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Title: The Family and it's Members

Author: Anna Garlin Spencer

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LIPPINCOTT'S

FAMILY LIFE SERIES

EDITED BY

BENJAMIN R. ANDREWS, Ph.D.

TEACHERS COLLEGE. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

THE FAMILY AND ITS MEMBERS

By ANNA GARLIN SPENCER

Lippincott's Home Manuals

Edited by BENJAMIN R. ANDREWS, Ph.D.

Teachers College, Columbia University

LIPPINCOTT'S FAMILY LIFE SERIES

Edited by Benjamin R. Andrews, Ph.D., Teachers College, Columbia University

THE FAMILY

AND ITS

MEMBERS

BY

ANNA GARLIN SPENCER

SPECIAL LECTURER IN SOCIAL SCIENCE, TEACHERS COLLEGE OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,
FORMERLY ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF THE NEW YORK SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL
WORK, SPECIAL LECTURER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN AND
HACKLEY PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AND ETHICS AT
MEADVILLE THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL; AUTHOR OF
WOMAN'S SHARE IN SOCIAL CULTURE

PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

PRINTED AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
BY J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.

TO THE MOTHERS AND FATHERS, IN
NUMBER BEYOND COUNT, WHOSE
COURAGE, LOVE AND FAITHFULNESS
CARRY ONWARD THE GENERATIONS
AND KEEP THE MAIN CURRENTS
OF LIFE STRONG AND WHOLESOME.

INTRODUCTIONToC

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 6every 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.

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 7conscious 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. 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 8largely 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 9influence 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.

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 10of 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.

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.

11The 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.

—The Author.

January, 1923.

CONTENTS

THE FAMILY AND ITS MEMBERS

CHAPTER IToC

THE FAMILY

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 21father-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 22of 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 23demands. 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 24obtained. 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 25family 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 26legal 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) 27would 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 28the 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 29inter-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 30the 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 31that "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 32we 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 33a 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 34the 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 35hope 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 36transmission 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.

37The 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 38present 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 39wife 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 40intoxicated 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 41intolerable, 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 42individualistic 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, 43too, 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 44to 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 45demands 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

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IIToC

THE MOTHER

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 48have 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:

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 49have 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 50the 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 51enforced. 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 52of 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 53for 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.

54Meanwhile, 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 55for 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 56children 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 57knowledge 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 58rite 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 59Devine 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.

60Early 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 61agencies 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 62child 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 63discipline 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 64the 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 65individual 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 66sense 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 67in 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.

68Women 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

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IIIToC

THE FATHER

70Historic 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 71has 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.

72That 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 73Doctor 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 74skill 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 75a 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 76Plutarch 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; 77when 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 78effort 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 79for 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.

80Something 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 81a 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 82responsibility, "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.

83Moral 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.

84The 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.

85In 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 86"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.

87The 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 88from 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.

89With 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

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IVToC

THE GRANDPARENTS

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 91of 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 92group 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 93customs, 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, 94of 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.

95While 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 96and 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 97contempt 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 98with 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 99she 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 100what 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 101obligations 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 102is 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 103the 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.

104A 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 105fail 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, 106the 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 107indicates 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 108few 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 109have 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 110require 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 111be "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 112distance 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 113mind. 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.

114In 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.

115In 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

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER VToC

BROTHERS, SISTERS, AND NEXT OF KIN

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 118widow 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 119from 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 120sometimes 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 121large, 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. 122We 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 123within 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

CHAPTER VIToC

FRIENDS AND THE CHOSEN ONE

125The 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 126Emerson 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 127own. 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 128first 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 129repetition 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.

130The 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 131sides, 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 132in 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 133or 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 134and 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 135any 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 136dialects 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 137higher 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 138happy 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.

139Easy 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

CHAPTER VIIToC

HUSBANDS AND WIVES

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.

143With 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 144whether 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 145allegiance 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 146women 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 147heavier 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 148legal 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 149go 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 150woman, 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 151fundamental 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 152as 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 153outside 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 154feeling 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, 155how 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. 156All 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 157appearance. 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.

158On 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. 159After 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.

160A 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 161knowledge 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:

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 162as 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 163is 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

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER VIIIToC

THE CHILDREN OF THE FAMILY

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:

166The 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 167to 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 168to 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 169hopelessly 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.

170It 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 171a 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 172wholly 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 173takes 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:

1. An indemnity of 200 francs at the birth of a child.

2. A suckling indemnity, which is given to the wife, of 100 francs a month during the first year.

3. 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. 174In 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 175this 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 176in 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 177crippled 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 178pick 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 179may 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. 180Many 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 181the 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:

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 183has 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 184professions 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 185teachers 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 186in 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, 187the 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

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IXToC

THE FLOWER OF THE FAMILY

The Proportions of Genius to the Mediocre.—In Dr. T.S. Clouston's suggestive book, The Hygiene of Mind, he estimates 190that 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 191Dartmouth 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."

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 192soon 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 193Human 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, 194great 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 195fit 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 196more 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 197when 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. 198In 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 1905. 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 199and 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.

200In 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 201ways 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 202business, 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.

203Varieties 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":

It is of such that affection speaks most tenderly.

QUESTIONS ON THE FLOWER OF THE FAMILY

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER XToC

THE CHILDREN THAT NEVER GROW UP

—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 206childhood 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 207on 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 208of 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 209or 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 210parents 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 211morons 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 212coming 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 213"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 214helping 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 215the 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 216the 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 217self-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

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER XIToC

PRODIGAL SONS AND DAUGHTERS

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.

221Yet, 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 222million 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 223toward 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 224methods 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 225of 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 226criminals 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 227than 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 228back 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 229privation 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 230testimony 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 231analogous 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

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER XIIToC

THE BROKEN FAMILY

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 235had 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.

236New 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 237all 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 238will 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 239to 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.

240Judges, 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 241relations 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 242conscience 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. 243The 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.

244There 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:

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 245a 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

CHAPTER XIIIToC

THE FAMILY AND THE WORKERS

Changes from Ancient to Modern Forms of Labor.—The change from the domestic and handicraft stage in industry to the 247capitalized, 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 248this 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 249better 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 250success. 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.

251Social 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 252masters 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 253of 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 254of 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 255what 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 256their 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 257to 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 258and 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 259self-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 260away 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 261poles 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 262serves. 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 263the 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 264new 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 265of 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 266had 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 267the 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 268than 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

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER XIVToC

THE FAMILY AND THE SCHOOL

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 271in 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 272but 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 273is 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 274compared 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 275the 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 276manufacture 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 277for 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 278rational 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 279students, 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 280the 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 281for 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 282tastes 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 283familiar 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 284process 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:

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 286and 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 287realize 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 288who 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.

289Types 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:

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

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER XVToC

THE FATHER AND THE MOTHER STATE

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 292permeated 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:

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 293only 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 294Association, 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 295it 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.

296In 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 297development. 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:

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 298why 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 299publications 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 300agencies 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 301as 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:

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 302is 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 303such 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 304outline 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 305should 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 306of 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 307of 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 308political 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 309in 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 310into 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:

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."

312Though 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 be. 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

FOOTNOTES:

BIBLIOGRAPHYToC

BOOKS AND ARTICLES MENTIONED IN THE TEXT

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES UNDER CHAPTER HEADS

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CURRENT PUBLICATIONS, WITH SUGGESTIONS

In pursuance of the practical aim of this book, an up-to-date study of current social problems is urged and the use of reports and literature issued by National and State organizations is recommended.

In addition, therefore, to the list of books and articles cited or referred to in the text, the following special sources of information concerning current activities and the discussion of immediate social problems are given as aids to class study or to individual reading:

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