fireside. It made the household a 
 work-place, and some feel that this was a detriment to home life and 
 that we have a better chance to make real centres of love and 
 happiness now that we have taken out of the domestic field almost all 
 the elements of manufacture and of trade. However that may be, this 
 much is sure, that when father and mother worked together, and 
 children learned how to work while still within the family influence, 
 it was easier than it is now to make the daily task one of mutual 
 coöperation and mutual service within the family circle. 
   
 =The Old Household a Work-place.=--We have passed laws now, forbidding 
 "home industries" because so many "sweated trades" find their last and 
 often impregnable fortress in the crowded rooms of the tenement 
 living-places. This may be necessary and may be well to do, but the 
 fact remains that something inhered in the old domestic training of 
 children and youth in useful work within the home which was lost when 
 the factory was built and the young workers had to seek their jobs 
 outside the family circle. And that something of work-drill and 
 habit-forming in the interest of self-support and family usefulness we 
 are now trying to reintroduce into the education of children and youth 
 by elaborate and costly "manual training," "Pre-vocational and 
 Vocational courses" and similar departments in the schools. 
   
 =Welfare Managers in Modern Times.=--The fact that hours of work and 
 conditions affecting the workers can be standardized more easily when 
 those workers are massed in large numbers under one recognized owner 
 and manager of a great industry has sometimes blinded us to the need 
 of each young person to have constantly near at hand a personal 
 representative of society's interest in the development of his 
 character; some interpreter of social customs and ideals to follow 
 which will make for his advantage. We are trying now to get "Welfare 
 Managers," paid chaperons, nurses and teachers, into business concerns 
 to take the place of older forms of social direction and care for 
 youthful workers. These functionaries often do much good and are 
 recognized expressions of the social interest of employers. Since they 
 are installed avowedly for the purpose of making conditions better for 
 the younger, weaker, less trained and more needy of the workers, 
 "Welfare Managers" often find a hostile or at least indifferent 
 attitude toward their efforts on the part of the higher paid, the 
 better established, and more competent women workers, especially those 
 organized in Trade Unions with the slogan of "Not Charity, but 
 Justice." They do, however, reach with light and leading some of the 
 darker sides of modern industry as related to the younger workers. 
   
 =Child-labor.=--The student of industrial history knows that 
 child-labor is not a new evil. Children were often overworked and 
 cruelly driven when parents, guardians, and those to whom they were 
 "bound out" as apprentices were the only taskmasters and their labor 
 was wholly within the household. Indeed, Hutchins and Harrison, in 
 their _History of Factory Legislation_, declare that "it is not easy 
 to say whether children were really worked harder in the early 
 factories than under the domestic system which they replaced." Edith 
 Abbott, in her excellent summary of _The Early History of Child Labor 
 in America_, shows clearly that at the bottom of the ancient desire to 
 use very young persons in industry was a conviction that work, 
 constant and hard work, is the only safeguard against evil. "Satan 
 finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" was not a figure of 
 speech to our ancestors, it was statement of a sober fact. This 
 feeling led naturally to the conditions that gave Samuel Slater, the 
 pioneer in textile manufacture in New England, a collection of child 
 workers in his first mill as his only laborers and at ages between 
 seven and twelve years. 
   
 We are now able to see and remedy some evils of child-labor in the 
 factory system which passed unnoticed and for which no prohibitive law 
 was in existence in the handicraft stage. It is true, however, as all 
 must recognize, that the modern specialization of labor and modern use 
 of machines allows a wholesale exploitation of youth and of physical 
 weakness impossible in older forms of industry. Hence the facts of 
 modern industry justify and make necessary the "Child Labor Movement." 
 Yet vital and strong as that movement is, we have to-day, as has been 
 stated in another connection, a misuse of children by millions in 
 industry. We have also a dangerous overuse of youth in industry, and 
 we have a reckless waste of mothers and of potential mothers in 
 unsuitable work. We have also certain dangers to family life in the 
 turning of attention and of ambition of young people away from family 
 interests into fields of industrial activity which are inimical to 
 family success. This makes the problem of the family and the workers 
 one of great difficulty and one to be given the most serious attention 
 on the part of those who are themselves above the economic conditions 
 which operate to complicate that problem among the poor and 
 struggling. 
   
 =Increase in Women Wage-earners.=--In the first place, we must note 
 the tendency toward rapid increase of the numbers of women listed by 
 the census as in "gainful occupations." Without noting in this 
 connection the conditions just before and during the Great War, 
 conditions not at all indicative of normal increase in the numbers of 
 working-women, we trace in the period from 1880 to 1910 a rise from 
 2,647,157 to 8,075,772 of the number of women in receipt of salary or 
 wages for work outside their own homes. The estimate of 1920, now 
 given, of nearly 41,609,192 "persons of both sexes and of ten years 
 old and over engaged in gainful occupations" shows us 8,549,399 
 "females." Of these, over a million are engaged in "Professional 
 service" (a larger proportion than of men so listed and, of course, 
 indicating the great majority of women in the teaching profession). 
 More than two millions are listed in "Domestic and Personal service." 
 That leaves over three millions working in "agriculture, forestry, 
 animal industry, manufacture and mechanical industries," and nearly a 
 million and a half in "clerical occupations." The use of ten years of 
 age in such lists is now obsolete as an indication of custom in 
 employment of youth. Fourteen years of age is the norm in the listing 
 of youthful workers and the age limits should be revised to suit that 
 rise in the legal age of the child wage-earner as generally practised 
 now in the United States. With that understanding, the statistics for 
 "Child Labor Certificates" issued by the large manufacturing cities of 
 our country show an army of young workers, more than twenty thousand 
 in New York City alone, annually entering the competitive industrial 
 field with full consent of society. This all means that millions of 
 women and very young persons who under the earlier forms of industrial 
 life would have been employed (however steadily or with whatever 
 handicaps or even cruelty) within some family circle, are now under 
 the full control of mass-direction, mass-standardization, and 
 mass-influence in their daily work. 
   
 =Social Pressure on the Individual Worker.=--This pressure is in 
 itself almost a sufficient reason for the family instability now seen. 
 To divorce all the working-time, and all the work-tendency, and most 
 of the work-training from home life is to weaken the hold of the 
 family upon the average worker. Members of a family in which each has 
 definite and firm relation to some different requirement and control 
 connected with a daily task are likely to acquire an independent 
 relation to society in general. In such eases it requires a far more 
 vital and enduring affection, a distinctly superior mutual 
 understanding and sense of justice, and a far larger natural equipment 
 of tact and power of adjustment than was required in other economic 
 conditions, in order to make the family life enduring and happy. The 
 economic self-interest of each member of the family in the domestic 
 circle was obviously that of every other member when the household was 
 a workshop. Even, the land and all which it implied was a family 
 possession in primitive days. And the worker's equipment, owned 
 privately, was limited in the early days. We read that "tools, 
 weapons, slaves and captured women and the products of some special 
 skill were generally private possession, but products of group-work, 
 such as the capture and killing of buffalo, salmon, and all larger 
 game among the North American Indians, and the maize which individual 
 women tended but which belonged to the household or the tribe in 
 common, were all shared as community property." When to this communal 
 possession of products of group-activity were added control over 
 marriage portions, however those might be appropriated, and the 
 management of all property thought to be of group-value, we can see 
 that all of economic weight of influence now so individualized once 
 went into the family asset. 
   
 In the mediæval times, when laborers were gaining slowly a class 
 consciousness outlined by Guilds and Unions of special groups of 
 workers, the family was still the main centre of work-direction and of 
 united profit from work, and hence it was evident to the dullest mind 
 and the coldest heart that members of a family should work and save 
 together. Now the whole trend of industrial relationship is toward 
 making independent and individualistic connection between the worker 
 and his job outside of family unity. Even movements for legal 
 protection of the worker against exploitation by masters in industry 
 often take little account of family relationship or the varying 
 inherited family ideals. Setting the well-being of one member of the 
 family against what is supposed to be the well-being of other members 
 of the family, as in the case of some child-labor laws, may be 
 necessary and socially wise, but it surely does not lead to family 
 stability. 
   
 =Demands of Family Life Upon Industry and Labor Legislation.=--The 
 demands of family life should at least be stated and have some weight 
 in any further attempts to make the lot of the individual worker 
 better, and should be considered in any drastic attempts to enforce 
 labor legislation which sets the parent and the child against each 
 other in the courts, or which hampers a mother in what she deems of 
 vital necessity in the carrying out of her parental duty. 
   
 "The Code for Women in Industry," issued by the division of Women in 
 Industry of the Department of Labor, in coöperation with the "War 
 Labor Board" and the "War Labor Policies Board," when the questions 
 concerning standards for employment of women in war plants were acute, 
 as published in the _Survey_ of January 4, 1919, is in brief summary 
 as follows: No woman employed or permitted to work more than eight 
 hours a day or forty-eight hours a week. One day of rest a week 
 demanded for all and no night work for minors or women. The basis of 
 the wage-scale to be form of occupation, not sex; and no lesser wage 
 for women permitted unless it can be proved that their employment 
 lessens the output of work. A legal minimum wage for all women, which 
 should include cost of living of dependents as well as of individuals. 
 All work conditions to be good and safety adequately secured. Women to 
 be prohibited from working in occupations where exposure to heat or 
 cold or to poisonous substances, or where bad position or too great 
 muscular strain, endanger health. Home work prohibited. 
   
 =Should Adult Women and Children be Listed Together in Labor 
 Laws?=--There is grave question whether some of these items listed as 
 essentials in the protection of women in industry, and certainly 
 useful in the peculiar conditions of munition manufacture into which 
 women rushed in such vast numbers in answer to the call of war, should 
 form a permanent outline of the relation of law to women workers. 
 Some of them have, and clearly, a place in any future code in peace 
 time. The requirement for one day of rest in seven; the demand that 
 quality and power of labor, not sex, shall set the wage-scale; and the 
 legal requirement for sanitary, safe, and moral conditions in 
 workshops and factories, all are vital to sound social demand in the 
 interest of women workers. Are these not also demands for just labor 
 conditions of men? The eight-hour day is now fixed as a standard for 
 men and women alike, with the forty-eight hour a week definition. A 
 minimum wage, including cost of living for dependents as well as for 
 individuals involved, has justice at its base, but requires for its 
 application less a blanket sum indicated by law than a wages-board or 
 other form of discriminating commission with power to adjust flexibly, 
 with due consideration of place and of quality of work, the wages to 
 the task. Conditions of labor should be "good" in all cases, and what 
 is good should be fixed by disinterested persons. Physical safety and 
 moral protection must be secured at all hazards, and in the case of 
 women special protection, particularly for those under twenty-one 
 years of age, is needed. Any work which is peculiarly a menace to 
 health and to the race-life for mothers or potential mothers may well 
 be forbidden by law. The absolute prohibition of night work and of 
 home work to adult women may well be left in the background, however, 
 until the industrial situation is clearer for all women workers. The 
 evils of night work for the "sweated" woman, untrained for any 
 lucrative labor and who has to catch on to the labor wheels at any 
 point open to her effort at middle age, must not blind us to the fact 
 that one of the most precious things in the inheritance of brave and 
 loyal natures is the determination to earn for one's own support and 
 for that of one's dearest. The tenement labor, which is such an evil 
 in many of our cities and one so impossible to deal with adequately by 
 ordinary inspectorship provision, is not all there is to "home work." 
 It may well be that, as has been before indicated, the new uses of 
 electrical power may return to the home, and in ways to the advantage 
 of the family, some of the processes now wholly under factory control 
 and provision. The point is that while there cannot be too much 
 protective legislation for children and youth, the place of adult 
 women in the labor world must not be too firmly and exclusively held 
 by the side of children lest we add to the difficulties women still 
 experience in finding and keeping a place in the world of modern 
 industry. 
   
 =Women in War Work.=--In England, we are told, there were one million 
 women employed in war plants during the great struggle with Germany. 
 In every variety of munitions manufacture women were found in great 
 numbers, often furnishing eighty per cent, or more of the total number 
 employed. It is a fact that they "made good." It is also a fact that 
 the average of health among the working women of England rose in many 
 localities where women were employed at these unwonted tasks. The 
 reason given for this by one keen observer being that the higher wages 
 earned enabled many thousands of women, before undernourished because 
 of their poverty, to have "three square meals a day." When we remember 
 that in England there are nearly two million more women than men, and 
 that the men who served in the army and have returned physically and 
 mentally able to take back the jobs they left for army service are 
 clamoring for them, and when we remember that the struggle for a 
 standard of living never goes backward and that women workers once 
 used to good wages will not willingly take poor ones again, we can see 
 what difficulties the war has made in our sister country for both men 
 and women in industry. 
   
 In our own country the one and a quarter million women engaged in 
 industrial work directly or indirectly connected with the war service 
 when the first investigation was made in fifteen states, under the 
 auspices of the National League of Women's Service, were but a section 
 of the army of women who were enlisted in war work, paid or unpaid and 
 of various kinds. Now we have an unemployment problem of our own with 
 something of the same complaint of the men of England that the 
 returned soldier finds a woman in his place, a woman who is still 
 wanted, perhaps, by the employer and who does not wish to relinquish 
 her job. 
   
 When Mrs. Muhlhauser Richards took charge of the Woman's Division of 
 the Department of Labor in the effort to make a clearing house of 
 women's work in the interest of help to the government it was not 
 simply a measure for temporary use or of temporary value. The idea 
 still persists in peace as well as in war, and justly, that the 
 interests of women in industry require a special division of the Labor 
 Department in order that we shall be able to know what is needed for 
 their protection in the interest of family life as well as understand 
 what individual women require in justice when they are wage-earners. A 
 minimum wage is demanded and in several states made a legal 
 requirement, but to name a definite sum per week puts a stated figure 
 where a movable and changeable condition inheres in the situation. 
 Experts in labor reform, therefore, urge the passage of legislative 
 bills providing for "wage commissions to determine living wages for 
 women and minors," and such have been secured in several states. 
   
 The linking of women of all ages with minors may be necessary for 
 protection of individual women from exploitation, but again, it must 
 be insisted that such a blanket cover for women workers of all ages 
 may not be for the ultimate good of the adult, competent yet 
 struggling women, who are trying to compete with men for a place in 
 the world of labor. The fact is that we often approach the problems of 
 work and wages and general labor conditions from the angle of the most 
 needy, the most exploited, the least trained, and the poorest in 
 opportunity. This may be the highway of philanthropy and to be 
 travelled in the interest of social helpfulness, but it is not all the 
 roads labor reform must use. 
   
 =Minimum Wage for Fathers of Families Real Need.=--When we study 
 questions of labor as related to family well-being we must begin with 
 an ideal of what the normal family requires of its members, men, 
 women, and older children, and place in the first position of economic 
 requirement the family demand upon the husband and father. He must, we 
 have said, be in position to be a "good provider" for his group. That 
 means he must be trained to be a worker, faithful, efficient, 
 intelligent, who does something which society needs to have done and 
 for which employers can and will pay adequate wages. That means 
 vocational training, guidance, and opportunity. That means, also, an 
 economic system not easily convulsed by bad times and ups and downs in 
 the industrial world. That means, again, ease and cheapness of 
 transportation in order that families may live in decent homes and yet 
 the chief wage-earner go back and forth to his work without too great 
 strain of strength or purse. That means some social control of housing 
 facilities, food supply, public sanitation, and educational facilities 
 which will secure the essential of human living to all workers and 
 their families. To work harder to secure these vital elements of 
 family well-being is the task of all. If we were as anxious as 
 citizens to secure opportunity for the men and women who make up the 
 great army of average workers, self-supporting but at cost of struggle 
 often too severe, as we are anxious as philanthropists to ease the 
 burden and protect the weakness of the more backward members of the 
 industrial army, the current of upward movement of all in gainful 
 occupations would be stronger and more socially helpful. The family is 
 most of all concerned with the minimum wage of adult men who marry and 
 have children. 
   
 =The Attitude of Women Toward Labor Problems.=--The family is 
 concerned next with the attitude of women who are wives and mothers, 
 or daughters partially supported from the family purse, toward the 
 whole area of industrial problems. It may be always right, as it is 
 often necessary, for married women, even when mothers of young 
 children, to earn in the outside labor world. It is, however, always a 
 social crime for women who try simply to piece out an insufficient 
 family income to do it in ways to bring down or to keep down wages in 
 the specialty of work they take part in, especially to bring down or 
 keep down the wages of men in that specialty of work. It may be best 
 (it usually is) for young daughters to earn wages even if they do 
 kinds of work which in the labor market will not secure a return 
 adequate for full self-support. The work may be educational in its 
 quality; much that young girls do in department stores is of that 
 character; but wages too low for full self-support must be reckoned as 
 part pay for a work-opportunity mixed of training and service, not one 
 that lists the worker in full competitive position. 
   
 =Necessary Protection for Children and Youth in Labor.=--Where young 
 boys or young girls enter into the industrial world they should step 
 from either a Trade School, and if so, with the guidance and care of 
 some representatives of that school to aid them in making physically, 
 morally, and vocationally helpful alignment, or else should be given 
 half-time employment in the factory or shop that takes them on as 
 helpers and find in some "Continuation School" a right use of the rest 
 of the work-day. The right sort of protective aid to boys and girls 
 between the ages of fourteen, when the law allows some form of 
 wage-earning, and that of sixteen to eighteen years, when they may 
 safely shift for themselves, should halve the wage-earning hours (four 
 instead of eight each day or twenty-four instead of forty-eight a week 
 or alternate weeks at work or study); should double the numbers set to 
 each stated task in shop or factory; should treble the supervisory 
 control of society, in a union of Health Board, School Board, and 
 Employers' and Employees' Council; and should quadruple the fitly 
 trained teachers, the school sittings, the adequately equipped 
 recreation centres and all incitements to higher uses of leisure time. 
 The early years of every child should be held sacredly apart from the 
 whir of wheels and the din of machinery; he should then rehearse in 
 some degree, as will be later shown, the handicraft age of industry 
 and its personalizing influence. His entrance into the world of modern 
 labor should be not a plunge or a tumble but along a regulated highway 
 of well-outlined endeavor, with social influences on either side to 
 make his passage into wage-earning safe for himself and useful to 
 others. 
   
 Social protection should be less a club marked, "Thou shalt not," and 
 more an opportunity inscribed, "Chances to rise, win them!" For the 
 woman, married and a mother, there must be not so many new ways of 
 enforcing prohibitions of what are deemed for her harmful forms of 
 labor, as more ingenuity in providing half-time work, better 
 adjustments of earning facilities to domestic duties, far more 
 coöperative machinery for reducing the cost of living and for securing 
 the family against economic exploitation in food, clothing, and 
 shelter. 
   
 =Women and the Cost of Living.=--There is a field of family 
 conservation which has been until lately almost wholly neglected by 
 women; a field which must be mastered by them, the field of 
 combination of all family interests in behalf of each family need. The 
 attitude of the new voters among women who have organized into a 
 League to enable them to become better and more efficient citizens is 
 eminently encouraging. When the League of Women Voters takes hold 
 definitely, consciously, and with intelligent devotion of the problems 
 of cost of living, market supply, distribution of essentials of life 
 and the whole range of economic interests which lie next to family 
 well-being, it means that women are taking into the electorate a new 
 and vitally needed form of social control and social service. That in 
 itself, alone, would justify the struggle of women to obtain the 
 franchise. More and more men in political life will come to understand 
 what a League of women, for the most part "home-women" and 
 family-serving-women, will demand of officials in the area of basic 
 essentials of comfort and security in the home. 
   
 =The Family Demand upon Unmarried Women.=--The social demand upon 
 women who are at work in any field of personal endeavor, whether that 
 be professional, clerical, manual or artistic, has been outlined 
 before in this treatment of the relation of the home to society in 
 general as involving sortie special consideration of family needs. 
 This may seem a negligible quantity to many women, unmarried, with 
 relatives all self-supporting or well-to-do. There is no reason why a 
 daughter should be called "undutiful" or "selfish" who is absorbed in 
 her own work than why a son should be so esteemed when there is no 
 special reason why other members of the family should hold that 
 daughter's time and effort at their disposal. The selfishness may be 
 on the other side, and often is where parents or near relatives within 
 the family bond try to burden the young woman with odds and ends of 
 family service, which others might as well assume, and leave her with 
 no ambition or opportunity for personal achievement. There are, 
 however, in this complicated life of ours many contingencies of family 
 experience which still demand from daughters a share in time and 
 strength which sons may more easily concentrate upon their own work. 
 This fact, often operating unconsciously, leads many young women to 
 choices of types of work which have fixed hours and easy adjustment to 
 frequent absences from work. These give little chance for rising in 
 wage or position and often give low wages from the start. This 
 tendency keeps many women from success in work and is often a reason 
 why men distrust and oppose their entrance into a new field of 
 industry. 
   
 The first essential of character, it must be insisted, is the power of 
 self-support, of self-direction, of self-achievement. This is, now 
 seen to be an essential for women as for men. The only adequate 
 solution of problems of commercialized prostitution includes for each 
 girl capable of that attainment the power of easy and complete 
 self-support. Hence, the family has no right to take from its members 
 some present advantage which will handicap potential workers, either 
 boys or girls, in their struggle to meet adult responsibilities of 
 economic life. Hence, again, the whole question of vocational 
 preparation for girls, as well as for boys, has right-of-way as 
 against any temporary or easily dispensed-with helping in family 
 emergencies which may seriously hamper the future wage-earner. This is 
 now being seen clearly; and the consequence is that parents do without 
 for themselves both luxuries and often comforts, in order that their 
 children shall have a chance in general education and in vocational 
 training to fit them for later economic success. This fact, so 
 honorable to parents, often leads away from family unity by increasing 
 a chasm of culture and of condition between parents and children. 
 This, again, indicates that the modern standardization of child-care 
 and of parental duty has in it elements that demand far more developed 
 character in all the members of a family in order to hold together by 
 affection, justice, and higher compulsions of tenderness those who 
 have by virtue of the self-sacrifice of the older ones lost touch on 
 many of the common fields of effort. 
   
 =Farming and the Farmer's Wife.=--There is one great area both of 
 man's work and of woman's work which supremely needs better 
 understanding and more efficient organization in the interest of 
 family life. That is the basic industry of all civilized life, 
 farming, and woman's service in the farm home. We now generally place 
 our farm houses far apart from each other, and we have usually but one 
 house on the place and that for the owner and his family. We have no 
 adequate provisions by which the seasonal nature of agricultural work 
 can be so arranged by ingenious dovetailing with other forms of labor 
 as to furnish an all-the-year employment to men who wish to marry and 
 bring up families and yet do not own but work upon farms. We have few 
 means for easing the burdens of household labor for the farmer's wife, 
 and hence the larger the farm, the more property it represents, the 
 more men laborers it demands for the owner's successful conduct of the 
 business, the more unbearable the pressure upon health, strength, 
 time, and energy of the woman who is the farmer's helpmate. These are 
 some of the fundamental reasons for the drift away from farm life to 
 the cities and the towns, a drift seen to be ominous and if not 
 checked socially destructive of national prosperity when the Great War 
 forced us to take account of social conditions in the United States 
 more seriously than ever before. 
   
 The girls of the farms want to go away from home to find easier work 
 than their mother's kitchens afford quite as much as do the boys who 
 wish to get away from the summer drudgery and the winter dulness of 
 the isolated farmstead; and now the girls can get away easily and 
 often do. It is the lack of workers to adequately aid those in command 
 of agricultural life which is more than all things else the difficulty 
 that must be faced, wrestled with, and overcome if we would keep 
 adequate numbers on the farms. The effect of the drift away from the 
 country upon general family life is too evidently bad to need any 
 intensive statement here. The congestion of cities, the street life of 
 children which makes legal offenses of acts natural and necessary to 
 free play, the walking of city streets by armies of unemployed fathers 
 and those who might be fathers while harvests are lost for want of 
 laborers, the lack of food in one stratum of society while in another 
 there are no people to eat what nature provides so abundantly--all 
 this and more rises in the mind of everyone who understands that in 
 the right adjustment of agriculture to the people's needs lies the 
 best interests of all. The sorry picture of the haggard woman, widow, 
 deserted, or divorced, scrubbing on her knees all night long the 
 marble floors of a vast office-building, to hurry back to her 
 locked-in children in the early morning hours, to fall exhausted on 
 the bed until the call of the alarm clock to get breakfast and send 
 the little ones to school--this picture has been portrayed often to 
 Consumer's League and Women's Club audiences and has made many women 
 of position and of influence call for drastic prohibition of such 
 overwork of mothers. It has also made women work diligently until they 
 secured forms of help from the public purse to subsidize such mothers 
 and give them state aid until the children were able to earn something 
 for themselves. There are many who can visualize that scrubwoman, and 
 who can place beside her as needing social aid the sewing-machine 
 operator, the garment-finisher or the flower-maker in the tenement 
 sweatshop, who can not see that the farm-house mother is often 
 subjected to labor conditions that sap life and health and doom her 
 children to weakness. These opposite poles of woman's work both call 
 for better social understanding and more intelligent and devoted 
 social work. The scrubwoman, or the poverty-bound tenement worker may 
 be proper subjects for public or private philanthropy; the farm-house 
 mother is or should be the prime object of social justice and social 
 engineering for ends of social well-being. Upon the farmer and his 
 wife and also upon the miner and his wife and the forest worker and 
 his wife rest the very foundations of economic stability and 
 industrial security. Those who procure at first hand the raw material 
 of manufacture and of commerce are too precious to social order for 
 any neglect of conditions in their work. In many foreign countries the 
 land seems to shrink dangerously as population grows. In our vast 
 country and in the stretches of Canada, North America seems, as Lowell 
 said, to have "room beside her hearth for all mankind." And yet, in 
 New York City and in other centres of population, there are swarms of 
 people, many of them of foreign birth, of varying races and of 
 different nationalities, crowding each other to suffocation and many 
 of them holding out hands for charity, who might, if rightly aided 
 toward a different environment, work to full support of themselves and 
 their families in the fresh air and healthful surroundings of the 
 country. The need is to transfer city advantages to the country in far 
 greater extent, and to transfer the people who cannot find or make a 
 human chance in the city to the wide spaces and work needs of the 
 country. Rural life must be urbanized, city life must be relieved of 
 those who hinder the making of a beautiful and noble civic life, not 
 because they are incapable but because there are too many of them who 
 have not yet arrived at full capacity for vocational achievement and 
 cannot do so in the crowd with which they have to contend. 
   
 =Domestic Help and Family Life.=--For the relief of family life in the 
 matter of domestic help there must be an intelligent and an earnest 
 attack of educated women upon the problems involved. The admirable 
 suggestions of Professor Lucy Salmon in her _Democracy in the 
 Household_[16] indicate the chief difficulty in getting and keeping 
 the right sort of domestic worker. The personal relation is not that 
 of equals but of superior to inferior, and the helper in the home is 
 isolated socially from the group he or she serves. This is felt 
 peculiarly in cases where but one helper is employed within the 
 household. The petition of many housewives recently sent to Washington 
 to beg that "the restriction upon immigration now in force may be 
 lifted in the case of women who seek to enter the United States to 
 engage in domestic labor" on the ground of a household need, dire and 
 widespread, is an indication that many women, perhaps most, look 
 forward to a continuance of the present conditions of domestic work 
 but with ever-new sets of domestic workers from other lands. Their 
 attitude in this particular is wholly mistaken. Even if the races from 
 all the ends of the earth should one by one troop through the kitchens 
 of American housewives, most of them would not stay long enough to 
 even learn how to do good work in those kitchens. The first chance 
 they got the factory or shop or even the canning shed or the open 
 field of harvest would take them away. And this is not because the 
 work in the home is too hard, or the room and food not so good as 
 elsewhere, but because domestic service is the last stronghold of 
 aristocracy and no one brought in touch with democratic ideas will 
 long accept it. Miss Salmon's ideas, if carried out, would stay the 
 rapidity of the current away from domestic service. But a quite new 
 approach to the whole problem must be defined and realized by women of 
 light and leading if we would have adequate and efficient help In 
 household work. The fact that most professional or business women find 
 it far easier to get good help where but one domestic worker is kept, 
 than do most women who have no outside duties, gives one key to the 
 situation. As one woman of character and education far above that of 
 most household workers said, "I do housework for Mrs. So and So, for 
 she teaches and there is a reason why she needs help. I would not take 
 a place where there were women in the family who could do the 
 housework themselves perfectly well and wait upon them." 
   
 The absurd hypocrisy that in one breath praises all work done for the 
 comfort of the family as the highest form of service and in the next 
 demands that the family "servant" accept all manner of inherited 
 insignia of social inferiority must be outgrown. In the city and 
 suburban towns the hour-service and the various forms of commercial 
 aids to household tasks may work, as has been before indicated, to 
 gradually do away with the servant class, in the old sense of those 
 words and without much social consciousness of the change. In the 
 small towns and in the rural districts, where is now the most acute 
 suffering and need of housemothers, there must be a conscious and a 
 wholesale movement to reinstate domestic service on a plane compatible 
 with democracy and amenable to high standards of intelligence and 
 efficiency. When one thinks of the rural need for teachers, for 
 nurses, for doctors, for kindergartners, for recreation managers, for 
 community leaders, one is tempted to call for a social conscription 
 that shall make all graduates from normal and teacher-training 
 schools, from all schools for social work, and all hospitals, from all 
 playground classes and settlements, serve for a period of one year or 
 two in the country districts as their part in social organization. 
 Surely if a government has the moral right to force youth to serve in 
 war for purposes of destruction of enemies, it has a right to compel 
 youth to serve in peace for purposes of human conservation and for the 
 just sharing of social advantages by all the people of a common 
 country! 
   
 =The Application of Democratic Principles to Life.=--Finally, the 
 problems which inhere in work as related to the family have at their 
 base the same great demand for equality of educational and economic 
 opportunities which inhere in all that relates to the application of 
 democratic principles to actual living. This is not an essay on 
 economic theory or a statement of the results of special studies of 
 economic condition. Still less is it an attempt to make an appeal for 
 one or another type of economic reform. It is simply a partial view of 
 certain work conditions as they come closest to family life. There is 
 to this writer no more merit or demerit in any form of economic 
 dogmatism than in any special theologic creed. We may all differ, and 
 with reasons sufficient to our thought and without blame, on questions 
 of how we can best attain a true democratization of the industrial 
 order. We cannot now be of two minus as to the righteousness of such 
 democratization. We must all believe in giving all human beings a fair 
 chance at the best things of life; security against want, homes that 
 offer conditions for family well-being, educational entrance into our 
 common social inheritance, and leisure to enjoy the things that make 
 for happiness. The baptism of religious idealism by the social spirit 
 is now accomplished. As Dr. Walter Rauschenbusch, that great prophet 
 of a new social order, well says in his last thought-compelling book, 
 "The social gospel has become orthodox." 
   
 =Women Must be More Democratic.=--Women have been so long held within 
 family interests that they, less than men, have had the discipline of 
 democratic life within the labor world. They are often the vicarious 
 expressions of man's remaining aristocratic feeling, as Veblen has 
 acutely outlined in his _Theory of the Leisure Class_. Husbands still 
 wish their wives to be more "select" than they find it wise longer to 
 be themselves and more tenacious of inherited conventional forms than 
 business or inclination longer allow for themselves. Hence, women have 
 not, as a rule, organized their households on as democratic principles 
 and methods as men have organized their own work. Women, now that they 
 have attained the democratic position in the state which they have 
 long worked for must apply the principles they have preached in that 
 crusade for political equality in the very stronghold of social caste 
 and rigid class-feeling, the family life itself. And even if they have 
 to educate their husbands in the process. 
   
 Woman may do this, first, by wiping out and forever the stigma that 
 attaches or has attached to any woman who earns money outside her own 
 home. They may do it, second, by so relating themselves to 
 professional, clerical, manual workers among their own sex as to show 
 that they really believe in equality of rights and mutuality of duties 
 among all classes. They may do it, third, by taking hold of the 
 household service problem radically and from the basis of actual 
 knowledge of its importance to personal and family well-being. They 
 may show actual regard for the dignity of the functions implied, by 
 the treatment accorded the competent, faithful, and often 
 indispensable domestic helper. There is a big social job waiting for 
 women in matters concerning the work of their own sex both within and 
 without the family circle; and the social power of women will be best 
 shown, perhaps, in settling the worst problems of domestic service by 
 the wiser and more efficient use of better educated, more socially 
 respected, and more definitely standardized workers within the home. 
   
 =The Social Effect of Trade Unions.=--No study of the relation of 
 modern industry to family life, however brief and inadequate, can 
 ignore the question, "How has the Trade Union organization of 
 wage-earners affected the home?" The immediate and direct effect has 
 often been disastrous when strikes and lockouts marked the course of 
 industrial warfare. All war is bad for family life and especially 
 injurious to the development of children. And economic war lacks the 
 appeal to the imagination and the ceremonial prestige of war between 
 nations or of civil war in one country. We have had in our 
 race-experience for untold ages the linking of military training with 
 military defence of political ideas and of the fatherland. To fight 
 for one's country seems highly honorable. This lift of the sense of 
 community unity into the area of supreme struggle gives to men often 
 what no other experience so far accomplishes, namely, a feeling of 
 spiritual union with all other men who also struggle for what they 
 believe to be right. In labor wars; in the strife between employer and 
 employed, that sense of race unity even when struggling against a 
 national enemy, that which gives what Professor James well called the 
 "mystic element in militarism," is lacking. It is a fight between men 
 who have and those who have not and feel themselves defrauded of just 
 due. Hence, although the fight may be bitter even unto death, and the 
 sacrifices of immediate comfort for ultimate ends beyond measure 
 heroic and even wise, there can be little of the pomp and circumstance 
 that accompany national and international warfare. The Decoration Days 
 when heroes of past conflicts are praised and receive from all the 
 reverence which patriotism pays to those believed to have saved some 
 precious inheritance from harm do not yet, perhaps will never, include 
 heroes of labor struggles for equal right and mutual justice. Yet the 
 history of industrial changes shows beyond cavil or doubt that in this 
 field, as in others, he who would be free himself must win his 
 freedom. The basic principle of the Trade Union, the right and 
 usefulness of collective bargaining, inheres in the conditions of 
 machine-dominated and capitalized industry. In this form of labor 
 organization the individual worker cannot bargain individually; his 
 place in the factory is too infinitesimal and his power measured by 
 that of his employer too invisible for such personal alignment. This 
 fact is now not questioned by any but those so enamoured of old 
 methods of control of the worker by those who hire him that they 
 cannot see what has really happened both to the employer and the 
 employed. The labor struggle had to come. The right of workers to 
 combine and to work together for what seems to them their best 
 interests is as inherent a part of modern democratic ideals as is the 
 right of all citizens to vote. And since modern industry has given 
 enormous power to a few master leaders and requires so many 
 wage-earners to carry out its enterprises the struggle has necessarily 
 been hard and long. No one can justly place all good behavior on one 
 or the other side in this conflict. No one can fail to see that power 
 attained by the Trade Unions has at times been used as selfishly as 
 the power of the employers has been. But when we remember that until 
 the first quarter of the nineteenth century combinations of workmen, 
 even to respectfully ask an increase of wages or a bettering of work 
 conditions in lessening of hours and in sanitary and moral provisions 
 in work-places, was legally a "conspiracy," and liable to harsh 
 punishments, we must be glad that at any temporary cost the main army 
 of laborers has been organized from a mob of oppressed individual 
 workers. But what a cost to the family has been often paid! Mothers 
 already overworked and under-nourished still further starved by the 
 "strike relief" that only serves to maintain wretchedness, not to 
 abolish it. The sufferings of children who miss even the meagre family 
 comfort which the too small pay of the father when at work was able to 
 supply. The greater suffering of children shunned and ill-treated by 
 school mates when the father is called a "scab." The deeper tragedy of 
 experience of men who take work that their labor comrades have refused 
 because of the claim of wife and children, and are abused, both in 
 body and in denial of sympathy and respect, because they are thought 
 to be traitors to their striking fellows. What is hinted at in these 
 few words could be made into one of the great dramas of the ages if 
 only the social imagination could take into understanding and show 
 without partiality both sides of the picture. The time may come when 
 it will be seen that in all wars some heroes fall on the side that is 
 called wrong and have right to meed of deferred praise. When that time 
 comes, the history of labor conflicts will show that in the struggle 
 between the father's duty to his children and the wife who shares his 
 service to them, and his duty toward the democratizing of labor by 
 force of battle for justice and a fair chance for all his class, 
 heroes and martyrs have fallen on both sides of the line. Meanwhile, 
 the encouraging thing is that Labor Commissions and permanent Boards 
 of Investigation and Arbitration and many government devices for 
 securing a more even justice all around the circle of wage-earning 
 activity are increasing in evidence as a sign that we are on the way 
 to bring the common need for peace and order in industry to bear upon 
 its warring elements. It only needs that the great consuming public, 
 the final and the worst sufferer when labor wars are waged, shall 
 understand and use its overmastering social power to bring order out 
 of the chaos of opposing interests. 
   
 =Women's Trade Unions.=--The entrance of women into the Trade Union 
 field is a significant feature of modern industry. Denied in many 
 men's Unions the right of membership and in many fields of work 
 competing only with those of their own sex, yet obviously in need of 
 the same declaration of rights and the same class support of each 
 other in securing better conditions of labor that men realized before 
 them, the Women's Trade Union members have much the same spirit and 
 many of the same methods that men have used in similar bodies. They, 
 as a rule, stand, however, for more protective legislation for women 
 than men demand for themselves and have one element unique in such 
 bodies. That element is the membership within Women's Trade Unions of 
 women of social position, of financial security and even of wealth and 
 of broadest culture. These women who join the Trade Union League not 
 to benefit their own class, which is usually the professional or the 
 employing class, but to help wage-earning women to better conditions, 
 have often been the laboring oar in the organization and maintenance 
 of such Unions. Nothing analogous to this is found in the Men's Trade 
 Union movement in the United States. It bears witness to two elements, 
 one that women of the so-called privileged classes are growing very 
 sensitive to the claims of social justice as these are related to 
 wage-earning women, and the other that the average age of wage-earning 
 women is so much younger than that of men employed in similar work 
 that the need for help from without in any effective effort for relief 
 from bad conditions is more apparent. The transitory character of much 
 of women's work makes the permanent personnel of any Trade Union 
 League of women a smaller minority of its membership than in the case 
 of men. It is said that in any trade where both the men and the women 
 are well organized the membership of the men's Union will be fairly 
 stable for twenty years, that of the women's Union will show a radical 
 change each five years, making almost a complete turn-over in the 
 twenty years' count. That is, of course, due to the fact that most 
 women use for wage-earning only the period between leaving school and 
 marrying, usually about four and a half years. That makes the term 
 "working-girls" most appropriate and is a contrast to the working 
 man's longer hold upon his trade. 
   
 =The New Solidarity of Women.=--The fact that women of all types of 
 social advantage and disadvantage are already linked together in the 
 Women's Trade Union movement, has, however, deep social significance, 
 especially as wage-earners' organizations relate themselves to family 
 life. No woman who has had right opportunities for education and 
 family life in her own experience can work in intimate comradeship 
 with those who have been denied such advantages without aiming 
 directly for social arrangements in labor which will no longer cheat 
 any young life of its joy, its culture, or chance for its possibility 
 of right relation in the home. The signs are full of hope that more 
 and more members of each class will feel that society as a whole has 
 claims upon them above all that any group may attain by working only 
 for its own advantage. No law of justice will stand the test of time 
 save that which ordains an order in which "Each for All, and All for 
 Each" will be the rule in industry as in the nobler state! 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON THE FAMILY AND THE WORKERS 
   
 What is most important to the success of the modern family, a 
 
      minimum wage for working women or a minimum wage for men which 
      can supply decent living for a man, his wife, and at least 
      three children? 
   
 What effect has the wage-earning of married women and mothers 
 
      in gainful employments outside the home had upon the stability 
      and happiness of the family? 
   
 What effect have the laws protecting women and children in 
 
      industry had upon family life? 
   
 What effect would the proposed increase of legislation placing 
 
      men and women, married and single women, and unionized and 
      non-unionized labor upon an identical legal plane be likely to 
      have upon family life? As, for example, in the case of 
      "deserting husbands," or in work especially inimical to women's 
      health? 
   
 How can the admitted evil of industrial exploitation of 
 
      children be best and most surely prevented? 
   
   
 FOOTNOTES: 
   
 [16] See _American Journal of Sociology_ for January, 1912. 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER XIV (THE FAMILY AND THE SCHOOL) 
   
 "To prepare us for complete living is the function which education 
   has to discharge, and we judge the value of any training solely by 
   reference to this end. For complete living we must know in what 
   way to treat the body, in what way to treat the mind, in what way 
   to manage our affairs, in what way to bring up a family, in what 
   way to behave as a citizen, in what way to utilize those sources 
   of happiness which Nature supplies, and how to use all our 
   faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and of 
   others."--HERBERT SPENCER. 
   
   "The final value of all institutions is their educational 
   influence; they are measured morally by the occasions they afford 
   and the guidance they supply for the exercise of foresight, 
   judgment, seriousness of consideration, and depth of 
   regard."--JOHN DEWEY. 
   
   
   "Socialized education has four aims: 
   
   First. That the pupil shall acquire control of tools and methods 
           of social intercourse,--language, number, social forms and 
           conventions. 
   
   Second. That the pupil shall be favorably introduced to society 
           through acquaintance with science, arts, literature, and 
           through participation in present social life. 
   
   Third. That the pupil shall be trained for an occupation. 
   
   Fourth. That the motives of his conduct, his own individually 
           appreciated and chosen ends, shall be intelligently 
           socialized."--GEORGE ALBERT COE. 
   
   "The unbeliever says, 'You can never construct a true society out 
   of foolish, sick, selfish men and women as we know them to be.' 
   But the believer sees already a better state beginning to exist in 
   men transfigured by the power of education. And there is nothing 
   that man will not overcome, amend, and convert until at last 
   culture shall absorb, chaos itself."--EMERSON. 
   
   "At the present time it may be that only the least effort is 
   needed in order that truths already revealed to us should spread 
   among hundreds, thousands, millions of men and women and a public 
   opinion become established in conformity with the existing 
   conscience and the entire social organization become transformed. 
   It depends upon us to make the effort."--TOLSTOI. 
   
   
 =New Forms of Education Demanded by Modern Industry.=--When the 
 power-driven machine ushered in the new era in industry it lessened 
 both the prestige and the dignity of the individual worker in three 
 particulars. First, it destroyed the apprentice system and hence 
 reduced all workers to a level in the eyes of the employer of labor 
 and the general public. The apprentice system had used for educational 
 purposes the important period of adolescence between childhood and 
 youth. It had served with its ceremonial of entrance into the 
 journeyman's right and public recognition to give distinction to the 
 skilled workman, and it had made a nexus of social relationship, built 
 upon craftsmanship, between those of the same and those of varying 
 trades and occupations. In the second place, the handicraft system had 
 given a distinct political right and power to skilled workmen. The 
 craftsmen, and the burghers of cities who represented them, had to be 
 called upon by kings and nobles to give assent to wars and to furnish 
 the sinews of war after the Guilds had gained money-power. And there 
 has as yet developed in modern government no substitute for this older 
 and more direct political appeal to individuals, through their work, 
 to make the vote alluring to the imagination of modern laborers. In 
 the third place, the transition from the feudal law of personal 
 service from each class to each class above to the tax system of 
 modern times, whereby a citizen pays his dues to society in cash 
 instead of in such personal service, took place in the era of 
 handicraft and was so bound up with the apprentice system and the 
 Guild organization that the connection between labor and public right 
 and duty was obvious and definite. We feel that it is an advance in 
 political development when a man, and now a woman, also, gains the 
 franchise directly as a human being without regard to social station 
 or vocational approach to life. But when in any country the franchise 
 is on simply human grounds and the economic life is founded on class 
 distinctions, and class distinctions as wide and deep as those which 
 modern industry makes between employer and employed in the great 
 divisions of manufacture and the provision of raw material for that 
 manufacture, the human basis of the body politic is blurred. 
   
 When the socially bad effects of the decay of the apprentice system 
 were recognized, and the need for some new forms of distinction 
 between the skilled and the unskilled in labor was understood, there 
 was a movement to introduce into the school system a substitute for 
 that older form of craft-training. The first Manual Training High 
 School marked that movement. The starting of Trade Schools in 
 connection with certain large industrial plants or groups of plants 
 signally demonstrated an effort to reinstate skill as a distinction of 
 those who had acquired it. The pioneer work of such educators as Dr. 
 Felix Adler in the Ethical Culture School of New York, at first called 
 the Workingman's School, to introduce manual training and some 
 definite use of handicraft processes for educational purposes in the 
 grade schools, and thus make a logical connection with the 
 Kindergarten, was a striking example of the new sense of need for a 
 new education to fit the new industrial situation. The Kindergarten 
 itself, with its response to the natural desire of childhood to make 
 things and to do things and to act together in the play rehearsal of 
 activities of later life, was a testimony that the school was to be 
 called upon from henceforth to do what in the older time was done 
 within the home and to do it better than the home had succeeded in 
 doing. 
   
 The connection between these movements in education and the family 
 well-being must be clear to all. Anything that lessens the dignity and 
 power of the worker lessens the ability of the average man to be a 
 competent and successful father; just as anything that lessens the 
 dignity and power of the worker or makes him seem but a machine for 
 others to use in building up industrial organization lessens his 
 influence in the political order. The importance to the family and to 
 the state of the elements of education which are aimed at reinstating 
 standards of skill and recognition of superior ability in the 
 industrial field, by the school, can not, therefore, be overestimated. 
   
 =Education a Social Process.=--These elements are attempts to 
 socialize education. We say that education is a process in the 
 development of human personality. So it is, but it is also a process 
 by which individuals are fitted for serviceableness to the group life. 
   
 Education is not now for the first time "socialized" because we now 
 theorize upon its social function in a new way. Each group of people, 
 in each phase of social relationship, aims to express and to 
 perpetuate, through the training of the oncoming generations, the 
 ideals, the customs, and the institutional forms deemed by them 
 necessary and desirable. The educative process is indeed a personal 
 one, teacher acting upon pupil directly to secure individualized 
 results; but it has always been socially determined, both in purpose 
 and in method, by the group "mores" and the group needs.[17] The 
 family has been called "the first and primitive school," but hardly 
 with accuracy; since, although the family is the first agency to begin 
 the educative process, what each family has demanded in loyalty and in 
 activity from each child has been determined, since the beginning of 
 social organization, by what the group of which that family was a part 
 had accepted as the right and useful end of child-training. The 
 limitations of the family, therefore, in early as in later education, 
 have been as marked as its powers, as has been well shown by Doctor 
 Todd in his book, _The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency_. 
   
 =The Three Learned Professions.=--When there were but three learned 
 professions, law, medicine, and theology, and the man of action, 
 soldier or ruler, thought lightly of them all in comparison with his 
 own field of activity, the higher education could be limited to those 
 of selected classes. Now the social need is for trained talent in a 
 far broader area, and the consequence is that not only is the 
 grade-school being made over but the professional goal of college and 
 university is being extended beyond the dreams of old pedagogues. When 
 physical, economic, and social sciences were born they gradually 
 demanded a place in the educational system from top to bottom of the 
 line. The study disciplines they introduced, at first by apology of 
 the cultured, and later by open response to a social demand for 
 leadership in a vastly wider range of activity than was known when 
 colleges first came to be, have attained a higher and higher position 
 until now the various degrees which aim to differentiate the type of 
 social usefulness for which the student is prepared are for the most 
 part on a par with each other. 
   
 =New Calls for Trained Leadership.=--This pressure of the new 
 subject-matter of education from the top down, and the pressure from 
 the bottom up of the new ideals in methods of training of the 
 child-mind, have made an educational ferment which has often given 
 confusion of aim and ineffectiveness of accomplishment, but both mean 
 educational advance and educational advance in obedience to new 
 conceptions of common social need. All this movement in the 
 educational world has a direct and immediate influence upon family 
 life. What was good in the old domestic training for individual 
 life-work we are trying to put into the school, and what is needed for 
 skill and leadership in the modern industrial order we are trying to 
 put into the college and university. This means not only that the 
 family rule is less deferred to in the education of even the youngest 
 child, it also means that if we would save the family influence in 
 education we must bring the parents and teachers together in council 
 and in united control as never before. This is being attempted; the 
 Mothers' Club and the Parent-Teacher Associations now in evidence 
 being impressive symbols of a larger social movement through books, 
 pamphlets, magazines, reports, and "Foundations," together with clubs 
 of more general social type. The value of the Trade Unions and of 
 other special forms of organization of workers in the matter of 
 securing rights and opportunities in the labor world has been alluded 
 to, but the definite educational value of such class organizations 
 must not be ignored. It is true that there is a loss of emphasis upon 
 skill and good workmanship in much of the modern Trade Union influence 
 as compared with the Guild ranking of older craft-unions, but there 
 is a type of education for citizenship which, with all its crudity and 
 coarseness of ideal, inheres in the Trade Union as in few other 
 organizations. To emphasize class feeling, it is said, is to work 
 against democracy. True, but to have a political system in which one 
 class is ignored, as "hands," not heads, is still more detrimental to 
 democratic government. The class consciousness of the worker was 
 strong in the days when the Guilds had political power, and it was a 
 wholesome check upon the claim of divine right of kings and nobles to 
 rule. The class consciousness of wage-earners is needed in modern 
 times and should have its due representation in halls of legislation 
 where it could meet naturally, in healthful competition and debate, 
 the class consciousness already there in the persons of employers of 
 labor and managers of legal interests of great corporations. The 
 education that will finally unite in better understood coöperation all 
 class interests in public well-being is to be found in such use of the 
 school as will show how we are all bound together in industry, as in 
 the political body; in work as in voting power. That education which, 
 with more or less intelligence and with deeper or more shallow 
 understanding, society is now working toward will make the home life 
 more secure as well as the state more united. 
   
 =The Special Education of Girls.=--The application of new educational 
 ideals and methods to the training of girls and young women is of 
 first-rate importance in the matter of home relationship to the 
 school. And this is the case not only because there are far more women 
 than men at work in carrying out those ideals and methods in the 
 schools but because if there is to be made valid and useful, conscious 
 and definite, union of school and home in one educational approach to 
 childhood it must be largely through the mothers and women-teachers 
 that such union can be effected. The reasons for this are too obvious 
 to require explanation. 
   
 There are those who believe that there is no question of 
 sex-differences in education, that all that is needed is to open all 
 educational opportunities to boys and girls alike and give both 
 precisely the same instruction. There are also those who still believe 
 that some varying elements of child-training and the instruction of 
 youth should be retained and further developed in the case of boys 
 and girls. Some basic facts must be in mind when we attempt to answer 
 the question, Shall we try for somewhat divergent schooling for the 
 two sexes? 
   
 First of all, we must remember that we have inherited the fruits of a 
 long race-experience in which men and women were for the most part so 
 separated from, each other in functioning that the education of boys 
 and girls was made wholly unlike after sex-differentiation began, and 
 sometimes, as in Sparta, before that period. The difference in ideal 
 and in method of training was not, as some have said, that "boys were 
 trained for human and socialized work" and "girls were fitted for 
 personal and generally menial service alone." Both were trained for 
 personal character and for social ends. The men were tied to the land, 
 and the political order, and the family responsibility for parenthood, 
 and some distinct personal service in behalf of the group life, as 
 were the women. The difference, the tremendous difference, was this: 
 that the service demanded of men, whatever their part or lot might be, 
 was early seen to require a definite schooling for some particular 
 vocation, demanding some measure of intellectual concentration and 
 technical skill; while the service demanded of women was supposed to 
 be of a nature requiring only general apprenticeship within the family 
 life. The specialization of labor, as is often shown, took from that 
 family apprenticeship of women, one by one, its vocational elements of 
 manual work until the housemother seemed to need only that general 
 ability which can quickly and wisely use the fruits of others' expert 
 knowledge and technical training. It as surely added for men, in every 
 division of vocational alignment, an increasing differentiation of 
 training and of labor. The reaction upon the educative process of this 
 specialization and organization of industrial and institutional life 
 has been distinct and far-reaching. The girls were left to the 
 experiential apprenticeship of the family, since they were not counted 
 as citizens. Even the ancient education of boys was in comparison 
 formal and definite, having at its core the group loyalties which 
 united them in patriotic devotion to "the collectivity that owned them 
 all." When, again, the peaceful industries which women had started in 
 their primitive Jack-at-all-trades economic service to the family and 
 clan life needed organization into separate callings of agriculture 
 manufacture and commerce, and primitive means of transportation had to 
 be perfected for interchange of products between nation and nation, 
 women were again left out of control of the processes which man's 
 organizing genius set in motion. Hence, neither political nor 
 industrial changes in the social order gave to popular thought any 
 conception of the need for sending girls to school. In point of fact, 
 as we need often to be reminded, the fine talk about an educated 
 common people referred for the most part to boys alone until near the 
 middle of the nineteenth century. All that women needed to know it was 
 believed "came by nature." Much of it did come by imitation and 
 unconscious absorption, aided by the occasional better training of 
 exceptionally able and fortunate women; but the general illiteracy of 
 women was both a personal handicap and a social poverty. It is not 
 true, however, as some have said, that women have been "left out of 
 the human race" and have had to "break in" to man's more highly 
 organized life in order to taste civilization. Men and women have 
 stood too close in affection, girls too often "took after their 
 fathers," the family, even under the despotic rule of men, bound all 
 other social institutions to itself too vitally for the sexes to be 
 wholly separated in thought and activity. Even when most women had to 
 make a cross instead of signing their names on official documents and 
 could not have passed the fourth-grade examinations of a modern 
 school, they often became truly cultured and by reason of the very 
 demands of family and group life upon them. The reason most women were 
 denied formal school training so long after such denial became 
 actively injurious to the family and group life was because the 
 popular conviction still held that the most useful service which women 
 could render the state did not require, would even find inimical to 
 its best exercise, the kind of schooling which had been developed to 
 fit boys for "a man's part in the world." 
   
 =Formal School Training of Women New.=--When the principle of 
 democracy began to work in women's natures with an irrepressible yeast 
 of revolt against longer denial of opportunity for individual 
 achievement, and the vitally necessary and too-long-delayed "woman's 
 rights movement" was born, its first pressure was against the closed 
 doors of the "man-made" school. Enlightened women now demanded equal 
 chance with men for preparation for vocations. The school they sought 
 to enter was inherited from a past in which not only sex lines but 
 class lines held the opportunities of higher education for a small 
 clique. The ancient college and university did indeed lead towards 
 vocations, but only the three "learned professions" and general 
 training for commanding leadership in state and industrial affairs. 
 When physical, economic, and social sciences were born the study 
 disciplines they introduced into higher education appeared in answer 
 to an imperious social demand that leadership should be provided in a 
 vastly more varied range than the older civilization required. At 
 first the leaders in the higher education of women, like all _nouveaux 
 riche_, showed determination to prove themselves adept in the 
 traditions of the scholastic world into which they had so recently 
 entered. Classic curricula were strictly adhered to and all 
 "practical" courses viewed with open distrust except those leading to 
 the inherited professions, and to teaching, as these were pushed 
 upward toward college professorships. Happily, however, almost 
 coincident with the entrance of women into larger educational 
 opportunity came the broadening of that educational opportunity itself 
 to which reference has been made; and the marvelous growth of the 
 State Universities in the United States rapidly increased both the 
 more varied vocational stimuli and the wider preparation for 
 leadership now opening in our country for women as for men. 
   
 =New Training for Social Service.=--Two movements have resulted from 
 the widening of the field of higher education, movements not yet 
 recognized at their full social value, but already showing immense 
 influence both upon the vocational alignment of trained women and upon 
 the courses of study in colleges and universities. These two movements 
 are, first, so to improve the social environment as to make average 
 normal life more easily and generally accessible to the requirements 
 for human well-being; and, secondly, the movement to put the social 
 treatment, ameliorative and preventive, of abnormal or undeveloped 
 life, under scientific direction. When it was discovered that to lose 
 in death one baby out of every three born, to prematurely age or kill 
 mothers in a hopeless endeavor to make good that waste, to leave the 
 majority of the human race the helpless prey of preventable disease, 
 poverty, feeble-mindedness, vice, and crime, was to show lack of 
 rational social consciousness and effective social control, then it 
 speedily became a recognized social duty to provide schools, both 
 higher and lower in grade, which might do something to lessen 
 ignorance and increase knowledge in the practical arts of race culture 
 and of social organization for common human welfare. This conviction 
 led on one side to the introduction of courses of study in 
 universities, colleges, normal, high, and even some elementary 
 schools, which had bearing upon management of sanitation, food supply, 
 housing, street control, recreation, economic reform, social 
 engineering in politics, and kindred agencies for social betterment. 
 It led on the other side to the attempt to make the office of the 
 philanthropist a vocation, for which definite training and 
 standardized compensation must be provided. So rapidly have these two 
 elements of applied social science invaded the vocational field that 
 to-day, outside of general and special teaching, they draw the 
 majority of women seeking professional careers into work directly 
 leading to social and personal betterment. A few women became lawyers, 
 doctors, ministers, and now aspire to political leadership; but for 
 the most part women are true to their sex-heritage now that they have 
 a chance to choose and fit for their work. The nurture of child-life, 
 the moral safeguarding of youth, the care of the aged, the weak, the 
 wayward, and the undeveloped--these, which have been their special 
 tasks since society began to be rational and humane, are still their 
 main business in the more complex situations of modern life. 
   
 =Departments of Household Economics in Colleges.=--When the 
 departments of household economics were added to college courses they 
 were hailed on one side as a needed attempt to "make the higher 
 education fit women for wifehood and motherhood;" and on the other 
 side they were opposed as a base concession to conservative views of 
 woman's position, and as leading toward a lowering of standards in 
 women's higher education. They were, and are, neither of these. The 
 college courses in subjects related to the scientific improvement of 
 human beings and their environment are courses leading toward new 
 vocational specialties, which the newly outlined science of 
 race-culture demands. Women who excel in these specialties do so as 
 paid functionaries and are oftener unmarried than married. Nor are 
 these studies limited to feminine students, although far more women 
 than men choose them. The interrelation of the present social order by 
 which a milk or a water supply has to do with "big business" and with 
 law, and "a garbage can is a metal utensil entirely surrounded by 
 politics," requires some knowledge of these things on the part of men; 
 especially if they are to be "heckled" in political campaigns by women 
 voters. There are, to be sure, now outlined school training 
 "departments of homemaking" intended to help individual women in their 
 work in private homes, but such departments are generally of the 
 nature of "extension courses." Regular college courses, especially 
 those of four years and leading to a special degree, in household 
 economics, as in other groups of studies, lead directly toward a 
 vocational career, standardized and salaried, related to general 
 social organization, and subject to the "factory" tendencies of the 
 modern industrial order. Students in such courses, generally speaking, 
 graduate either to teach household arts in schools and extension work, 
 or to take positions as expert dietitians, managers of hospitals and 
 other public institutions, directors of laundries and restaurants, as 
 trained nurses, assistants or directors in chemical laboratories, 
 architects, interior decorators, landscape gardeners, and what not. 
 All these specialties are essential to social progress, and all are 
 linked to family life in general, but none of them is particularly 
 related to any one family group of one father, one mother, and their 
 children. They, therefore, while tending to make family life in 
 general far more successful than of old, fit no woman surely for 
 wifehood and motherhood; and they cannot do so unless omniscient 
 social wisdom can tell in advance what girls will marry and have 
 children and social control becomes despotic enough to oblige such 
 girls to take these courses in preference to any others; or unless 
 society returns to its old drastic compulsion for all to marry and 
 bear active part in the race-life as parents. 
   
 =Society Now Based upon Man's Economic Leadership.=--Any study of the 
 needs of the family in relation to the school, especially in relation 
 to the tax-supported, free, and compulsory educational system, must 
 take account of two outstanding facts: namely, first, that the whole 
 arrangement of society as we have inherited its condition is based 
 upon the economic leadership of the husband and father in the home 
 partnership. This continues to be the rule even in social strata 
 where the sense of justice gives both parties a common purse and where 
 finest quality of affection and of comradeship makes it a negligible 
 matter which one makes the larger contribution to the united treasury. 
   
 =Women Socially Drafted for Motherhood.=--The second fact which must 
 have its recognition in any study of education in relation to the 
 family, is that no married woman is exempt from all demands of 
 motherhood unless some "selective draft," more delicate in its 
 evaluation than any we have yet evolved, shall indicate her right to 
 exemption, and that if marriage is to continue on anything like its 
 present basis commonplace women cannot have all its advantages without 
 paying some adequate price. 
   
 =Father-office and Mother-office Still Differ.=--We are now in the 
 midst of a social order in which the father-office and the 
 mother-office do differ essentially in their requirements in the vast 
 majority of families. The father-office leads directly toward 
 specialization and achievement in some one calling. To be a good 
 father is, in ordinary family conditions, not so much to give constant 
 personal attention to his children as to do something well which the 
 world wants done and will pay for and by which he may maintain and 
 improve the economic and social standing of his family. To "give 
 hostages to fortune in wife and child" may, indeed often does, hamper 
 a man's idealistic relation to his vocation and oblige him to work for 
 money when he wants to work for fame or for higher usefulness, but it 
 serves almost always to keep him steady to his job. For the average 
 mother this is not the case. Where there is a family of children more 
 than large enough to make good the parent's share in life's ongoing 
 stream, or where physical, mental, or moral peculiarities demand 
 special attention to one child or more, or where aged, delicate, or 
 incompetent members of the family circle call for special 
 consideration, or where the environment does not provide, or the 
 income cannot pay for elaborate aids to domestic comfort from without, 
 the average conscientious housemother must give the best of strength 
 and the most of time in the service of the private family for many 
 years of life. That is to say, getting a group of children up to adult 
 independence and saving the community most of the intimate duties of 
 care of the aged and of the weak, while it calls upon the man-head of 
 the family for greater activity in his special line, calls upon the 
 woman-head of the family for a general and personal service as a 
 primary duty. This puts any vocational specialty she has chosen in a 
 secondary place while the family obligation is most pressing. The 
 result of this obvious fact is that the average woman does still have 
 a double choice to make when marriage offers; a choice for or against 
 the man, and a choice for or against her vocation. In proportion as 
 women are highly educated or industrially trained they have been 
 pressed toward some one calling for which they can be definitely 
 prepared and in which they may hope to rise in personal achievement 
 and in financial compensation. On the other hand, marriage and 
 motherhood appeal to the deepest instincts of human nature; and if the 
 man seems worth it a woman will generally risk vocational impediment 
 and awkwardness of economic adjustment for the sake of a congenial 
 mate and children of her own. 
   
 =Should the Education of Girls Include Special Attention to Family 
 Claims?=--These facts indicate that social prudence must at least ask 
 the question, Should not the education of girls include some distinct 
 recognition of special problems to be met, often in acute experience 
 of contrary currents of personal desire and social pressure, in the 
 lives of young women? As has been shown in other connection what we 
 are witnessing now in domestic life is the passing of the servant 
 caste, of the ordinary "hired girl" and of the unpaid family drudge; 
 not the eclipse of the housemother or the waning of the homemaker's 
 power or charm. In this household change and in the demand that goes 
 with it upon any woman who would have or make a home, and with clear 
 understanding of the new responsibilities which the new freedom of 
 women place upon them, certain fundamental principles should be held 
 firmly in mind as we deal with special problems of adjustment created 
 by new social situations. First of all, let us admit, and never cease 
 to emphasize the fact, that the social education of women demands from 
 now on the most scrupulous regard for the training of every normal 
 girl for self-support. This cannot be too much emphasized. This is the 
 only sure foundation for socially helpful sex-relationship and for 
 that democratization of the family without which social progress is 
 now impossible. The social education of women in general demands, 
 also, the cultivation of domestic tastes and of some measure of 
 household technic, not as a concession to the past, but as a safeguard 
 of the future, in such fashion that the call to personal service of 
 the family life may recall familiar and pleasant educational 
 activities. These educational activities should precede those which 
 tend directly toward vocational preparation for self-support. This 
 point, too, is vital. The age when almost all little girls like to do 
 things which concern the family comfort is from the eighth to the 
 fourteenth year, a period too young for proper vocational drill. Then, 
 when they are most likely to be ordered out of the kitchen if there is 
 a paid cook to give the order, and most likely to be thought "in the 
 way" if trying to help in domestic process of any sort, is the period 
 of all others when to "learn by doing" what they are interested in 
 will give them a background capable of easy adjustment to the later 
 demands of family life. The training of boys of the same ages has an 
 analogue in farming and handy use of common tools; and in the "work, 
 play, and study school" boys and girls learn much together which fit 
 both for mutual aid in the private family. The new education of the 
 grade schools, therefore, is coming to the rescue of the housemother's 
 task, as the high school and college have come to the aid of those who 
 would provide vocational careers for women. They may meet in helpful 
 alliance just as soon as a few social principles, which can make a 
 bridge between them, are outlined and accepted. 
   
 =Adjustment of Family Service and Vocational Work.=--First, most women 
 should allow for marriage and maternity first place for the years 
 socially required. Second, women cannot afford to lose entirely out of 
 their married lives vocational discipline, by the use of leisure time 
 left them by new easing of household service, even in odd jobs of 
 unpaid "social work," as is now so much the custom. The very 
 multiplicity and variety of ancient crafts practised in the home make 
 some one activity, held to rules of specialization, essential to the 
 housemother's development. The chosen vocation retained as an 
 avocation, during the housemother's active service, must not, however, 
 be a chief dependence for either her own or the family support lest 
 the family or herself suffer. It must be in the nature of a leasehold 
 upon her chosen career to be retaken for full occupancy as soon as the 
 children are out of hand and she has begun to feel the call of empty 
 hours to the old familiar task. This is not an impractical plan, as 
 many women are proving by experience. And as has been previously 
 demonstrated, society in the past has wasted the work-power of women 
 past the childbearing age in more ruthless and stupid prodigality than 
 any other of its treasures. Third, as has been before indicated, 
 married women with young children must learn to combine in "team 
 work," as they have never yet done, and to make engagements by two's 
 or three's for the work one unmarried woman may take alone. This is 
 especially called for in the great social task of teaching, "woman's 
 organic office in the world," as Emerson called it. The evils charged 
 against a "feminized school," where they really exist, are those due 
 not so much to the sex of the grade-teachers as to the celibate 
 condition in the "permanent supply" and to the too rapidly changing 
 personnel of those who marry. The same suggested team work would 
 operate well in all the higher professions; and the success of 
 "continuation schools" proves that half-time and third-time labor 
 schedules are perfectly feasible in manual work. The fourth social 
 principle to be accepted in the interest of women and the family is 
 one little perceived at the present time: namely, that which marks the 
 limitations of social usefulness in the specialization of labor 
 itself. 
   
 =Dangers of Specialization in Professional Work.=--We are beginning to 
 see that this process may be carried so far that a shallow and a cheap 
 person may so fill the exacting and narrow routine of a specialty of 
 manual work or professional service as to check ambition and power to 
 achieve a full and rich personality. Last of all, the social 
 principle, by which the claims of personality and the demands of 
 social solidarity (now so entangled in friction) may work smoothly to 
 individual and social well-being, the principle yet to be clearly 
 outlined and helpfully applied, should receive interpretation and 
 guidance through the race-experience of women. For that service the 
 social education of women must be lifted to a far higher plane of 
 intellectual and ethical culture. Deeper than all the problems which 
 the booming of the guns of this world war has forced upon the dullest 
 social consciousness is the question, How may the individual 
 conscience and personal ideal of the spiritual élite be harmonized 
 with, not destroyed by, the levelling process of democracy? Saints 
 and sages have always marked out the pathway of the future. How can 
 they still dower a common life pressed insistently toward uniformity 
 of action? May it not be that human beings of the mother-sex who have 
 paid and still must pay a price, one by one, for each single life, and 
 who have at the same time always been held and still must be held as 
 supreme upbuilders of the social fabric, shall lead the race toward 
 the solution of this most spiritual problem of democracy? It is not, 
 however, solely to make women better fitted for a dual rôle in social 
 order and social progress that we are socializing education: men also 
 must be better fitted to the tasks of social serviceableness within as 
 truly as without the family. No one has doubted the claim of society 
 upon man to be a useful worker and a competent manager of affairs in 
 the world. Until lately, however, few have seen that, as the 
 "Declaration of Eights and Duties" set forth in 1795 by those who 
 willed the freedom of France, "No one is a good citizen if he is not a 
 good son, a good father, a good brother, a good friend, a good 
 husband." It has been enough for a man to be able to achieve something 
 of value; his personal character has not been, held of such great 
 moment throughout the ages of the past. 
   
 Now we are beginning to demand that men be good in the sense they have 
 long demanded that women shall be, and that women shall be strong in 
 what they do as well as in what they are. This new demand strikes at 
 the roots of what has been called the "social evil," but which is the 
 most unsocial of all the pathological conditions of modern society. 
   
 =The New Training in Sex-education.=--The need to have the right sort 
 of fathers as well as fit mothers requires a new training in lines of 
 sex-education. One of the most perplexing of all educational problems 
 is how to give the needed training in this line in the best and most 
 effective way. In the admirable volume on _Sex-Education_ written by 
 Professor Maurice A. Bigelow, of Teachers College, Columbia 
 University, a list of eight reasons for sex-instruction is given which 
 are here quoted by permission: 
   
 Many people, especially in youth, need hygienic knowledge 
 
        concerning sexual processes as they affect personal health. 
   
 There is an alarming amount of the dangerous social diseases 
 
        which are distributed chiefly by the sexual promiscuity or 
        immorality of men. 
   
 The uncontrolled sexual passions of men have led to enormous 
 
        development of organized and commercialized prostitution. 
   
 There are living to-day tens of thousands of unmarried mothers 
 
        and illegitimate children, the result of the common 
        irresponsibility of men and the ignorance of women. 
   
 There is need of more general following of a definite moral 
 
        standard regarding sex-relationships. 
   
 There is a prevailing unwholesome attitude of mind concerning 
 
        all sexual processes. 
   
 There is very general misunderstanding of sexual life as 
 
        related to healthy and happy marriage. 
   
 There is need of eugenic responsibility for sexual actions that 
 
        concern future generations. 
   
 To the propositions thus clearly stated all thoughtful students of 
 family needs in education will give assent. This is not the place for 
 specific treatment of prostitution and its effect upon the home, nor 
 is it the place for a detailed statement of methods of sex-education 
 and of social hygiene now advocated and beginning to show encouraging 
 results in use. The simple statement must be made that if, as Spencer 
 has said, one test of education is its ability to make men good 
 husbands and fathers, the element of sex-education must not be omitted 
 from the educative process. How or where the necessary information and 
 stimulus to truly social conduct may or should be given is matter for 
 another statement. 
   
 =Heroes Held Up for Admiration.=--One point, usually wholly ignored, 
 must have some mention here, and that is the effect upon the minds of 
 children and youth of types of social order that are taken for granted 
 as proper and right in the setting of heroes and even of heroines 
 commended to their example. We have taken our heroes from the past. 
 That is natural. It requires an atmosphere of distance to render clear 
 in outline the lives of the great and good. It may be that some 
 prophets are held at just value by those with whom they live; it is 
 almost never that great prophets are seen at their full stature, by 
 the common apprehension, in the time of which they are a part. This 
 makes us offer as stimulant to the ethical imagination, and sometimes 
 as definite incitements to imitation, men and women whose social 
 surroundings were quite other than those we are now striving to 
 secure. How seldom is the teacher able to make the distinctions in 
 social judgment required for full understanding of the character 
 without spoiling the personal influence of the hero extolled. This is 
 particularly true in the use of much Biblical material in Sunday 
 School and in the unexplained classic references to the great and 
 good. One wonders what children are thinking about, children who read 
 in the daily papers long and spectacular accounts of trials for bigamy 
 or adultery, when the worthies of the Old Testament are spoken of and 
 their two or several wives taken as a matter of course in the lesson! 
 One wonders what is the meaning of justness or kindness to the 
 "servant" conveyed to the child in commandments which link together a 
 man's ox and his ass, his laborer and his wife! The fact is that 
 education has a narrow and perilous path to travel in moral lessons of 
 every sort, a path between a dull and critical analysis of differences 
 in moral standards and moral practice in the ages from which we have 
 come and a wholesale commendation of people who would be haled before 
 our modern courts for disobedience to laws were they to reappear upon 
 our streets. The need for stimulation of the ethical imagination is so 
 great, however, that we must dare this perilous path and master its 
 difficulties. Perhaps no one has been able to do this more effectively 
 than Mr. Gould, of the Moral Education Committee of England, who has 
 used the story method with consummate tact in building up from the 
 lower motive and the more ancient condition a series of pictures of 
 human greatness, which end always on some summit of personal devotion 
 in universal conditions to universal laws of right.[18] His method 
 leaves the pupil in a glow of admiration of excellence without dulling 
 his perception of realities of every-day life in his own time and 
 place. 
   
 However difficult, we must try by some method to make youth realize 
 what is excellent in those who have lived far enough in the past to 
 inspire reverence and yet keep some connection between those heroes 
 and sages of the older times and the march of human life upward and 
 onward. Especially is this the case in all treatment of the family 
 relation. We need not banish Chaucer's "Griselda" from the collections 
 of poems worthy to live and to be read, but at least we should insert 
 some companion pieces which show wifely fidelity in a more modern 
 form. We may well ask the child's admiration of the craftsman's 
 passion for achievement in "Palissey the Potter," but there might be 
 ethical significance in pointing out that nowadays we sometimes 
 question the right of a man to sacrifice to his art not only himself 
 but his wife, his children, and all related to him. The fact is that 
 although we cannot make use of any cumbersome scheme of historic 
 outlines of social progress nor of any learned history of matrimonial 
 institutions, we must somehow learn to permeate our teaching of 
 history and of literature and our exaltation of examples of human 
 greatness of character with the spirit of those who believe that 
 humanity is learning, and can know how to manage social affairs better 
 and better as the years of life-experience go on.[19] 
   
 =Moral Training at the Heart of Education.=--The right and helpful 
 relation of the school to the family, then, is one that must first of 
 all place moral character, the power to live a good and useful life in 
 all social relations, at the centre. And it is one also that takes 
 account particularly of the development of the family order and of 
 what we must save and of what we may throw away in that order, if we 
 would have a stable inner circle of human rights and duties as a 
 pattern for all relationship in the industrial order and in the state. 
   
 =Drill to Avert Economic Tragedies.=--In view also of the danger of 
 economic tragedies that affect the family,--dangers of unemployment of 
 the father by reason of bad times beyond his control, of his 
 disablement by industrial accident, of his too-early impairment of 
 strength by reason of industrial misuse of his powers in ways he can 
 not prevent,--it may be that education for every boy should include, 
 while he is still under the legal wage-earning age, efficient drill in 
 the simpler arts of agriculture. He who can get from the land the raw 
 material for family comfort is alone, it would seem, able to meet all 
 industrial catastrophes without alarm. In this country, at least, such 
 a man, whatever his failure or misfortune in professional, in 
 clerical, or in manual labor, may make good his father-office in basic 
 essentials of family support. All that has been said about the need of 
 mixing vocational training with preparation for home-making in the 
 case of girls may be said with almost as much, force about the need of 
 giving the average man an economic refuge in case of vocational 
 disaster in the ability to work the land to meet essential family 
 need. This is beginning to be understood as never before. The newest 
 education of all, as has been said, is intent upon providing for girls 
 and boys alike this training for economic safety in some expert use of 
 land for self-support as well as for retranslation of older work 
 interests. In these "schools of tomorrow" the boys as well as the 
 girls, while still very young, are being trained to cook and to do 
 necessary things for household comfort. This is not subversive of 
 inherited divisions of labor in the home. This teaching only adds to 
 the economic security of both sexes and may make the men of the future 
 able to exist comfortably without so much personal service from their 
 womenfolk, and, above all, may make the home a more perfectly 
 coöperative centre of our social order. 
   
 =A Graduated Scale of Virtues.=--In the French _Categories_ of "Moral 
 and Civil Instructions," first outlined in 1882 and perfected and 
 applied in 1900, the children of the Public Schools of that country 
 have their attention called first to the duties related to "Home and 
 Family," going on from that topic to "Companionship, The School, 
 Social Life, Animal Life, Self-respect, Work, Leisure and Pleasure, 
 Nature, Art, Citizenship and Nationality," and ending with a study of 
 the "Past and Future." The latter topic indicates an intent to give in 
 some fashion the idea of human progress and something of its 
 outstanding points of interest and value. Other moral codes aim at 
 some sublimation of history and literature as a finish to courses in 
 ethical instruction. It is for the student of social progress to 
 insist that such study of the past, linked to the study of the present 
 and to some hopeful outline of the future, be not used merely as a 
 capstone but shall be woven in, as warp and woof of all education, as 
 it touches every side of life. 
   
 =Types of Education.=--Dr. Lester Ward, in his _Dynamic Sociology_, 
 lists the various types of education we must cherish and realize in 
 the common life as follows: 
   
   "The Education of Experience; 
   The Education of Discipline; 
   The Education of Culture; 
   The Education of Research; 
   The Education of Information." 
   
 To this list, with which most educators would be in agreement, the 
 believers in the "New Education" might add the Education of 
 Development of Personality. 
   
 Experience, discipline, culture, research, and information are, 
 however, the great means by which the personality absorbs the social 
 inheritance and thus finds its own place in the social whole. The 
 early initiation by the family to all these means of personal 
 development is not yet exhausted either in function or in social 
 usefulness. The family still begins the socializing process. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON THE FAMILY AND THE SCHOOL 
   
 In child-training, should the general aim be to give as much 
 
      as possible of that training in the home or as much as 
      possible in the school? or what is a wise and efficient 
      balance between family and society influence in education? 
   
 Given a necessity in character-development for drill in 
 
      obedience, stimulus toward self-development, capacity for 
      self-control and for helpful association with others in the 
      interest of the commonweal, what part, if any, can the home 
      play which the school cannot? 
   
 What is the duty of citizens in respect to tax-supported and 
 
      compulsory education and how can that duty be effectively done 
      in city and country life? 
   
 How can educational systems be made to work for the better 
 
      coördination of family life among the newly arrived immigrants? 
   
 Outline, in general suggestion, an educational program for boys 
 
      and for girls which would be likely to directly aid the family 
      in attaining stability and success among all classes, having 
      regard to aim, subject-matter, methods of character-development 
      and form of social provision and control in the school. 
   
   
 FOOTNOTES: 
   
 [17] See _Democracy and Education_, by John Dewey: "Because of death of 
 individuals, life has to perpetuate itself by transmission, by 
 communication; must be social in character." 
   
 [18] See _The Children's Book of Moral Lessons_, published by Watts and 
 Co., London. 
   
 [19] See _Principles of Sociology with Educational Applications_, by 
 Frederick R. Clow, a valuable and suggestive book for the general 
 reader. 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER XV (THE FATHER AND THE MOTHER STATE) 
   
   "I should like to point out by what principles of action we rose 
   to power and under what institutions and through what manner of 
   life we became great. We are called a democracy, for the 
   administration is in the hands of the many, not the few; but while 
   the law secures equal justice to all, the claim of excellence is 
   always recognized. When a citizen is in any way distinguished he 
   is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege 
   but as a reward of merit. Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may 
   benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his position. 
   
   "We are unrestrained in private intercourse, while a spirit of 
   reverence pervades our public acts. We are prevented from doing 
   wrong by respect for authority and for the laws, having an 
   especial regard for those ordained for the protection of the 
   injured, as well as to those unwritten laws which bring upon the 
   transgressor the reprobation of general sentiment. 
   
   "We are lovers of the beautiful, though simple in our tastes, and 
   we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness. An Athenian 
   citizen does not neglect the state because he takes care of his 
   own household, and even those engaged in business have a fair idea 
   of politics. 
   
   "The great impediment to right action is, in our opinion, not 
   discussion, but the want of that knowledge which may be gained by 
   discussion. 
   
   "We do good to our neighbors not upon a calculation of interest 
   but in the confidence of freedom and in a frank and fearless 
   spirit." 
                     From the oration of Pericles, 450 B.C., 
                           as reported by Thucydides. 
   
   "Statesmen work in the dark until the idea of right towers above 
   expediency or wealth. The Spirit of Society, not any outward 
   institution, is the mighty power by which the hard lot of man is 
   to be ameliorated. 
   
   "Every line of history inspires a confidence that things mend. 
   This is the moral of all we learn; it warrants Hope, the prolific 
   mother of all reforms. Our part is plainly not to block 
   improvement or to sit until we are stone but to watch the uprise 
   of progressive mornings and to conspire with the new work of new 
   days."--EMERSON. 
   
   "Nations are the citizens of humanity as individuals are the 
   citizens of the nation. As any individual should strive to promote 
   the power and prosperity of his nation through the exercise of his 
   special function, so should every nation in performing its special 
   mission perform its part in promoting the prosperity and 
   progressive advance of humanity."--MAZZINI. 
   
     "Our country hath a gospel of her own 
     To preach and practise before all the world,-- 
     The freedom and divinity of man, 
     The glorious claims of human brotherhood." 
                     --LOWELL. 
   
   
 =The Socialization of the Modern State.=--In a previous book before 
 mentioned[20] and in many special articles published elsewhere, the 
 idea has been stressed that society is now witnessing a remarkable 
 coalescence of two ethical movements which are of special significance 
 in the new political equality of men and women. These two movements 
 are, first, the call for the application to women of the principles 
 embodied in our national Bill of Rights; and, second, the introduction 
 of what is called social welfare work into governmental provisions and 
 administration. The first marked the reaction of women, belated but 
 strong, and at last successful in realization of purpose, to the 
 eighteenth Century demand for the recognition of human rights 
 regardless of color, sex, or previous condition of servitude. The 
 second was a reaction of social sympathy and a growing sense of social 
 responsibility for the better development of the common life. These 
 two movements so worked together that as women marched toward the 
 citadel of political power and responsibility, political action became 
 more and more permeated by forms of social interest in which women 
 were already alert, and by forms of social activity in which women 
 were already proficient. This is particularly noticeable in the United 
 States. For example, in our country we have changed the common point 
 of view and the general governmental approach to individual and 
 private life in the following important particulars: 
   
 Health--public and private, in matters of prevention of 
 
      disease and in care of the sick and the convalescent. 
   
 Education--in respect to all ages and to all peculiar needs of 
 
      special training. 
   
 Philanthropy, or the social care of the dependent, the 
 
      poverty-bound, the defective, and the juvenile delinquent. 
   
 Penology, or the laws and their administration which deal with 
 
      crime and criminals and with both the victims of and the 
      panderers to vice. 
   
 Recreation and all manner of publicly provided opportunity for 
 
      helpful use of leisure time. 
   
 Conservation of natural resources in the interest of common 
 
      wealth. 
   
 Checks upon economic exploitation by the greedy and strong of 
 
      the young, the weak, and the ignorant. 
   
 Checks upon those commercialized forms of recreation which tend 
 
      to despoil childhood and youth of innocence and refinement. 
   
 Official standardizing of ways of living found to be conducive 
 
      to physical, mental, and moral well-being, and social aids 
      toward vocational training and guidance. 
   
 The union of Federal with State and Local efforts for the 
 
      general welfare. 
   
 =The Interest and Work of Women in This Process of Political 
 Change.=--In every one of these new forms of approach to individual 
 life by the general public through law, tax-supported opportunity, or 
 special grant of official aid, women have played a distinct and a 
 large part. When, therefore, women entered formally into the body 
 politic of these United States, they entered into a place of power 
 already familiar to them in many of its activities. Indeed, they had 
 helped to outline and to make effective many of those activities and 
 came into a new relation to them only by virtue of a recognized 
 access of control over their administration. When government was 
 merely a restraining or a military power over individual life, there 
 might be to many minds an incongruity in women assuming voter's 
 privileges and duties. When government became a means for conserving 
 and nurturing and developing individual life, mothers, at least, could 
 be easily seen to have proper part in its functions. 
   
 =Health a Social Enterprise.=--To briefly rehearse this list of 
 political activities is to show marked changes in social ideals. We 
 have entered upon a crusade against preventable disease and for the 
 better physical development of all citizens and potential citizens. 
 This crusade now makes the official Boards of Health, the hospital and 
 medical service, the nurse's vocation, and the lay volunteer support 
 of all these, the outstanding features of our community life. 
 Epidemics used to be considered visitations of an avenging Providence 
 for the people's sins. So they are in essence and in modern 
 translation of old ideas, a punishment by Nature for broken laws; 
 experiences to be ashamed of now that we know how to prevent them. 
 Deaths of babies, once mysterious dispensations of Infinite power, 
 have come to mean indictments of community and family for failure to 
 furnish right conditions for infant life. Deaths of mothers in 
 childbirth, leaving older children without suitable protection and 
 care, once thought events to which to be resigned, however sad and 
 pitiable, are now seen to be preventable calamities for which society 
 is to blame. Avoidable cripplement and invalidism of workmen, once 
 considered either their own fault or unexplained misfortune, are now 
 listed as cause for receipt of sickness and accident benefits under 
 Workmen's Compensation Laws. Premature old age, due to overwork and 
 undernourishment, is on its way to be proceeded against as a record of 
 social neglect. All waste of life's vigor and happiness which is 
 indicated by lower levels of health and strength in any class or age 
 than can be secured by the more favored is from now on recorded as 
 social failure and social fault. Hence, the state and all manner of 
 private agencies are at work to make physical standards higher and 
 physical conditions better for all. When we remember that the pioneer 
 worker in organization of Boards of Public Health and the founder of 
 the American Public Health Association, Dr. Stephen Smith, has just 
 passed away after reaching the hundred year mark of life's usefulness, 
 we can readily see how rapid has been the growth in scientific 
 attention to health and social agencies for its advance. 
   
 =General and Vocational Training for All.=--In education we have not 
 accomplished all that the leaders in that field outlined for us two 
 generations ago, but there is a movement all along the line to make it 
 possible for every person to have at least a fair start toward 
 education in the compulsory free school; and for adults, younger or 
 older, to make up for early deficiencies by constantly increasing 
 later opportunities of special and of general training in the things 
 every citizen should know. Allusion to new specialties of varied 
 educational facilities has before been made. 
   
 No one can doubt that as teachers and helpers to teachers, as members 
 of educational societies, and as acting on official boards by 
 appointment, women have been long serving in the ranks and needed the 
 ballot only to make their function more inclusive and more commanding 
 in directive power. When we remember that it is only since 1837, when 
 Horace Mann published the first Report of a State Board of Education 
 and began his great work for the Common School of his country, that we 
 have had even a distinct social goal in this great field of endeavor 
 we cannot be pessimistic about future accomplishment. When that 
 educational leader declared in response to those who remonstrated with 
 him for turning aside from the usual and, for him, brilliant 
 opportunities of the law, "The next generation is to be my client," he 
 started a new profession, and the present effort in education is but 
 the widening of that social furrow. When we recall that Mary Lyon, in 
 opening Mt. Holyoke Seminary for Girls in that same year of 1837, 
 offered the first opportunity to girls of limited means of what could 
 be called higher education, we can better realize how rapid has been 
 the movement to fit women for educational service. We, at least, now 
 have a clearer aim in education and are at liberty to use fit men and 
 fit women alike for its realization. The one great contribution of 
 later times is the determination to share with all the opportunities 
 once held sacred to a select few. 
   
 =Women's Work in Philanthropy.=--In philanthropy there has been so 
 great a transformation both in ideal and in method that it amounts to 
 a change in the centre of gravity. Charity once had for its aim the 
 easing of unbearable misery, the giving of alms to relieve the 
 starving, and personal aid of all sorts to those who were not expected 
 to be lifted out of the category of the poor, those who must be always 
 helped, but should be helped in a spirit of kindness. Now we have the 
 command for permanent care for the helpless where they will not 
 handicap the normal. We have the varied agencies for preventing 
 delinquency in youth and many a new type of moral rehabilitation for 
 all who have stepped but a short distance out of the ordered path of 
 life. We have the ideal of every defective child in permanent 
 custodial homes, every insane person cared for with humanity and 
 trained intelligence, every dependent child readjusted to family life 
 by adoption or trained happily and usefully in residential school, 
 every aged person protected from want and misery in public or private 
 homes, every widowed mother helped to take care of her own children, 
 and every sick person aided by hospital and clinic and visiting nurse 
 and convalescent home in readjustment to normal activity. Finally, we 
 have boldly replaced the motto, "Relieve Poverty," by the new slogan, 
 "Abolish Poverty," and we are impatient with ourselves and with social 
 arrangements if any considerable number of our fellow-beings are 
 obliged without fault of theirs to receive material relief. In all 
 this, what a part has been played by women! Dorothea Dix 
 revolutionized the care of the insane in the United States. Louisa Lee 
 Schuyler organized and for fifty years energized and directed the work 
 of the New York State Charities Aid Association which made over into 
 humane and intelligent social care-taking the inherited institutions 
 of a more ignorant and indifferent time. The first woman to serve on 
 the State Board of Charities in New York, Josephine Shaw Lowell, whose 
 motherhood in the family and the state knew no bounds and whose 
 statesmanship comprehended every social relation, is not the last to 
 so serve. "The lady with the lamp," Florence Nightingale, who 
 pioneered in trained nursing has had many a follower in this as in 
 other countries. The annals of all charitable agencies show that at 
 every step, whether recognized as responsible members of the body 
 politic or not, women have done the work in large and efficient 
 measure when the state took over a new job of life-saving and of 
 life-nourishment. 
   
 In the realm of penology we have moved far from the old private prison 
 into which the noble could cast his enemy and no one question his 
 acts. We have moved far from the early prison which was easily 
 neglected in all sanitary as in all moral conditions, since it was 
 then only a stopping place, often for a short time only, on the way 
 from court condemnation to hanging or mutilation, flogging or exile. 
 When the prison became a place for longer sojourn, and sentence to it 
 became in itself a legal punishment, humane men and women began to 
 feel the importance of knowing what went on in the places set aside 
 for offenders against the law, and Howard and others set the tendency 
 toward a more humane and reasonable treatment of criminals. We now are 
 at work finding out who are real criminals and who are accidentally 
 caught in the meshes of hurtful circumstances, who among the offenders 
 against the law are mentally responsible, and who are but children of 
 adult bodily size, and what to do for and with the intentional enemy 
 of social order. We have not yet learned to apply the ideals we have 
 gained in wise and effective treatment of the small minority of men, 
 and far smaller minority of women, who cannot or will not walk the 
 safe and well-outlined road of the law-abiding, but we have some 
 concepts that promise to guide us in this particular and the new 
 Penology is born. Men and women alike are working out details of 
 direction and shouldering the heavy social work demanded. The thing 
 that is most conspicuous in Penology is the new attitude of courts of 
 law, of judges and even of juries. This is an attitude of humane 
 inquiry into causes of moral breakdown, and humane dealing with 
 criminals as of right entitled to a fair chance. Surely this is a 
 fatherly attitude taking the place of old punitive ideas. 
   
 =Culture Aids to the Common Life.=--When we come to the new work of 
 making the streets safer for the spirit of youth, and the life of all 
 more protected and happy by recreative measures standardized for 
 personal uplift, we are distinctly in the area of parental functions 
 of the modern state. It takes fatherly men and motherly women to run 
 the public playground, and to make the parks, the museums, the 
 settlement clubs and classes, and the children's rooms in public 
 libraries what we now will that they shall be,--the centres of eager 
 interest and the nursery of character development. The mention of the 
 free public library suggests what is probably the most potent of all 
 the higher social influences in our American life. In the large city 
 and in the small town alike, and even in remote rural districts served 
 by the Loan Libraries, the opportunity to find what will feed the mind 
 and lead toward the delight of the printed page is one that has meant 
 more to more people who were aspiring and able to become leaders in 
 any sphere of life than has any other opportunity; perhaps than even 
 the public school after the main essentials of early grade teaching 
 have been gained. 
   
 To sit in a public library and watch the eager interest of each 
 newcomer, to see the patience, the understanding, the sympathetic 
 attitude and the earnest effort to be of utmost service which the 
 librarian almost invariably shows, and to see the absorbed attention 
 of the readers in what they have been assisted in selecting, is to 
 bless the generosity and public spirit of every one who has made the 
 public library so common a blessing. Not all books are equally 
 helpful, not all give equal pleasure, it is true, but when one gets a 
 book with a message in it for him, what a joy! 
   
 One often thinks of the lovely song of Emily Dickinson when sitting 
 thus in a public library: 
   
     "He ate and drank the precious words, 
     His spirit grew robust; 
     He knew no more that he was poor 
     Or that his frame was dust. 
     He danced along the dingy ways 
     And this bequest of wings 
     Was but a book. What liberty 
     A loosened spirit brings!" 
   
 =Many Languages in One Country.=--In this connection must be noted the 
 effort of many to limit this "bequest" to the language of the country. 
 In another connection we have noted the difficulty that inheres in 
 having many differing tongues in one community, the difficulty of 
 reaching a common ideal and method of living when language is a barrier 
 and not an aid to companionship. This barrier of language to the 
 foreign-born is often cited as a reason why the immigrant is 
 handicapped. It is also a reason why social efforts and religious 
 influences often fail of success and why so many native-born Americans 
 fail to understand the newer Americans. If, as many prophesy, the 
 English language becomes the standard tongue for business and diplomacy 
 and literature, all the best products of every nation being made 
 available by translation, at least, for those speaking English, it can 
 become that ruling tongue only by slow degrees. Meanwhile, the chasm 
 between citizens of a common country made by differing languages may be 
 bridged by far greater effort on the part of older Americans gifted in 
 the use of foreign tongues. We see women by the hundreds flocking to 
 Europe and the East to "get local color" and perfect themselves in 
 foreign languages, who might find at their own doors, among those 
 illiterate in English, but with a wealth of knowledge of their own 
 native literature and speech, men and women who would be able, if 
 rightly approached, to exchange national values both in literature and 
 history to mutual advantage. The need of adult education on the part of 
 the foreign-born is not always a need to be met by condescending from 
 above to those of low intellectual estate. It is often a mere 
 requirement to master another form of speech by those, already 
 linguists, or at least in possession of a broader use of language than 
 is the average citizen of the United States. The ways of social helping 
 in this line are many and of the highest political importance. The 
 variety of languages spoken in the United States, however, is not so 
 serious an obstacle to the intercommunication of our population for 
 political information and in organization for common ends of the public 
 good as is the shameful condition of illiteracy among the electorate. 
 The foreign-language publications in the United States numbered, in 
 1914, 1404, of which 160 were dailies, with total circulation per issue 
 of 2,598,827, and 868 weeklies with a total circulation per issue of 
 4,239,426, and other publications to the number of 376 with a total 
 circulation per issue of 3,609,735. These foreign-language journals are 
 not all or many of them devoted to "stirring up strife" and do not 
 prevent absorption of the foreign-born in the body politic. They are, 
 on the contrary, necessary means of making those who speak foreign 
 tongues acquainted with facts and conditions which newcomers need to 
 know and understand. During the Great War our government used these 
 foreign-language publications to spread broadcast appeals for 
 financial and personal support. The excellent "Foreign Language 
 Information Service," still existing and having Federal backing, has in 
 hand the introduction into the principal foreign-language publications 
 of information and appeal calculated to make good American citizens. 
 The demand that has been made in moments of excitement for the 
 abolition of the foreign-language press is therefore as stupid as it is 
 unfriendly. Only by the use of his native tongue can a man who does not 
 yet understand English be made to feel and act as a genuine part of the 
 citizenship of his adopted country. It is for those who cherish real 
 Americanism to try to get into these publications, which are the 
 strategic point of contact between older and newer Americans, all that 
 is deemed vital to the welfare of our common country. Through a wise 
 use of this material in every free public library and in the multiplied 
 Loan Libraries in remote districts, the newcomers in our country who 
 read intelligently their own language and are eager to learn, may gain 
 all that a good citizen needs to know. And if in parallel columns the 
 English with the foreign language should be used to convey the same 
 thought, the progress will be doubly fast in true Americanization. 
   
 =Personal Conservation.=--In the conservation of natural resources for 
 the benefit of all the people we have been slow to understand either 
 our social danger, or our social opportunity, but our Federal 
 Government is setting us notable lessons and local communities are 
 trying to learn and follow them, and Women's Clubs all over the 
 country are staying up the hands of officials and trying to help save 
 the people's inheritance for the people's wealth; surely a fatherly 
 and a motherly office if any state function can be. When we enter the 
 area of protection of the young and weak and ignorant against the 
 exploitation of vice and greed and selfishness, we are in the very 
 centre of that parental care which the modern state now seeks to give 
 to its citizens. When the Great War turned into training camps the 
 flower of our youth, these agencies for moral protection and social 
 watch-care which had been so largely developed as volunteer and 
 private social work, became the resource of a government bent on 
 keeping men "fit to fight," and on preserving young women in the 
 vicinity of the camps both from giving and receiving harmful 
 influences. Since then, more than ever, such agencies for moral 
 protection have become official in civic life and have the endorsement 
 and the aid of government. It is one new feature of all modern 
 protective work that women are employed as members of the police, as 
 matrons in public places supported by tax, and indeed in places of 
 commercial recreation, as judges of special courts where parole and 
 methods of suspended sentence are used, and in all places where boys 
 and girls are exposed to danger and to temptation. Thus the home 
 influence is spreading out toward the work-place and the 
 play-centre--truly a retranslation of family service in terms of the 
 public life. 
   
 =The Children's Bureau.=--Our government at Washington used to be 
 limited in its function to those political services which no state 
 organization could accomplish by itself, but now the Federal 
 departments are busily at work setting standards, if only through 
 authentic information and suggestion, which aim to raise the average 
 life in all directions, economic and social. The Children's Bureau is 
 preëminently a standardizing body, although with no power to issue or 
 enforce decrees. The Bureaus which have to do with foods and animal 
 life and farm management are setting higher and higher levels of 
 attainment for the common people in their home life and in their 
 vocational work. There is a strong movement to enlarge the educational 
 influence at the very heart of our national government with a Cabinet 
 Head to set a high standard of attainment in both the art, the 
 science, and the administration of education as well as to aid in 
 equalizing educational opportunity. Moreover, there is a strong 
 tendency, seen most recently and vividly in the provisions of the 
 Maternity Aid Bill, for all social efforts to ask and to be granted 
 Federal financial aid on the fifty-fifty plan. There is not a 
 consensus of opinion among the thoughtful as to the wisdom of thus 
 placing upon the general government the burden of social schemes upon 
 which a minority of the people, be that minority large or small, are 
 alone agreed. The force of persuasion may secure national legislation 
 in advance of that which many local communities already have or are 
 seeking to secure. The increase of national power through the work of 
 national officials is not deemed politically sound by some persons who 
 favor specific action by the states alone in such matters as maternity 
 aid. The tendency is, however, a proof of two things, one that we are 
 as a people becoming a nation; that is more a centralized and united 
 governmental force--and the other that more and more people are trying 
 in every way to secure a more uniform as well as a higher standard of 
 living for all our citizens. 
   
 =A Women's Lobby at the National Capitol.=--It is said that the most 
 powerful lobby in Washington is "the Public Welfare Lobby backed by 
 seven million organized American women." This lobby is composed of 
 representatives of the following organizations of women with number of 
 members estimated as indicated: 
   
     National League of Women Voters                     2,000,000 
     General Federation of Women's Clubs                 2,000,000 
     Women's Christian Temperance Union                    500,000 
     National Congress of Mothers and 
       Parent-Teacher Associations                         310,000 
     National Women's Trade Union League                   600,000 
     Daughters of the American Revolution                  200,000 
     American Home Economics Association                     1,800 
     National Consumers' League                  (No number given) 
     American Association of University Women               16,000 
     National Council of Jewish Women                       50,000 
     Girls' Friendly Society                                52,000 
     Young Women's Christian Association                   560,000 
     National Federation of Business and 
       Professional Women                                   40,000 
     Women's League for Peace and Freedom                    2,500 
   
 This represents a formidable influence upon public affairs, one that 
 may do some harm along with much good, unless it goes to school to 
 social facts and balances its social sympathy (already shown in such 
 alert attention to the needs of the weaker and younger portion of the 
 nation) with sober and sane understanding of the difficulty of getting 
 progress in any line unless a majority of the people are unitedly in 
 favor of it and willing to sacrifice something in order to secure it. 
   
 There are signs already that among the leaders of women in the new 
 organization of Women Voters there is a feeling that the pendulum may 
 swing too far toward philanthropic measures, for some of which the 
 general public is as yet unprepared. The call is already made for 
 more concentration upon the better enforcement of existing laws, 
 rather than upon constant demand for new legislation in the interest 
 of social welfare. 
   
 =Women's Interest in Public Life a Social Asset.=--The fact, however, 
 that so many women are actively engaged not only in watching 
 legislation and in learning the character and ability of political 
 leaders in the national Congress, but also in trying to raise the 
 average life of the people of the country by and through better laws 
 and more efficient enforcement, is cause for great encouragement. It 
 shows that women came into their kingdom of political power just as 
 the state was ready to take on the functions no longer fully expressed 
 within the family circle. If we must be shocked by learning that a 
 baby a day is being given away in New York City through advertisements 
 in the daily papers, and with a haste and carelessness that proves 
 lack of responsibility in parents and guardians, we may be relieved of 
 fear that love of children is dying out when we see what are the 
 things that millions of women are now banded together to secure for 
 the betterment of all child-life. Largely owing to such efforts, fewer 
 babies die during the first year of life now in any listed one hundred 
 thousand, than ever before in our American history. If we find that 
 many people are living without the comforts they need and in 
 conditions inimical to health and morality, we can at least take 
 comfort in the fact that fewer go to the "poorhouse" than used to be 
 found there when all sorts of dependents were sent to that one 
 institution. With the state's new discrimination and graded assorting 
 of young and old and sick and well and sane and insane and normal and 
 subnormal, the state care is on lines at once more humane to the 
 individual and more helpful to social organization. 
   
 The state is indeed turning father and mother in its newer agencies 
 for social conservation and social aid to the distressed and 
 miserable. And as the state thus does the work that once was attempted 
 and poorly done by the collective family, it must more and more call 
 to its service the men and women of parental quality and of fit and 
 devoted expression of the protective and the nurturing elements of 
 human nature. 
   
 =Social Service in Peace.=--The state has always called for 
 sacrificial service from its members. It has called most of all for 
 such sacrificial service when danger seemed to threaten the national 
 existence, or enemies of the government lifted treasonable intent 
 against the peace and order to which the majority of citizens were 
 devoted. Now we are called upon, if only we can realize the new claims 
 upon the higher patriotism, to make the country we love what all 
 countries should be, a home of freedom, of mutual helpfulness, of 
 economic well-being and of incorrupt and progressive political order. 
 It has been said and truly, "The ideas of great men are apprehended 
 slowly, and a free and rational society must in part exist before the 
 dream of such a society can be interpreted." We have a dream of a 
 free, a noble, a competent, a happy people in our America. We must be 
 careful at every point lest by carelessness of political forms or lack 
 of understanding of what those forms should be, we hinder the 
 development of that free and rational society in which the noblest 
 thoughts and highest ideals of the best and finest of our leaders can 
 alone find root and grow. 
   
 =Problems Voters Must Solve.=--Three special problems are before the 
 voters of our country, problems commanding in importance and not easy 
 of solution. They are, first, the problem which inheres in our union 
 of States, with their wide divergence of climate, soil, industries, 
 population, standards of action and ideals of national and local 
 action. The problem is this: what shall we decide is the measure of 
 wise and useful division between the laws and conditions we shall make 
 national in extent of social control and in practical functioning of 
 political administration, and those of smaller autonomous units? What 
 shall belong to the Federal Government and make field for its 
 activity? What shall belong to the various States and make up their 
 separate systems of law and administration? And what shall be left to 
 each locality, or each county of each State, for its own political 
 activity? These are not easy questions to answer, and the constant 
 movement toward centralization of power, not only of standardization 
 but of control in the National Government (a movement which received 
 such an immense impetus during the war), is likely to make this a 
 movable problem of differing answers as our nation grows older. The 
 division of States may give a geographical symbol of deep inherent 
 differences of background of culture and even of race, or that 
 division may mean only a superficial mark of geographic outline 
 between two sets of communities alike in all their inheritance and 
 tendency. In any case, how much weight shall still be attached to 
 "States Rights," and how much shall we press for a uniform life 
 throughout all the land? What shall be the special duties of each 
 local community toward its common needs of education, of recreation, 
 of moral protection, and social order? How much in any given place 
 shall the tendency of neighbors to be unwilling to testify against 
 each other when wrong-doing is practised, and unable to withstand any 
 evil influence when near the centre of its working, lead us to unite 
 in demanding a larger unit for the Juvenile Court or the enforcement 
 of laws against commercialized vice or any other social concern where 
 justice demands a free hand and no favor to any group? These are 
 questions with which some of our volunteer agencies of social work 
 have wrestled. The answers that wise and good people have made to them 
 should have weight in any decision we may make as to the right and 
 effective divisions of law and its enforcement in our American system. 
 This problem of division of authority has within it a puzzling 
 counter-interpretation of our original Constitution and of our history 
 up to date. The doctrine of "States Rights," it is said, received its 
 death blow in the Civil War, but the equal political and civil rights 
 of the negro, which that war was supposed to establish as a national 
 concern, vary with the varying attitudes of people of the different 
 states toward the enforcement of the Constitutional Amendments which 
 were intended to secure those rights. The Southern States, it is said, 
 still stand for the dignity and autonomy of each Commonwealth in 
 matters of restriction upon labor and of provision for tax-supported 
 education, but the inner stronghold of the Federal Prohibition 
 Amendment is the section of the country south of Mason and Dixon's 
 line. The new States, again it is said, are more tenacious of national 
 centralization of government because more evidently drawing their 
 powers from the federal centre, but in the valley of the Mississippi 
 from north to south,--that section which promises to have the 
 determination of the course of American history in its hands for the 
 next hundred years,--there are signs that the state autonomy and the 
 state jealousy of invasion of local authority in the interest of 
 national conformity to federal law are not by any means unknown. 
 There should be some more carefully outlined and more commonly 
 understood principles of judgment to lead us to decisions, when a 
 thing we believe it good to do or a law we desire to set in place and 
 in operation call upon us for support, as to the best way of using 
 that support. Whether to try for a federal amendment or a national 
 statute, whether to work wholly within each State, or whether it is 
 matter which so depends upon local sentiment and local coöperation 
 that each smallest community centre must work out its own salvation, 
 or secure its own advance in independent work,--this is the problem. 
   
 =Comparison Between National and Local Effort.=--One reason why some 
 elements of social progress lag behind others which are not more 
 firmly believed in is that confusion of effort has followed the 
 contrary forms of attack upon the national, the state, or the local 
 governments for the furtherance of the object in which all parties 
 believe. Instances are not needed in this connection for every person 
 who has worked or who desires to work for social betterment finds this 
 question at the gateway of organized effort. Shall one turn to the 
 centralizing tendency in political life of our country for support of 
 a given measure, or shall one make a breakwater in that tendency and 
 concentrate attention upon the smaller political units? 
   
 =Preferential Voting.=--The second problem of political science and 
 art which presses upon the attention of our electorate is one which is 
 bound up in methods of selection and election of our legislators and 
 executives. The ever-recurring question of, "For whom shall we 
 vote?"--rests back upon the deeper question, "For whom shall we have a 
 chance to vote?" The primary was supposed to end the acknowledged 
 corruption and inadequacy of the caucus system. The primary is an 
 advance on the secret caucus with its choice of men for the highest 
 office by a few partisan politicians only, whose business it is to 
 keep party lines strong and to make them carry their candidate into 
 office. The primary, however, we see, is a very expensive method and 
 open to many dangers, and progressive students of political methods 
 are not satisfied with it. Why can we not move, and strongly, for 
 preferential voting? For some plan by which it shall be the public 
 purse only which secures the necessary printing and circularizing for 
 required information, and no personal differences in wealth shall have 
 any weight in the listing of names on the ballot? To have a law by 
 which any legally named number of voters (a sufficient number to keep 
 out lonely cranks, but not a sufficient number to suppress 
 considerable minorities) should indicate by petition desire for a 
 chance to vote for a specific representative of their political 
 ideals? The legal requirement that such persons so named should have a 
 place on the official ballot and that all voting citizens should be 
 able to indicate their graded preference for all candidates thus 
 officially listed, would give the people of a democracy a chance to 
 really choose the kind of legislators they want and the kind of 
 executives they think they need. In the present situation the 
 independent mind and conscientious purpose often has a choice only 
 between "necessary evils" or the refuge of the political "woods." 
   
 =Proportional Representation.=--The adoption of some form of 
 preferential voting can alone give the voters a chance for 
 proportional representation of their ideals and aims in legislative 
 bodies. We are seeing that the limits of useful partisanship in 
 politics are narrower than was once thought. No sane and sensible 
 person really believes that all of goodness and of wisdom is contained 
 in his party and that its success is a valid reason for "turning out 
 the rascals" of the other party. No sane and sensible person believes 
 that there is such a thing as "Democratic" economy, or "Republican" 
 justice, or "Socialistic" efficiency, or "Labor Party" good 
 government. There are only economy, efficiency, justice, and good 
 government. Each party may have a different ideal of the best method 
 of attaining these political necessities, and, therefore, since truth 
 is not gained by dogmatic assumptions of any one set of persons but by 
 approach to problems of mind and character from different angles of 
 experience and of study, each party should have its representatives in 
 the legislative bodies of nation, state, and community. And every new 
 idea of political reform and social progress that by dint of hard work 
 among the intellectual and moral élite has gained a substantial 
 following in public opinion of even a relatively small minority, has, 
 in justice, and in demand for constant advance in human affairs, a 
 right to a place in the high debate of political leadership. It is, 
 therefore, for those who believe in the worth and use of freedom and 
 of mutual tolerance and respect, in political discussion and action, 
 to work for some method of selection of political representatives of 
 the people which will make our legislative bodies more truly official 
 sections of the thought and moral ideal of the whole life of the body 
 politic. This is, perhaps, the greatest of the political calls for 
 increased wisdom and practical sense in our country. 
   
 The third problem which presses for attention, study and possible 
 solution upon the voters of the United States, and one in which the 
 new voters, the women, are peculiarly concerned and in a position of 
 past experience and of present activity to add much weight and value 
 to the debate it occasions, is this: 
   
 =What Shall Public and What Shall Private Social Service 
 Attempt?=--How far and by what ways shall the varied philanthropic and 
 educational activities which are named in mass "social work," and 
 which have been developed and are now so largely operated by private 
 and volunteer agencies and organizations, be made a part of the 
 official service of the father and the mother state? In this social 
 work, so far, the few have set a pattern of aid to individuals, which 
 public agencies have tended to take over without much serious study of 
 whether in any particular case the transfer was necessary or wise. 
 This change has often been made, also, without determining whether or 
 not further supervisory work by the private citizen was needed to keep 
 the social enterprise true to its original and tested principles of 
 action. The time has come when in all such changes from private and 
 volunteer work of a few to the demand for support and the dependence 
 upon guidance of the many, through public officials, we should have 
 some clear guiding principle. What that principle may be it is not the 
 purpose here to discuss, but the state that is now doing so much that 
 only families were formerly expected to do, and is attempting to do so 
 much that only trained and devoted service of experts chosen by 
 acknowledged leaders in social service has previously tried to 
 accomplish, must be tutored and must be supervised by a more 
 intelligent electorate if it is to do its more ambitious tasks well. 
 No private agency should allow its finest fruits of longest study and 
 effort to be absorbed by official provision and control, unless it can 
 gain assurance that those fruits will be secure in the transfer. 
   
 This all indicates that women voters who have, happily, no past 
 bondage to partisanship to overcome, who entered upon their political 
 power with no pledges to any one party to hamper their free action, 
 and who, being indebted to progressive party leaders in every one of 
 the political divisions, have friends in every one, may and should do 
 much to help progressive and independent men voters to solve the 
 deeper problems of our political situation with clarity of judgment 
 and true patriotic devotion.[21] 
   
 =Difficulty in Being a Good American Citizen.=--We have the most mixed 
 of populations. We have the greatest variety of inherited national and 
 racial backgrounds in the electorate. We have the widest stretches of 
 country, and therefore the most difficult adjustments to any 
 centralized system of government. We have the most mobile common life, 
 our people moving from State to State, and from one sectional interest 
 to another with bewildering frequency. We have as yet no universal 
 schooling even in the rudiments of reading and writing of the English 
 language to serve as common basis for common knowledge. We have a lack 
 of ethical unity in many basic problems of the family, the industrial 
 order, the type of tax-supported schooling, and the ideals of 
 patriotism. These conditions seem to make it more difficult to become 
 a first-class American citizen than to achieve political competency in 
 any other government on earth. Even with the confusion in countries 
 abroad, even in the European tangles of feuds and suspicions and the 
 horrible weight of starvation and physical weakness of the Old World, 
 we may yet, if serious in our judgment of American life, soberly 
 acknowledge the greatest difficulties of all political adjustment 
 which lie within our own political life. Such acknowledgment is not to 
 any true American of the older stock and the more noble patriotism a 
 confession of discouragement or an apology for social failures in our 
 common life. It is rather, for all nobler and wiser citizens, a 
 stimulant to constant vigilance in defence of inherited liberties and 
 a call to deeper consecration and more devoted service in our 
 political relationship. Finally, the father and the mother state does 
 not try or want to live to itself alone. We have learned that 
 selfishness in the private family leads to social ills and weakness 
 which society in general, which surrounds all private families, must 
 correct and amend. Are we not learning in the awful light of the 
 recent world conflagration that selfishness in nations leads to social 
 ills and weakness which can be corrected only by world organization 
 for world well-being? 
   
 =Our Country a Member of the Family of Nations.=--That America we love 
 and would serve with a higher patriotism and a wiser political method 
 is a part of the great family of nations, and if it has learned any 
 lessons of fatherly and motherly function of state care and 
 development of the individual life, it has learned those lessons not 
 for isolated national culture, but as a part of the universal 
 schooling in the gospel of human brotherhood. 
   
 Rightly to understand and rightly to apply that teaching of 
 race-experience in all the complicated life of international 
 relationship is more truly to serve the best interests of every 
 smallest community within our own nation. As Immanuel Kant declared so 
 long ago, "The constantly progressive operation of the good principle 
 works toward erecting in the human race, as a community under moral 
 laws, a kingdom which shall maintain the victory over evil and secure 
 under its domination an eternal peace." 
   
 It has been urged that patriotism is the piety of the school, and 
 brotherhood is the gospel of the church, and justice is the righteous 
 law of industry, and mutual reverence and mutual affection are the 
 heart of the family life. If this be true, then patriotism itself is 
 the working-out in ever-widening circles of that ideal of coöperation 
 for the common good, which shall at last make every Father and Mother 
 State a worthy member of the Family of Nations. 
   
 =Vows of Civic Consecration.=--The Athenian youth took a solemn pledge 
 when he arrived at the age when his relation to the City became 
 consciously one of loyal service. This vow may be translated as 
 follows: "We will never bring disgrace to this our City by any act of 
 dishonesty or cowardice nor ever desert our comrades. We will fight 
 for the ideals and sacred things of the City both alone and with many. 
 We will revere and obey the City laws and do our best to incite a like 
 respect and reverence in others. We will strive unceasingly to quicken 
 in all the sense of civic duty, that thus in all ways we may transmit 
 this City, greater, better and more beautiful to all who shall come 
 after us." Should not some such solemn act of consecration mark the 
 advent of each youth into the actual citizenship of his town and his 
 country? A modern writer, Thomas L. Hinckley, has summed up a 
 "Municipal Creed" as the utterance of the "Spirit of the Modern City," 
 as follows: 
   
   "I believe in myself--in my mission as defender of the liberties 
   of the people and guardian of the light of civic idealism. 
   
   I believe in my people--in the sincerity of their hearts and the 
   sanity of their minds--in their ability to rule themselves and to 
   meet civic emergencies--in their ultimate triumph over the forces 
   of injustice, oppression, exploitation and iniquity. 
   
   I believe that good food, pure water, clean milk, abundant light 
   and fresh air, cheap transportation, equitable rents, decent 
   living conditions and protection from fire, from thieves and 
   cut-throats and from unscrupulous exploiters of human life and 
   happiness, are the birth-right of every citizen within my gates; 
   and that insofar as I fail to provide these things, even to the 
   least of my people, in just this degree is my fair name tarnished 
   and my mission unfulfilled. 
   
   I believe in planning for the future, for the centuries which are 
   to come and for the many thousands of men, women and children who 
   will reside within my gates and who will suffer in body, in mind 
   and in worldly goods unless proper provision is made for their 
   coming. 
   
   I believe in good government and in the ability of every city to 
   get good government; and I believe that among the greatest 
   hindrances to good government are obsolete laws--which create 
   injustice; out-grown customs--which are unsocial; and antiquated 
   methods--which increase the cost of government and destroy its 
   efficiency. 
   
   I believe that graft, favoritism, waste or inefficiency in the 
   conduct of my affairs is a crime against my fair name; and I 
   demand of my people that they wage unceasing war against these 
   municipal diseases, wherever they are found and whomsoever they 
   happen to touch. 
   
   I believe that those of my people who, by virtue of their 
   strength, cleverness or thrift, or by virtue of other 
   circumstances, are enabled to lead cleaner lives, perform more 
   agreeable work or think more beautiful thoughts than those less 
   fortunate, should make recompense to me, in public service, for 
   the advantages which I make it possible for them to enjoy. 
   
   I believe that my people should educate their children in the 
   belief that the service of their city is an honorable calling and 
   a civic duty, and that it offers just as many opportunities for 
   the display of skill, the exercise of judgment or the development 
   of initiative as do the counting houses and markets of the 
   commercial world. 
   
   Finally, I believe in the Modern City as a place to live in, to 
   work in, and to dream dreams in--as a giant workshop where is 
   being fabricated the stuff of which the nation is made--as a 
   glorious enterprise upon whose achievements rests, in large 
   measure, the future of the race."[22] 
   
 We may think that these utterances stress too much the city life and 
 fail to visualize the wide stretches of rural communities and the 
 small towns where a few people only make the atmosphere and administer 
 the laws. The spirit, however, must be the same, whether one dwells 
 with the crowd or on some lonely farm. The spirit of that genuine 
 patriotism which is not satisfied to have one's country less noble and 
 less unselfish than its own ideal of what a country should be. 
   
 =The Children's Code of Morals.=--It is in the spirit of such a 
 patriotism that _The Children's Code of Morals_ has been prepared by 
 William J. Hutchins, and is sent broadcast by the "National Institute 
 for Moral Instruction," In this code, boys and girls are enjoined and 
 pledge themselves to be good Americans by obeying the following laws: 
 "The Law of Health; The Law of Self-control; The Law of Self-reliance; 
 The Law of Reliability; The Law of Clean Play; The Law of Duty; The 
 Law of Good Workmanship; The Law of Friendly Coöperation in Good 
 Team-work; The Law of Kindness; The Law of Loyalty." 
   
 Though children and youth may learn these laws by heart and understand 
 and agree to the fine statements by which they are expounded and make 
 through them a detailed promise to obey the laws of "right living" by 
 which alone the citizenship of our country may serve its best 
 interests--that in itself could not make all citizens what they should 
 It is, however, a lesson of the past that youth needs some outward 
 
 and visible sign of its "coming of age." Now, as in the past, youth 
 needs some form of consecration to high ideals. It needs some ceremony 
 that shall fix the lessons of patriotism, of social responsibility and 
 of community service, and stir to noble purpose. The education that 
 begins in the home is not finished by any college graduation or even 
 by vocational training for a useful career. Its great "Commencement" 
 is that which ushers the young man, and now also the young woman, into 
 conscious and responsible relationship to the body politic. This 
 Commencement should have its solemn and beautiful ritual and should be 
 made the great event of all young life. 
   
   
 QUESTIONS ON THE FATHER AND THE MOTHER STATE 
   
 What changes in legislation and in law enforcement is the 
 
      entrance of women into the electorate likely to effect? 
   
 Should the State be more and more charged with responsibility 
 
      for care of the weak, the defective, the delinquent, dependent, 
      and sick, the out-of-work, the aged, and those heavily burdened 
      by parentage of young children, and if so, how can society 
      escape a tendency to remove from individuals and from the 
      family that sense of personal responsibility upon which the 
      best things in our inherited social order have been built? 
   
 Should women voters particularly address themselves to 
 
      increasing public welfare provisions or should they try to 
      solve difficult problems of adjustment between public and 
      private effort for the common good? If both, how can they 
      adjust effort to party politics on the one side, and to 
      independent use of the power of the vote on the other side? 
   
 When volunteer organizations of charity, correction, and 
 
      education transfer their work to official boards and legal 
      provisions, that work, experience shows, sometimes is lowered 
      in standards and loses in efficiency. How can voting women 
      prevent this? How can a new class of voters, hitherto specially 
      interested in getting things desired done by others, best help 
      others to do things through their own political action? 
   
 The army intelligence tests showed that our white drafted army 
 
      contained 12 per cent. superior men, 66 per cent. average men, 
      and 22 per cent. inferior men. This statement, made by Cornelia 
 Cannon in _The Atlantic Monthly_ of February, 1922, leads 
 
      the author of the article to the conclusion that "our political 
      experiments, such as representation, recall, direct election of 
      senators, etc., are endangered by the presence of so many 
      irresponsible and unintelligent voters." Is there a remedy for 
      this, other than waiting for the slow process of education? If 
      so, what is it? 
   
 _The Neighborhood: A Study of Social Life in the City of 
 
      Columbus, Ohio_, by R.D. McKenzie, of the University of 
      Washington, gives a good example of what such a study of one's 
      own locality should be. Is it not the duty of those having the 
      leisure and the ability to inaugurate such a study in the 
      locality in which their political relation is most immediate? 
      If so, how can a Women's Club, or a League of Women Voters, 
      start such a study? 
   
   
 FOOTNOTES: 
   
 [20] _Woman's Share in Social Culture._ 
   
 [21] See _A Course in Citizenship_, by Ella Lyman Cabot, and others. 
   
 [22] Printed in _The Survey_ of October 31, 1914. 
 
 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY Pg 7 
   
 BOOKS AND ARTICLES MENTIONED IN THE TEXT 
   
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE AND CHAPTER I                             Page 5, 19 
   
   Man and Woman, by Havelock Ellis. 
   The Evolution of Marriage, by Le Tourneau. 
   Woman's Share in Primitive Culture, by Otis T. Mason. 
   The Evolution of Sex, by Geddes and Thompson. 
   The History of Matrimonial Institutions, by George Elliott 
     Howard, University of Chicago Press. 
   Sex and Society, by W.I. Thomas. 
   Descriptive and Historical Sociology, by Franklin H. 
     Giddings. 
   The Family as a Social and Educational Institution, by 
     Willystine Goodsell. 
   Social History of the American Family, by Arthur W. 
     Calhoun. 
   Sociology and Modern Social Problems, by Charles A. 
     Ellwood. 
   The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency, by Arthur 
 Todd. 
 
   Woman and Labor, by Olive Schreiner. 
   The Family, by Elsie Clews Parsons. 
   The Family, by Helen Bosanquet. 
   Women and Economics, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 
   Love and Marriage, by Ellen Key. 
   The Family in Its Sociological Aspects, by J.Q. Dealey. 
   The New Basis of Civilization, by Simon Patten. 
   Social Control and Social Psychology, by Edward A. Ross. 
 
 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY Pg 8 
   
   Children Born Out of Wedlock, by George B. Mangold, 
     University of Missouri. 
   The Federal Children's Bureau, Publications 42 and 77. 
   Report of the Committee on Status and Protection of 
     Illegitimate Children of the National Conference of 
     Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, 1921. 
   Normal Life, Chapter V, The Home, by Edward T. Devine. 
   Taboo and Genetics, by Knight, Peters, and Blanchard. 
   A Social Theory of Religious Education, Part IV, Chapter, 
     The Family, by George Albert Coe. 
   
 CHAPTER II                                                     Page 46 
   
   Conveniences for the Farm-home, Farmers' Bulletin No. 
     270. 
   The Farm Kitchen as a Workshop, Farmers' Bulletin No. 607. 
   The Business of the Household, by C.W. Taber. 
   
 CHAPTER III                                                    Page 69 
   
   Agamemnon, The Choephori and The Furies, The Tragedies of 
     Aeschylus. 
   Native Tribes of Southeast Australia, Chapter on The 
     Education of the Australian Boy, by A.W. Howitt. 
   The Patriarchal Family, by Sir Henry Maine. 
   Pure Sociology, Chapter XIV, The Androcentric Theory, by 
     Dr. Lester F. Ward. 
   Successful Family Life on the Moderate Income, by Mary 
     Hinman Abel. 
   
 CHAPTER IV                                                     Page 90 
   
   Danish Care for the Aged, by Edith Sellers. 
   The State and Pensions for Old Age, by J.A. Spender. 
   Report of Bureau of Census, Department of Commerce. 
   Old-age Support of Women Teachers, by Lucille Eaves, 
     Department of Research of Educational and Industrial 
     Union of Boston, Mass. 
   The Trade Union and the Old Man, by John O'Grady, 
     _American Journal of Sociology_, November, 1917. 
 
 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY Pg 9 
   
 CHAPTER V                                                     Page 116 
   
   Deuteronomy, The Bible. 
   Tembarom, F.H. Burnett. 
   
 CHAPTER VI                                                    Page 124 
   
   Early Massachusetts Laws, quoted by Howard in Matrimonial 
     Institutions. 
   
 CHAPTER VII                                                   Page 141 
   
   Successful Family Life on the Moderate Income, by M.H. 
     Abel. 
   
 CHAPTER VIII                                                  Page 164 
   
   A Uniform Joint Guardianship Law, Conference of 
     Commissioners for Uniform State Laws. 
   The Sheppard-Towner Act for Maternity Benefits, U.S. 
     Children's Bureau. 
   Infant Mortality Rates, U.S. Children's Bureau. 
   Extra Family Wage, _The Survey_, November 12. 1921. 
   National Endowment of Motherhood, English Authors. 
   Reports of the National Child Labor Committee. 
   Report of Division of Child Hygiene, New York City, Dr. 
     Josephine Baker. 
   The Soul of Black Folks, by Doctor Dubois. 
   Chicago Study of 1,500 Families, Dr. Alice Hamilton. 
   Summary of Child Welfare Demands, by Julia C. Lathrop, in 
     _The Child_, August, 1920. 
   
 CHAPTER IX                                                    Page 189 
   
   The Hygiene of Mind, by Dr. T.S. Clouston. 
   The Social Cost of Unguided Ability, by Professor Woods. 
   Hereditary Improvement, by Francis Galton. 
   Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics, by Dr. Lester F. Ward, 
     _American Journal of Sociology_. 
 
 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY Pg 10 
   
   Hereditary Genius, by Francis Galton. 
   Euthenics, A Plea for Better Living Conditions as a First 
     Step Toward Higher Human Efficiency, by Ellen H. 
     Richards. 
   The New Party, by Andrew Reid. 
   Charting Parents, by Caroline Hedger, Elizabeth McCormick 
     Memorial Fund Publications. 
   Observation Record for the Selection of Gifted Children in 
     the Elementary Schools, by Julia A. Badenes. 
   Universal Training for American Citizenship, by William H. 
     Allen. 
   Books for Parents Listed by Federation for Child Study, 2 
     West Sixty-fourth Street, New York. 
   Social Organization, Chapter on Democracy and Distinction, 
     by C.H. Cooley. 
   
 CHAPTER X                                                     Page 205 
   
   Mental Diseases in Twelve States, by Horatio M. Pollock 
     and Edith M. Forbush, _Mental Hygiene_, April, 1921. 
   The Kallikak Family, Dr. F.H. Goddard. 
   Treatise on Idiocy, by Dr. Edward Seguin. 
   Proceedings and Addresses of Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth 
     Sessions of American Association for Study of the 
     Feeble-minded. 
   Experiments to Determine Possibilities of Subnormal Girls 
     in Factory Work, by Elizabeth B. Bigelow, _Mental 
     Hygiene_, April, 1921. 
   Vocational Probation for Subnormal Youth, by Arnold 
     Gesell, _Mental Hygiene_, April, 1921. 
   Report of Mental Examination of 839 Women and Girls, by 
     Anne T. Bingham, New York Probation and Protective 
     Association. 
   Colony and Extra-institutional Care of the Feeble-minded, 
     by Charles Bernstein, _Mental Hygiene_, January, 1920. 
   Human Nature and the Social Order, Chapter on Personal 
     Degeneracy, by C.H. Cooley. 
   Psychology, by William James. 
   Brain and Personality, by F.E. Thompson. 
 
 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY Pg 11 
   
 CHAPTER XI                                                    Page 219 
   
   Concerning Prisoners, by Bernard Glueck, _Mental Hygiene_, 
     April, 1918. 
   Report on the Draft Examinations, by H.W. Lanier. 
   Out-of-school Activities, _The Survey_. 
   Moral Equivalents for War, by William James. 
   The Socially Inadequate, by Harry H. Laughlin. 
   
 CHAPTER XII                                                   Page 233 
   
   Sociology and Modern Problems, by C.A. Ellwood. 
   The Divorce Problem, by W.F. Willcox. 
   Problems of Marriage and Divorce in Woman's Share in 
     Social Culture, by Anna Garlin Spencer. 
   Marriage and Social Control, by Anna Garlin Spencer, in 
     _Harvard Theological Review_, July, 1914. 
   
 CHAPTER XIII                                                  Page 246 
   
   History of Factory Legislation, by Hutchins and Harrison. 
   Census Estimates of Women Wage-earners. 
   Code for Women in Industry, by Department of Labor, 
     Division of Women in Industry. 
   Democracy in the Household, by Lucy Salmon, in _American 
     Journal of Sociology_, January, 1912. 
   
 CHAPTER XIV                                                   Page 269 
   
   Ethical Culture School and Pioneer Manual Training School, 
     New York, Reports. 
   Democracy and Education, by John Dewey. 
   The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency, by Arthur 
 Todd. 
 
   Sex-Education, by Maurice A. Bigelow. 
   Moral Education Lessons, by F.A. Gould. 
   Categories of Moral and Civic Instruction, French School 
     Book. 
   Principles of Sociology with Educational Applications, by 
     Frederick C. Clow. 
 
 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY Pg 12 
   
   Dynamic Sociology, Chapter on Types of Education, by 
     Lester F. Ward. 
   A Social Theory of Religious Education, Chapter on The 
   Learning Process Considered as the Achieving of Character, 
     by George Albert Coe. 
   
 CHAPTER XV                                                    Page 290 
   
   First Report of Massachusetts State Board of Education, by 
     Horace Mann. 
   Songs, by Emily Dickinson, The Book. 
   Publications of the Foreign Language Information Service. 
   Publications of the Children's Bureau. 
   List of Representatives of Women's Organizations in the 
     Public Welfare Lobby at Washington. 
   Publications of the Societies to Further Preferential 
     Voting and Proportional Representation. 
   A Course in Citizenship, by Ella Lyman Cabot, and others. 
   The Pledge of the Athenian Youth. 
   A Municipal Creed, by T.L. Hinckley, in _The Survey_, 
     October 31, 1914. 
   The Children's Moral Code of American Citizenship, by W. 
 Hutchins, National Institute for Moral Instruction. 
 
   Army Intelligence Tests, by Cornelia J. Cannon, in 
     _Atlantic Monthly_, February, 1922. 
   The Neighborhood, by R.D. McKenzie. 
   
   
 ADDITIONAL REFERENCES UNDER CHAPTER HEADS 
   
 Chapter First, The Family: 
   
   The Ethics of the Family, James S. Tufts, Ph.D., 
     _International Journal of Ethics_, Chicago, Illinois. 
   College Women and Race Suicide, by William M. Sadler, 
     M.D., in _Ladies' Home Journal_ of April, 1922. 
   Applied Eugenics, by Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill 
     Johnson. 
 
 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY Pg 13 
   
   Program of a School for Homemakers, by L.D. Harvey, of 
     Stout Institute, Menominee, Wisconsin (a pioneer 
     movement for special training of women in higher 
     institutions of learning), published by Bureau of 
     Education, Washington, D.C., in 1911. 
   The Sex-Factor in Human Life, by T.W. Gallaway, Ph.D., 
     American Social Hygiene Association, New York City. 
   Can the State Solve the Marriage Problem? by Gordon 
     Reeves, in _Physical Culture Magazine_ of May, 1918, 
     summing up 400 answers to 60 questions concerning 
     government financial aid to mothers. 
   Mothers' Pensions, For and Against, in _The Independent_ 
     of November 9, 1914. A brief summary with bibliography. 
   
 Chapter Second, The Mother: 
   
   On the side of Birth Release, address by Louis J. Dublin, 
     Ph.D., Statistician of Metropolitan Life Insurance 
     Company, at Sixth Annual Meeting of American Social 
     Hygiene Association, October, 1919. Library American 
     Social Hygiene Association, 370 Seventh Avenue, New York 
     City. 
   Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes, by C. 
     Gasqueine Hartley. 
   La Question Sexuelle et la Femme, by Doctour Toulouse. 
     Bibliotheque-Charpentier. 
   The Logical Basis of Woman Suffrage, by A.G. Spencer, in 
     _Annals of American Academy of Political and Social 
     Science_, February, 1910. 
   Equal Pay and the Family: A Proposal for the National 
     Endowment of Motherhood, published by Headley Bros., 
     London, England. 
   
 Chapter Third, The Father: 
   
   What Makes a Man a Husband? by Havelock Ellis, in 
     _Pictorial Review_ of September, 1919. 
   
 Chapter Fourth, The Grandparents: 
   
   Old Age Dependency in the United States, by L.W. Squier. 
 
 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY Pg 14 
   
 Chapter Eighth, The Children of the Family: 
   
   Program of Nutrition Clinics for Delicate Children, 44 
     Dwight Street, Boston, Mass. 
   Text of Bill H.R. 15400, to Create a Department of 
     Education in the Federal Government with a Cabinet Head. 
   
 Chapter Twelfth, The Broken Family: 
   
   Resolution for Uniform Divorce Legislation Introduced in 
     Senate by Wesley Jones, of Washington, with Hearings 
     before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Judiciary, 
     Senate Proceedings, Washington, D.C. 
   The Broken Family, Jane Colcord, Russell Sage Foundation. 
   
 Chapter Thirteenth, The Family and the Workers: 
   
   The Labor Contract from Individual to Collective 
     Bargaining, by Margaret Anna Schaffner, Ph.D., _Bulletin 
     of University of Wisconsin_, No. 182. 
   Women and Economic Revolution, by Theresa Schmid McMahon, 
     Ph.D., _Bulletin of University of Wisconsin_, No. 498. 
   The Industrial Training of Women, by Florence Marshall, in 
     _Annals of American Academy of Political and Social 
     Science_. 
   Report of Committee on Elimination of Waste in Industry of 
     the American Engineers' Council, appointed by Herbert 
     Hoover, in Publications of the Society of Mechanical 
     Engineers, 29 West Thirty-ninth Street, New York City. 
   Women in Industry in War-Time, by Frederick Warren 
     Junkins, a bibliography in _Bulletin of the Sage 
     Foundation Library_, 130 East Twenty-second Street, New 
     York City. 
   
 Chapter Fourteenth, The Family and the School: 
   
   A National Program of Education, by Hugh S. Magill, Field 
     Secretary of the National Education Association, Address 
     at Commission on Reconstruction, Headquarters N.E.A., 
     1201 Sixteenth Street, Washington, D.C. 
 
 
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