IX

DOMESTIC ETHICS

The relation of the home to ethics is so vital, so intimate, so extensive, as to call for the utmost care and patience in its study.

The "domestic virtues" are well known to us, and well loved. We have a general conviction that all our virtues as well as charity begin at home; that the ethical progress of man is a steady stream flowing out of the home, and as far as we compare one virtue with another, we assume the domestic virtues to be the best.

In half the race we ask nothing but the domestic virtues; in the other half we look for something further; but consider such civic and social virtues as appear to be offshoots of the domestic. We call the home "the cradle of all the virtues," and never imagine for a moment that it can cradle anything else—in the line of ethics.

Now let us make a careful examination of this field; first establishing a standard of human conduct and character, and then studying the relation of the home to that standard. The same consideration referred to in previous chapters is here most urgently pressed upon the reader: that all the qualities found in the home do not necessarily originate there. As a race rises and improves, its improvement appears in the home, as elsewhere. But that improvement is in itself due to varying conditions. The diffusion of intelligence following the discovery of the art of printing lifted the general average mind, and so lifted the home as well as other departments of life. But that increase of intelligence did not originate in home life, and is in no way due to its influence.

The sense of human liberty which spread rapidly among us in the early years of the settlement of this country, following, as it did, the splendid dash for religious liberty which brought so many of our ancestors here, has borne fruit in our home life. We have more freedom in the family relation than is found in older forms of government, but this larger freedom did not originate in the home and is in no way to be accredited to it.

Home-life, as such, does in itself tend to produce certain ethical qualities; qualities not produced, or not in any such degree, by other fields of life. Constant association with helpless infancy develops a generous care and kindness—that is, it does so when the helpless infants are one's own. The managers of foundling and orphan asylums do not seem always to be so affected. Constant association with the inevitable errors and mistakes of childhood develops patience and sympathy, or tends to do so. There are qualities brought out in home life which extend their influence into the life of the world. The young man or woman who has had good home influence shows that advantage all through life. But there are also qualities brought out in the world's life apart from the home; and the man or woman affected by these shows them in the home life. We find in our homes the gathered flowers of civilisation, of Christianity, of progress in general; and unconsciously accredit the homes with the production of these beautiful results—quite erroneously.

The influence of religion, as we all know when we stop to think of it, has done much more for us than the influence of the home. The Canaanites had homes—yet gave their children to Moloch. The demand of the idol had more power than the appeal of the child. The Hindoos have homes, yet give their babies to the water, their widows to the fire.

Besides religion there are many other influences which affect human character and conduct; the influences of our government, our education, our business. We are seeking here to point out precisely what ethical qualities are developed by home life, good or bad; and to show further that the present condition of the home is not final, nor vitally essential. We may so change the conditions of home life as to retain all that modifies character for good, and to discard all that modifies it for evil.

The home as a permanent institution in society, if rightly placed and understood, works for good. The home in its non-essential conditions, if wrongly placed in our scheme of thought, if misunderstood, if out of proportion and loaded with anachronisms, works evil. In the complex group of qualities which make up the human character to-day, for good and ill, many influences are traceable; and we wish here to disentangle from among them some lines of influence, and show what place is held by the home in making us what we are and what we wish to be.

What is the preferred type of excellence in humanity according to our social instincts and to the measure of history? We began as savages, and the savage standard of ethics is easily grasped; we have progressed a long way beyond that savage standard; but ours is still well within the reach of common understanding. Without seeking for careful sequence let us enumerate our principal human virtues:

Love; with derivatives of kindness, sympathy, courtesy, etc. Truth; with honesty, accuracy, etc. Courage; connects with strength and wisdom. Justice; with a right humility. Self-control; with endurance, patience, and again with courtesy; also with temperance and chastity. Honour; a high, inflexible standard of various virtues.

These are arbitrary general types, but do fairly enough for this study. A human being possessed of these in high degree we should call "good." They all combine well with one another, and have many derivatives, some of which are above noted. Their common opposites are as easily given:

Hate; unkindness, coldness, rudeness. Falsehood; lying, dishonesty, inaccuracy. Cowardice; connects with weakness and ignorance. Injustice; this allows pride—rests on ignorance. Self-indulgence; followed by intemperance, unchastity, impatience, and other vices. Dishonour; meaning a low standard of virtues in general.

Man the savage had of these courage, in some lines; endurance and patience, in some lines; civilised man surpasses him in these, and has developed all the others. What are the conditions which have brought forth this degree of virtue in us, and how does the home rank among those conditions?

Let us first do it full justice. Mother-love is the foundation and permanent force of home life; and, mother-love is, indeed, the parent of all the love we know. Altruism was born of babyhood. The continued existence of the child—of a succession of children; the permanent presence of helplessness and its irresistible demands for care; this forced us into a widening of the sympathies, a deepening of sensitiveness to others' needs; this laid the foundations of human love. In this sense, the home is the cradle of one of our very greatest virtues. Love began with the mother; but it should not stop with her. "Mother-love" is precisely limited to its own children.

Few, indeed, are the mothers who love other women's children. As "mother" is a synonym for all kindness, so "stepmother" is a synonym for all unkindness. Folklore and fairy-tale indicate old fact. Infant helplessness and orphan need are not only what appeals to the mother—it is most the blood-tie, the physical relation.

Civilisation and Christianity teach us to care for "the child," motherhood stops at "my child."

Still, in the home we do find the nursery of all the lines of family affection, parental, filial, fraternal, and these are good. Hearts able to love ten could more easily take in twenty; the love of one's own parents spread to our present care for the aged; the power of loving grew, and, as soon as it overstepped the limits of the home, it grew more rapidly. We have learned to love our neighbours—if not as ourselves, at least, better than strangers. We have learned to love our fellow-citizens, fellow-craftsmen, fellow-countrymen. To-day the first thrills of international good-will are stealing across the world—and we are extending our sympathy even to the animals.

All this beautiful growth of love began at home; but the influence of the home, as it now exists upon the growth, is not so wholly gratifying. The love that we call human, the love of one another, the love Christ teaches us, is extra-domestic. We are not told, "Inasmuch as you have done it to your own families you have done it unto me." We are not exhorted to an ever-increasing intensity of devotion to our own blood-relations.

Both the teaching of our religion and the tendency of social progress call for a larger love, and the home, in its position of arrested development, primitive industry, and crippled womanhood, tends rather to check that growth than to help it. The man's love for his family finds expression in his labour for other people—he serves society, and society provides for him and his dear ones; so good will spreads and knits; comradeship and fellow-feeling appear, friendship brings its pure height of affection; this is the natural line of development in the great social virtue, love.

But the woman, still expressing her love for her family in direct personal service, misses all that. The primitive father, to feed the child, went forth himself and killed some rabbit—and the primitive mother cooked it: love, in grade A. The modern father, to feed his child, takes his thousandth part in some complex industry, and receives his thousand-fold share of the complex products of others' industry, and so provides for the child far more richly than could the savage: love, in grade Z. But the modern mother—if we can call her so by courtesy—to feed her child still does nothing but cook for it, still loves in grade A; and the effect of that persistence of grade A is to retard the development of grade Z. Mother-love is the fountain of all our human affection; but mother-love, as limited by the home, does not have the range and efficacy proper to our time. The home, as at present maintained, checks the growth of love.

As to Truth. This is a distinctly modern virtue. It comes in slowly, following power and freedom. The weak lie, a small beast hides; the lion does not hide. The slave lies—and the courtier; the king does not lie—he does not need to.

The most truthful nations are the most powerful. The most truthful class is the most powerful. The more truthful sex is the more powerful. Weakness, helplessness, ignorance, dependence, these breed falsehood and evasion; and, in child, servant, and woman, the denizens of the home, we have to combat these tendencies. The standard of sincerity of the father may be taught the son; but the home is not the originator of that standard. In this, as in other virtues, gain made in quite other fields of growth is necessarily transmitted to the home; but fair analysis must discriminate between the effect of religion, of education, of new social demands, and the effect of the home as such.

Courage comes along two main lines—by exposure to danger, and by increase of strength. The home, in its very nature, is intended to shield from danger; it is in origin a hiding place, a shelter for the defenceless. Staying in it is in no way conducive to the growth of courage. Constant shelter, protection, and defence may breed gratitude—must breed cowardice. We expect timidity of "women and children"—the housemates. Yet courage is by no means a sex attribute. Every species of animal that shows courage shows it equally in male and female—or even more in mother than in father. "It is better to meet a she-bear robbed of her whelps than a fool in his folly." This dominant terror—the fool—is contrasted with the female bear—not the male. Belligerence, mere combativeness, is a masculine attribute; but courage is not.

The cowardice of women is a distinctly home product. It is born of weakness and ignorance; a weakness and an ignorance by no means essential feminine attributes, but strictly domestic attributes. Keep a man from birth wrapped in much cloth, shut away from sky and sun, wind and rain, continually exhausting his nervous energy by incessant activity in monotonous little things, and never developing his muscular strength and skill by suitable exercise of a large and varied nature, and he would be weak. Savage women are not weak. Peasant women are not weak. Fishwives are not weak. The home-bound woman is weak, as would be a home-bound man. Also, she is ignorant. Not, at least not nowadays, ignorant necessarily of books, but ignorant of general life.

It is this ignorance and this weakness which makes women cowards; cowards frank and unashamed; cowards accustomed to be petted and praised, to be called "true woman" because they scream at that arch-terror of the home—a mouse. This home-bred cowardice, so admired in women, is of necessity transmitted to their sons as well as daughters. It is laughed out of them and knocked out of them, but it is born into them, relentlessly, with every generation. As black mothers must alter the complexion of a race, so must coward mothers alter its character. Apart from fighting—where the natural combative sex-tendency often counts as courage—our men are not as brave as they would be if their mothers were braver. We need courage to-day as much as we ever needed it in our lives. Courage to think and speak the truth; courage to face convention and prejudice, ridicule and opposition. We need courage in men and women equally, to face the problems of the times; and we do not get that courage from the home.

The sense of Justice is one of the highest human attributes; one of the latest in appearance, one of the rarest and most precious. We love and honour justice; we seek in some main lines of life to enforce it, after a fashion; but many of our arrangements are still so palpably unjust that one would think the virtue was but dreamed of, as yet unborn. Justice follows equality and freedom. To apprehend it at all the mind must first perceive the equal, and then resent the unequal. We must get a sense of level, of balance, and then we notice a deflection. As a matter of social evolution our system of legal justice springs from the primitive market place, the disputes of equals, the calling in of a third party to adjudicate. The disputants know instinctively that an outsider can see the difficulty better than an insider. Slowly the arbiter was given more power, more scope; out of much experience came the crystallisation of law. "Justice!" was the cry of the lowest before the highest; and the greatest kings were honoured most for this great virtue.

The field for justice has widened as the state widened; it has reached out to all classes; its high exercise distinguishes the foremost nations of our times. Yet even in the teeth of the law-courts injustice is still common; in everyday life it is most patent.

We have made great progress in the sense of justice and fair play; yet we are still greatly lacking in it. What is the contribution of domestic ethics to this mighty virtue? In the home is neither freedom nor equality. There is ownership throughout; the dominant father, the more or less subservient mother, the utterly dependent child; and sometimes that still lower grade—the servant. Love is possible, love deep and reciprocal; loyalty is possible; gratitude is possible; kindness, to ruinous favouritism, is possible; unkindness, to all conspiracy, hate, and rebellion is possible; justice is not possible.

Justice was born outside the home and a long way from it; and it has never even been adopted there.

Justice is wholly social in its nature—extra-domestic—even anti-domestic. Just men may seek to do justly in their homes, but it is hard work. Intense, personal feeling, close ties of blood, are inimical to the exercise of justice. Do we expect the judge upon the bench to do justice, dispassionate, unswerving, on his own child—his own wife—in the dock? If he does, we hail him as more than mortal. Do we expect a common man—not a judge with all the training and experience of his place, but a plain man—to do justice to his own wife and his own child in the constant intimacy of the home? Do we expect the mother to do justice to the child when the child is the offender and the mother the offended? Where plaintiff, judge, and executioner are lodged in one person; where there is no third party—no spectators even—only absolute irresponsible power, why should we—how could we—expect justice! We don't. We do not even think of it. No child cries for "Justice!" to the deaf walls of the home—he never heard of it.

He gets love—endless love and indulgence. He gets anger and punishment with no court of appeal. He gets care—neglect—discourtesy—affection— indifference—cruelty—and sometimes wise and lovely training—but none of these are justice. The home, as such, in no way promotes justice; but, in its disproportionate and unbalanced position to-day, palpably perverts and prevents it.

Allied to justice, following upon large equality and recognition of others, comes that true estimate of one's self and one's own powers which is an unnamed virtue. "Humility" is not it—to undervalue and depreciate one's self may be the opposite of pride, but it is not a virtue. A just estimate is not humility. But call it humility for convenience' sake; and see how ill it flourishes at home. In that circumscribed horizon small things look large. There is no general measuring point, no healthy standard of comparison.

The passionate love of the wife, the mother, and equally of the husband, the father, makes all geese swans. The parents idealise their children; and the children, even more restricted by the home atmosphere—for they know no other—idealise the parents. This is sometimes to their advantage—often the other way. Constant study of near objects, with no distant horizon to rest and change the focus, makes us short-sighted; and, as we all know, the smallest object is large if you hold it near enough. Constant association with one's nearest and dearest necessarily tends to a disproportionate estimate of their values.

There is no perspective—cannot be—in these close quarters. The infant prodigy of talent, praised and petted, brings his production into the cold light of the market, under the myriad facets of the public eye, to the measurement of professional standards—and no most swift return to the home atmosphere can counterbalance the effect of that judgment day. A just estimate of one's self and one's work can only be attained by the widest and most impersonal comparison. The home estimate is essentially personal, essentially narrow. It sometimes errs in underrating a world-talent; but nine times out of ten it errs the other way—overrating a home-talent. Humility, in the sense of an honest and accurate estimate of one's self, is not a home-made product. A morbid modesty or an unfounded pride often is. The intense self-consciousness, the prominent and sensitive personality developed by home life, we are all familiar with in women.

The woman who has always been in close personal relation with someone,—daughter, sister, wife, mother,—and so loved, valued, held close, feels herself neglected and chilly when she comes into business relations. She feels personal neglect in the broad indifference of office or shop; and instantly seeks to establish personal relations with all about her. As a business woman she outgrows it in time. It is not a sex-quality, it is a home-quality; found in a boy brought up entirely at home as well as in a girl. It tends to a disproportionate estimate of self; it is a primitive quality, common to children and savages; it is not conducive to justice and true social adjustment.

Closely allied to this branch of character is the power of self-control. As an initial human virtue none lies deeper than this; and here the home has credit for much help in developing some of the earlier stages of this great faculty. Primitive man brought to his dawning human relation a long-descended, highly-developed Ego. He had been an individual animal "always and always," he had now to begin to be a social animal, a collective animal, to develop the social instincts and the social conduct in which lay further progress.

The training of the child shows us in little what history shows us in the large. What the well-bred child has to learn to make him a pleasing member of the family is self-control. To restrain and adjust one's self to one's society—that is the line of courtesy—the line of Christianity—the line of social evolution. The home life does indeed teach the beginning of self-control; but no more. As compared with the world, it represents unbridled license. "In company" one must wear so and so, talk so and so, do so and so, look so and so. To "feel at home" means relaxation of all this.

This is as it should be. The home is the place for personal relief and rest from the higher plane of social contact. But social contact is needed to develop social qualities, constant staying at home does not do it.

The man, accustomed to meet all sorts of people in many ways, has a far larger and easier adjustment. The woman, used only to the close contact of a few people in a few relations, as child, parent, servant, tradesman; or to the set code of "company manners," has no such healthy human plane of contact.

"I never was so treated in my life!" she complains—and she never was—at home. This limits the range of life, cuts off the widest channels of growth, overdevelops the few deep ones; and does not develop self-control. The dressing-gown-and-slippers home attitude is temporarily changed for that of "shopping," or "visiting," but the childish sensitiveness, the disproportionate personality, remain dominant.

A too continuous home atmosphere checks in the woman the valuable social faculties. It checks it in the man more insidiously, through his position of easy mastery over these dependents, wife, children, servants; and through the constant catering of the whole ménage to his special tastes. If each man had a private tailor shop in his back yard he would be far more whimsical and exacting in his personal taste in clothes. Every natural tendency to self-indulgence is steadily increased by the life service of an entire wife. This having one whole woman devoted to one's direct personal service is about as far from the cultivation of self-control as any process that could be devised.

The man loves the woman and serves her—but he serves her through his service of the world—and she serves him direct. He can fuss and dictate as to details, he can develop all manner of notions as to bacon, or toast, or griddle cakes; the whole cuisine is his, he supports it, it is meant to please him, and under its encompassing temptation he increases in girth and weight; but not in self-control. He may be a wise, temperate, judicious man, but the home, with its disproportionate attention to personal desires, does not make him so.

No clearer instance could be given of the effect of domestic ethics. In this one field may be shown the beneficent effects of the early home upon early man, the continued beneficent effects of what is essential in the home upon modern man; and the most evil effects of the domestic rudiments upon modern man. The differing ages and sexes held together by love, yet respecting one another's privacy, demand of one another precisely this power of self-control. Children together, with no adults, become boisterous and unruly; adults together, with no children, become out of sympathy with childhood; the sexes, separated, tend to injurious excesses; but the true home life checks excess, develops what is lacking, harmonises all.

What does the morbid, disproportioned, overgrown home life do? It tends to develop a domineering selfishness in man and a degrading abnegation in woman—or sometimes reverses this effect. The smooth, unconscious, all-absorbing greed which the unnaturally developed home of to-day produces in some women, is as evil a thing as life shows. Here is a human creature who has all her life been loved and cared for, sheltered, protected, defended; everything provided for her and nothing demanded of her except the exercise of her natural feminine functions, and some proficiency in the playground regulations of "society."

The degree of sublimated selfishness thus produced by home life is quite beyond the selfishness we so deplore in men. A man may be—often is—deplorably selfish in his home life; but he does not expect all the world to treat him with the same indulgence. He has to give as well as take in the broad, healthy, growing life of the world.

The woman has her home-life to make her selfish, and has no world life to offset it. Men are polite to her on account of her sex—not on account of any power, any achievement, any distinctive human value, but simply because she is a woman. Her guests are necessarily polite to her. Her hosts are necessarily polite to her, and so are her fellow-guests. Her servants are necessarily polite to her. Her children also; if they are not she feels herself abused, denied a right.

The home and its social tributaries steadily work to develop a limitless personal selfishness in which the healthy power of self-control is all unknown. One way or the other swings the pendulum; here the woman pours out her life in devotion to her husband and children; in which case she is developing selfishness in them with as much speed and efficacy as if she were their worst enemy; and here again the woman sits, plump and fair, in her padded cage, bedizening its walls with every decoration; covering her own body with costly and beautiful things; feeding herself, her family, her guests; running from meal to meal as if eating were really the main business of a human being. This is the extreme.

Our primitive scheme requires that the entire time of the woman-who-does-her-own-work shall be spent in ministering to the physical needs of her family; and in the small minority who have other women to do it for them, that she shall still have this ministry her main care—and shall have no others. It is this inordinate demand for the life and time of a whole woman to keep half a dozen people fed, cleaned, and waited on, which keeps up in us a degree of self-indulgence we should, by every step of social development, have long since outgrown.

The personal preparation of food by a loving wife and mother does not ensure right nourishment—that we have shown at length; but it does ensure that every human soul thus provided for shall give far too much thought to what it eats and drinks and wherewithal it shall be clothed. The yielding up of a woman's life to the service of these physical needs of mankind does not develop self-control, nor its noble line of ensuing virtues—temperance, chastity, courtesy, patience, endurance.

See the child growing up under this disproportionate attention; fussy, critical, capricious, always thinking of what he wants and how he wants it. The more his mother waits on him, the more she has to do so; he knows no better than to help himself to the offered life. See the husband, criticising the coffee and the steak; or so enjoying and praising them that the happy wife eagerly spends more hours in preparing more dishes that John will like. It is a pleasant, roseate atmosphere. All are happy in it. Why is it not good? Because it is a hotbed of self-indulgence. Because it constantly maintains a degree of personal devotion to one's appetites which would disappear under a system of living suited to our age.

Self-control is developed by true home life; by true family love. Family, love, unmodified by social relation, gives also the family feud; the unconscionably narrow pride of the clansman; the home life of the first century, arbitrarily maintained in the twentieth, gives us its constant contribution of first-century ethics.

As to honour—that delicate, deep-rooted, instinctive ethical sense; applied so rigidly to this, so little to that; showing so variously; "business honour," "military honour," "professional honour," "the honour of a gentleman"—what is the standard of honour in the home?

The only "honour" asked of the woman is chastity; quite a special sex-distinction, not as yet demanded in any great degree of the man.

If the home develops chastity, it seems to discriminate sharply in its preferred exponent. But apart from that virtue, what sense of honour do we find in the home-bound woman? Is it to keep her word inflexibly? A woman's privilege is to change her mind. Is it to spare the weaker? Would that some dream of this high grace could stand between the angry woman and the defenceless child. Is it to respect privacy, to scorn eavesdropping, to regard the letter of another person as inviolate?

The standard of honour in the home is not that of "an officer and a gentleman." The things a decent and well-educated woman will sometimes do to her own children, do cheerfully and unblushingly, are flatly dishonourable; but she does not even know it. And the things she does outside the home, with only her home-bred sense of honour to guide her, are equally significant. To slip in front of others who are standing in line; to make engagements and break them; to even engage rooms and board, and then change her plans without letting the other party know; thus entailing absolute money loss to a perfectly innocent person, without a qualm; this is frequently done by women with a high standard of chastity; but no other sense of honour whatever.

The home is the cradle of all the virtues, but we are in a stage of social development where we need virtues beyond the cradle size. The virtues begun at home need to come out and grow in the world as men need to do—and as woman need to do, but do not know it. The ethics of the home are good in degree. The ethics of human life are far larger and more complex.

Our moral growth is to-day limited most seriously by the persistent maintenance in half the world of a primitive standard of domestic ethics.

  X

DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT

Long is the way from the primal home, with its simple child-motif, to the large and expensive house of entertainment we call home to-day. The innocent "guest-chamber" early added to the family accommodations has spread its area and widened its demands, till we find the ultra-type of millionaire mansion devoting its whole space, practically, to the occupation of guests—for even the private rooms are keyed up to a comparison with those frankly built and furnished for strangers. The kitchen, the dining-room, the pantry, the table-furniture of all sorts, are arranged in style and amplitude to meet the needs of guests. The sitting-room becomes a "parlour," the parlour a "drawing-room" with "reception-room" addition; and then comes the still more removed "ballroom"—a remarkable apartment truly, to form part of a home. Some even go so far as to add a theatre—that most essentially public of chambers—in this culminating transformation of a home to a house of entertainment.

From what once normal base sprang this abnormal growth? How did this place of love and intimacy, the outward form of our most tender and private relations, so change and swell to a place of artificial politeness and most superficial contact? The point of departure is not hard to find; it lies in that still visible period when hospitality was one of our chief virtues.

Of all the evolving series of human virtues none is more easily studied in its visible relation to condition and its rapid alterations than hospitality. Moreover, though considered a virtue, it is not so intermingled with our deepest religious sanction as to be painful to discuss; we respect, but do not worship it.

Hospitality is a quality of human life, a virtue which appears after a certain capacity for altruism is developed; not a very high degree, for we find a rigid code of hospitality among many savage tribes; and which obtains in exact proportion to the distance, difficulty, and danger of travelling.

We still find its best type among the Bedouin Arabs and the Scotch Highlanders; we find it in our own land more in the country than the city, more in the thinly settled and poorly roaded south than in the more thickly settled and better roaded north; and most of all on the western frontier, where mountain and desert lie between ranch and ranch.

To call out the most lively sense of hospitality the traveller must be weary (that means a long, hard road), and "distressed"—open to injury, if not hospitably received. To have a fresh, clean, rosy traveller drop in after half an hour's pleasant stroll does not touch the springs of hospitality. The genuine figure to call out this virtue is the stranger, the wanderer, the pilgrim.

Hospitality will not stand constant use. The steady visitor must be a friend; and friendship is quite a different thing from hospitality. That finds its typical instance in the old Scotch chief sheltering the hunted fugitive; and defending him against his pursuers even when told that his guest was the murderer of his son. As guest he was held sacred; he had claimed the rights of hospitality and he received them. Had he returned to make the same demand every few days, even without renewing his initial offence, it is doubtful if hospitality would have held out.

A somewhat thin, infrequent virtue is hospitality at its heights, requiring intervals of relaxation. "Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour's house, lest he weary of thee and hate thee," says the proverb of the very people where the laws of hospitality were sacred; and "the stranger within thy gates" came under the regular provision of household law.

Hospitality became a sort of standing custom under feudalism, as part of the parental care of the Lord of the Land; and thus acquired its elements of pride and ostentation. Each nobleman owned all the land about him; the traveller had to claim shelter of him either directly or through his dependents, and the castle was the only place big enough for entertainment. The nobleman saw to it that no other person on his domain should be able to offer much hospitality. So the Castle or the Abbey had it all.

A little of this spirit gave character to the partly danger-based southern hospitality. It was necessary to the occasional stranger on the original and legitimate grounds; it became a steady custom to the modern Lord of the Manor, none of whose subsidiary fellow-citizens had the wherewithal to feed and shelter guests. But hospitality, even in that form, is not what issues cards and lays red carpet under awnings from door to curb.

Here no free-handed cordial greeting keeps the visitor to dinner—the dinner where the plates are named and numbered and the caterer ready with due complement of each expensive dish. Hospitality must blush and apologise—"I'm sorry, but you must excuse me, I have to dress for dinner!" and "Why, of course! I forgot it was so late!—dear me! the Jenkinses will have come before me if I don't hurry home!" On what ground, then, is that dinner given—why are the Jenkinses asked that night? If not the once sacred spirit of hospitality, is it the still sacred spirit of friendship?

Are the people we so expensively and elaborately entertain—and who so carefully retaliate, card for card, plat for plat and dollar for dollar—are these the people whom we love? Among our many guests is an occasional friend. The occasional friend we entreat to come and see us when we are not entertaining!

Friendships are the fruit of true personal expression, the drawing together that follows recognition, the manifest kinships of the outspoken soul. In friendship we discriminate, we particularise, we enjoy the touch and interchange of like characteristics, the gentle stimulus of a degree of unlikeness. Friendship comes naturally, spontaneously, along lines of true expression in work, of a casual propinquity that gives rein to the unforced thought. More friendships are formed in the prolonged association of school-life or business life, in the intimacy of a journey together or a summer's camping, than ever grew in a lonely lifetime of crowded receptions. Friendship may coexist with entertainment, may even thrive in spite of it, but is neither cause nor result of that strange process.

What, then, is "entertainment," to which the home is sacrificed so utterly—which is no part of fatherhood, motherhood, or childhood, of hospitality or friendship?

On what line of social evolution may we trace the growth of this amazing phenomenon; this constant gathering together of many people to eat when they are not hungry, dance when they are not merry, talk when they have nothing to say, and sit about so bored by their absurd position that the hostess must needs hire all manner of paid performers wherewith to "entertain" them?

Here is the explanation: humanity is a relation. It is not merely a number of human beings, like a number of grains of sand. The human being, to be really human, must be associated in various forms; grouped together in the interchange of function. The family relation, as we have seen, does not in itself constitute humanity; human relations are larger.

Man, as a separate being, the personal man, must have his private house to be separate in. Man, as a collective being, the social man, must have his public house to be together in. This does not mean a drinking place, but any form of building which shelters our common social functions. A church is a public house—in it we meet together as human beings; as individuals, not as families; to perform the common social function of worship. All religions have this collective nature—people come together as human beings, under a common impulse.

The home is a private house. That belongs to us separately for the fulfilment of purely personal functions. Every other form of building on earth is a public house, a house for people to come together in for the fulfilment of social functions. Church, school, palace, mill, shop, post office, railway station, museum, art gallery, library, every kind of house except the home is a public house. These public houses are as essential to our social life and development as the private house is to our physical existence.

Inside the home are love, marriage, birth, and death; outside the home are agriculture, manufacture, trade, commerce, transportation, art, science, and religion. Every human—i.e., social—process goes on outside the home, and has to have its appropriate building. In these varied forms of social activity, humanity finds its true expression; the contact and interchange, the stimulus and relief, without which the human soul cannot live.

Humanity must associate, that is the primal law of our being. This association, so far in history, has been almost entirely confined to men. They have associated in war, in work, in play. Men have always been found in groups, on land and sea, doing things together; developing comradeship, loyalty, justice; enjoying the full swing of human faculties. But women, with the one partial exception of the privileges of the church, have been denied this most vital necessity of human life—association. Every woman was confined separately, in her private house, to her most separate and private duties and pleasures; and the duties and pleasures of social progress she was utterly denied. The church alone gave her a partial outlet; gave her a common roof for a common function, a place to come together in; and to the church she has flocked continually, as her only ground of human association.

But as society continued to evolve, reaching an ever-higher degree of interdependent complexity, developing in the human soul an ever-growing capacity and necessity for wide, free, general association, and transmitting that increasing social capacity to the daughter as well as the son, the enormous pressure had to find some outlet. "What will happen if an irresistible force meets an immovable body?" is the old question, and the answer is "The irresistible force will be resisted and the immovable body be moved." That is exactly what has happened. The irresistible force of the public spirit has met the immovable body of the private house—and that great, splendid, working social force has been frittered away in innumerable little processes of private amusement; the quiet, beautiful, private home has been bloated and coarsened in immeasurable distention as a place of public entertainment.

There is more than one line of tendency, good and bad, at work to bring about this peculiar phenomenon of domestic entertainment; but the major condition, without which it could not exist, is the home-bound woman; and the further essential, without which it could not develop to the degree found in what we call "society," is that the home-bound woman be exempt from the domestic industries, exempt from the direct cares of motherhood, exempt from any faintest hint of the great human responsibility of mutual labour; exempt from any legitimate connection with the real social body; and so, still inheriting the enormously increasing pressure of the social spirit, she pours out her energies in this simulacrum of social life we still call "social."

What is the effect, or rather what are some of the effects, of this artificial game of living upon the real course of life? And in particular how does it affect the home, and how does the home affect it? In the first place this form of human association, based upon the activities of otherwise idle women, and requiring the home as its vehicle of expression, tends to postpone marriage. The idle woman, contributing nothing to the household labours or expenses, requires to be wholly supported by her husband. This would be a check on marriage even if she stayed at home twirling her thumbs; for he would have to provide women to wait on her, on him, on the children, in default of her service as "house-wife." He could not marry as soon as the man whose wife, strong and skilled in house-service, held up her end of the business, as does the farmer's and mechanic's wife to-day.

But when to the expense of maintaining a useless woman is added the expense of entertaining her useless friends; when this entertainment takes the form, not of hospitality sharing the accommodations of the home, the food of the family, but of providing extra rooms, furniture, dishes, and servants; of special elaboration of costly food; and of a whole new gamut of expensive clothing wherein to entertain and be entertained—then indeed does marriage recede, and youth wither and blacken in awaiting it.

Current fiction, current jokes, current experience, and all the background of history and literature, show us this strong and vicious tendency at work; and ugly is the work it does. No personal necessities, no family necessities, call for the expenses lavished on entertainment. Once started, the process races on, limited by no law of nature, for it is an unnatural process; excess following excess, in nightmare profusion. Veblen in his great book "The Theory of the Leisure Class," treats of the general development of this form of "conspicuous waste," but this special avenue of its maintenance is open to further study.

Women who work in their homes may be ignorant, uncultured, narrow; they may act on man as a check to mental progress; they may retard the development of their remaining industries and be a heavy brake on the wheels of social progress; they may and they do have this effect; but they are at least honest workers, though primitive ones. Their homes are held back from full social development, but they are legitimate homes. Their husbands, if selfish and vicious, waste money and life in the saloons, finding the social contact they must have somewhere; but the wives, getting along as they can without social contact, meet the basic requirements of home life, and offer to the honest and self-controlled young man a chance to enjoy "the comforts of a home," and to save money if he will. I am by no means pointing out this grade of woman's labour as desirable; that is sufficiently clear in previous chapters; but it is in origin right, and, though restricted, not abnormal.

Domestic entertainment is abnormal. It is an effort to meet a natural craving in an unnatural way. It continually seeks to "bring people together" because they are unnaturally kept apart; and to furnish them with entertainment in lieu of occupation. Any person whose work is too hard, too long, too monotonous, or not in itself attractive, needs "relaxation," "amusement," "recreation"; but this does not account in the least for domestic entertainment. That is offered to people who do not work at all. Those of them who do, part of the time, as business men sufficiently wealthy to be "in society," and yet sufficiently human to keep on in real social activities, are not relaxed, amused, or recreated by the alleged entertainment.

Those who most conspicuously and entirely give themselves up to it are most wearied by it. They may develop a morbid taste for the game, which cannot be satisfied without it; but neither are they satisfied within it.

The proofs of this are so patent to the sociologist as to seem tedious in enumeration; one alone carries weight enough to satisfy any questioner—that is the ceaseless and rapid contortions of invention with which the "entertainment" varies.

If the happy denizens of the highest "social circles" sat serene and content like the gods upon Olympus, banqueting eternally in royal calm, argument and criticism would fall to the ground. If they rose from their eternal banqueting, refreshed and strong, recreated in vigour and enthusiasm, and able to plunge into the real activities of life, then we might well envy them, and strive, with reason, to attain their level. But this is in no wise the case. Look for your evidence at the requisites of entertainment in any age of sufficient wealth and peace to maintain idlers, and in no age more easily typical than our own, and see the convulsive and incessant throes of change, the torrent of excess, the license, the eccentricity, the sudden reaction to this and that extreme, with which the wearied entertainers seek to devise entertainment that will entertain.

The physiologist knows that where normal processes are arrested abnormal processes develop. The persistent energy of the multiplying cell finds expression in cyst and polypus as readily as in good muscle and gland; and, whereas the normal growth finds its natural limit and proportion in the necessary organic interchange with other working parts of the mechanism, no such healthy check acts upon the abnormal growth.

Legs and arms do not grow and stretch indefinitely, putting out wabbling, pendulous eccentricities here and there; but a tumour grows without limit and without proportion; without use, and, therefore, without beauty. It takes no part in the bodily functions, and, therefore, is a disease. Yet it is connected with the body, grows in it, and swells hugely upon stolen blood. Social life has this possibility of morbid growth as has the physical body.

All legitimate social functions check and limit each other, as do our physical functions. No true branch of the social service can wax great at the expense of the others. If there are more in any trade or profession than are needed, the less capable are dropped out—cannot maintain a place in that line of work. Our use to each other is the natural check and guide in normal social growth. This whole field of domestic entertainment is abnormal in its base and direction, and therefore has no check in its inordinate expansion. As long as money can be found and brains be trained to minister to its demands the stream pours on; and all industry and art are corrupted in the service.

True social intercourse, legitimate amusement, is quite another matter. Human beings must associate, in innumerable forms and degrees of intimacy. Perfect friendship is the most intense, the closest form, and our great national and international organisations the largest and loosest. Between lies every shade of combination, temporary and permanent, deep and shallow, all useful and pleasant in their place. A free human being, rightly placed in society, has first his work—or her work—the main line of organic relation. That means special development, and all affiliations, economic and personal, that rest on that specialisation.

Then come the still larger general human connections, religious, political, scientific, educational, in which we join and work with others in the great world-functions that include us all. Play is almost as distinctively a human function as work—perhaps quite as much so; and here again we group and re-group, in sports and games, by "eights," by "nines," by "elevens," and all progressive associations. Then, where the play is so subtle and elaborate as to require a life's work, as in the great social function of the drama, we have people devoting their time to that form of expression, though they may seek their own recreation in other lines.

All natural mingling to perform together—as in the harvest dances and celebrations of all peoples—or to enjoy together the performance of others, as when we gather in the theatre, this is legitimate human life; and, while any one form may be overdeveloped, by excessive use, as an unwise athlete may misuse his body, it is still in its nature right, and good, if not misused.

But the use of the home as a medium of entertainment is abnormal in itself, in its relation, or, rather, in its total lack of relation to the real purpose of the place. The happy privacy of married love is at once lost. The quiet wisdom, peace, and loving care which should surround the child are at once lost. The delicate sincerity of personal expression, which should so unerringly distinguish one's dress and house, is at once lost. The only shadow of excuse for cumbering the home with crude industries—our claim that we do this so as to more accurately meet the needs of the family—is at once lost. The whole household machinery, once so nobly useful, and still interesting, as a hand-loom or spinning wheel, is prostituted to uses of which the primal home had no conception.

In an ideal home we should find, first, the perfect companionship of lovers; then the happy, united life of father, mother, and child, of brother and sister; then all simple, genuine hospitality; then the spontaneous intercourse of valued friends—the freedom to meet and mingle, now more, now less, in which, as character develops, we slowly find our own, and our whole lives are enriched and strengthened by right companionship.

Right here is the point of departure from the legitimate to the illegitimate; from what is natural, true, and wholly good to this avenue of diseased growth. As we reach out more and more for a wider range of contact—a chance of more varied association—we should leave the home and find what we seek in its own place: the general functions of human life, the whole wide field of human activity. In school, in college, the growing soul finds at once possibilities of contact impossible at home.

True association is impossible without common action. We do not sit voiceless and motionless, shaking hands with each other's souls. True and long-established friends and lovers may do this for a season. "Silence is the test of friendship," someone has said; but friendship and love require something more than this for birth and maintenance. The "ties" of love and friendship are found in the common memories and common hopes, the things we have done, do, and will do, for and with each other.

The home is for the family, and at most, a few "familiar" friends. The wider range of friendship, actual and potential, that the human soul of to-day requires, is not possible at home. See the broad graded list of a man's school friends and college friends, classmates, and fellows in club and society, associates in games and sports, business friends of all degrees, friends and associates in politics; he has an enormous range of social contact, from every grade of which he gets some good, and, out of the whole, some personal friends he likes to have come freely to his home.

Contrast with this the woman's scale—the average woman, she whose "sphere" is wholly in the home. By nature—that is, by human nature—she has the same need and capacity for large association. Being pruned down to a few main branches, confined almost wholly to the basic lines of attachment known equally to the savage, she pours a passionate intensity of feeling into her narrow range. The life-long give-and-take with a friend of whose private life one knows nothing is impossible to her. She must monopolise, being herself monopolised from birth.

This intensity of feeling, finally worn down by the rebuff it must needs meet, gives place in the life of the woman who is able to "entertain," to the "dear five hundred friends" of that sterile atmosphere. It is no longer the free reaching out of the individual toward those who mean help and strength, breadth and change and progress, rest and relaxation. In the varied life of the world we are brought in contact with many kinds of people, in different lines of work, and are drawn to those who belong to us. In the monotonous life of "society" we are brought in contact with the same kind of people, or people whose life effort is to appear the same—all continually engaged in doing the same thing. If any new idea jars the monotony, off rushes the whole crowd after it—bicycle, golf, or ping-pong—till they have made it monotonous, too.

No true and invigorating social intercourse can take place among people who are cut off from real social activities, whose medium of contact is the utterly irrelevant and arbitrary performance of what they so exquisitely miscall "social functions." The foundation error lies in the confinement of a social being to a purely domestic scale of living. By bringing into the home people who have no real business there, they are instantly forced into an artificial position. The home is no place for strangers. They cannot work there, they cannot play there, so they must be "entertained." So starts the merry-go-round. The woman must have social contact, she cannot go where it is in the normal business of life, so she tries to drag it in where she is; forcing the social life into the domestic. The domestic life is crowded out by this foreign current, and, as there is no place for legitimate social activities, in any home or series of homes, however large and costly, the illegitimate social activities are at once set up.

The train of evils to the health of society we are all acquainted with, though not with their causes. Sociology is yet too new to us for practical application. We are too unfamiliar with normal social processes to distinguish the abnormal, even though suffering keenly under it. Yet this field is so within the reach of everyone that it would seem easy to understand.

The human being's best growth requires a happy, quiet, comfortable home; with peace and health, order and beauty in its essential relations. The human being also requires right social relation, the work he is best suited to, full range of expression in that work, and intercourse free and spontaneous with his kind. Women are human beings. They are allowed the first class of relations—the domestic; but denied the other—the social. Hence they are forced to meet a normal need in an abnormal way, with inevitable evil results.

We can see easily the more conspicuous evils of luxury and extravagance, of idleness, excitement, and ill health, of the defrauded home, the withering family life, the black shadows beyond that; but there are others we do not see. Large among these is our loneliness. The machinery of domestic entertainment is paradoxically in our way. We are for ever and for ever flocking together, being brought together, arranging to meet people, to be met by people, to have other people meet each other, and meanwhile life passes and we have not met.

"How I wish I could see more of you!" we sigh to the few real friends. Your friend may be at the same dinner—taking out someone else, or, even taking you out—in equal touch with neighbours at either side and eyes opposing. Your friend may be at the same dance—piously keeping step with many another; at the same reception, the same tea, the same luncheon—but you do not meet. As the "society" hand is gloved that there be no touching of real flesh and blood, so is the society soul dressed and defended for the fray in smooth phrase and glossy smile—a well-oiled system, without which the ceaseless press and friction would wear us raw, but within which we do anything but "meet."

For truth and health and honest friendliness, for the bringing out of the best there is in us, for the maintenance of a pure and restful home-life and the development of an inspiring and fruitful social life, we need some other medium of association than domestic entertainments. And we are rapidly finding it. The woman's club is a most healthy field of contact, and the woman's clubhouse offers a legitimate common ground for large gatherings.

The increasing number of women in regular business life alters the whole position. The business woman has her wider range of contact during the day, and is glad to rest and be alone with her family at night. If she desires to go out, it is to see real friends, or to some place of real amusement. When all women are honestly at work the "calling habit" will disappear perforce, with all its waste and dissimulation.

Given a healthy active life of true social usefulness for all women, and given a full accommodation of public rooms for public gatherings, and the whole thing takes care of itself. The enormous demand for association will be met legitimately, and the satisfied soul will gladly return from that vast field of social life to the restful quiet, the loving intimacy, the genuineness of home-life, with its constant possibilities of real hospitality and the blessings of true friendship.

  XI

THE LADY OF THE HOUSE

The effect of the house upon women is as important as might be expected of one continuous environment upon any living creature. The house varies with the varying power and preference of the owner; but to a house of some sort the woman has been confined for a period as long as history. This confinement is not to be considered as an arbitrary imprisonment under personal cruelty, but as a position demanded by public opinion, sanctioned by religion, and enforced by law.

In the comparative freedom to "walk abroad" of our present-day civilised women, we too quickly forget the conditions immediately behind us, when even the marketing for the household was done by men, and the conditions still with us for many millions of women in many countries who are house-bound for life.

To briefly recount the situation, we find in the pre-human home the mother sharing the hole or nest with her young, also sharing the outside task of getting food for them. In some species the father assists the mother, he never does it all. In other cases the father is no assistance, even a danger, seeking in cannibal infanticide to eat his own young; the mother in this case must feed and defend the young, as well as feed herself, and so must leave home at frequent intervals.

The common cat is an instance of this. She is found happily nursing the kittens in her hidden nest among the hay; but you often find the kittens alone while the mother goes mousing, and a contributary Thomas you do not find.

As we have before seen, our longer period of infancy and its overlapping continuity, a possible series of babies lasting twenty years or so, demanded a permanent home; and so long as the mother had sole charge of this progressive infant party she must needs be there to attend to her maternal duties. This condition is what we have in mind, or think we have in mind, when maintaining the duty of women to stay at home.

Wherever woman's labour is still demanded, as among all savages, in the peasant classes where women work in the fields, and in our own recent condition of slavery, either the mother takes her baby with her, or a group of babies are cared for by one woman while the rest are at work. Again, among our higher classes, almost the first step of increasing wealth is to depute to a nurse the mother's care, in order that she may be free from this too exacting claim. The nurse is a figure utterly unknown to animals, save in the collective creatures, like the bee and ant; a deputy-mother, introduced by us at a very early period. But this sharing of the mother's duties has not freed the woman from the house, because of quite another element in our human life. This is the custom of ownership in women.

The animal mother is held by love, by "instinct" only; the human mother has been for endless centuries a possession of the father. In his pride and joy of possession, and in his fear lest some other man annex his treasure, he has boxed up his women as he did his jewels, and any attempt at personal freedom on their part he considered a revolt from marital allegiance.

The extreme of this feeling results in the harem-system, and the crippled ladies of China; wherein we find the women held to the house, not by their own maternal ties, of which we talk much but in which we place small confidence, but by absolute force.

This condition modifies steadily with the advance of democratic civilisation, but the mental habit based upon it remains with us. The general opinion that a woman should be in the home is found so lately expressed as in the works of our present philosopher, Mr. Dooley. In his "Expert Evidence" he says, "What the coort ought to 've done was to call him up and say 'Lootgert, where's your good woman?' If Lootgert cudden't tell, he ought to be hanged on gineral principles; f'r a man must keep his wife around the house, and when she isn't there it shows he's a poor provider."

The extent and depth of this feeling is well shown by a mass of popular proverbs, often quoted in this connection, such as "A woman should leave her house three times—when she is christened, when she is married, and when she is buried" (even then she only leaves it to go to church), or again, "The woman, the cat, and the chimney should never leave the house." So absolute is this connection in our minds that numbers of current phrases express it, the Housewife—Hausfrau, and the one chosen to head this chapter—The Lady of the House.

Now what has this age-long combination done to the woman, to the mother and moulder of human character; what sort of lady is the product of the house?

Let us examine the physical results first. There is no doubt that we have been whitened and softened by our houses. The sun darkens, the shade pales. In the house has grown the delicate beauty we admire, but are we right in so admiring?

The highest beauty the world has yet known was bred by the sun-loving Athenians. Their women were home-bound, but their men raced and wrestled in the open air. No argument need be wasted to prove that air and sun and outdoor exercise are essential to health, and that health is essential to beauty. If we admire weakness and pallor, it by no means shows those qualities to be good; we can admire deformity itself, if we are taught to.

Without any reference to cause or necessity, it may be readily seen that absolute confinement to the house must have exactly the same effect on women that it would on men, and that effect is injurious to the health and vigour of the race. It is possible by continuous outdoor training of the boys and men to counteract the ill effect of the indoor lives of women; but why saddle the race with difficulties? Why not give our children strong bodies and constitutions from both sides?

The rapid and increasing spread of physical culture in modern life is helping mend the low conditions of human development; but the man still has the advantage.

This was most convincingly shown by the two statues made by Dr. Sargent for the World's Fair of 1893 from an extended series of measurements of college boys and girls. Thousands and thousands of specimens of our young manhood and young womanhood were carefully measured, and there stand the two white figures to show how we compare in beauty—the men and women of our time.

The figure of the man is far and away more beautiful than that of the woman. It is better proportioned as a whole; she is too short-legged, too long-waisted, too narrow-chested. It is better knit, more strongly and accurately "set up." She does not hang together well at all—the lines of connection are weak and wavering, and in especial does she lack any power and grace in the main area, the body itself, the torso. There is the undeveloped chest and the over-developed hips; and between them, instead of a beautifully modelled trunk, mere shapeless tissues, crying mutely for the arbitrary shape they are accustomed to put on outside! We are softer and whiter for our long housing; but not more truly beautiful.

The artist seeks his models from the stately burden-bearing, sun-browned women of Italy; strong creatures, human as well as feminine. The house life, with its shade, its foul air, its overheated steaminess, its innumerable tiring small activities, and its lack of any of those fine full exercises which built the proportions of the Greeks, has not benefited the body of the lady thereof; and in injuring her has injured all mankind, her children.

How of her mind? How has the mental growth of the race been affected by the housing of women? Apply the question to men. Think for a moment of the mental condition of humanity, if men too had each and every one stayed always in the home. The results are easy to picture. No enlargement of industry, only personal hand-to-mouth labour: not a trade, not a craft, not a craftsman on earth; no enlargement of exchange and commerce, only the products of one's own field, if the house-bound were that much free: no market, local, national, or international; no merchant in the world.

No transportation, that at once; no roads—why roads if all men stayed at home? No education—even the child must leave home to go to school; no art, save the squaw-art of personal decoration of one's own handmade things. No travel, of course, and so no growth of any human ties, no widespread knowledge, love, and peace. In short, no human life at all—if men, all men, had always stayed at home. Merely the life of a self-maintained family—the very lowest type, the type we find most nearly approached by the remote isolated households of the "poor whites," of the South. Even they have some of the implements and advantages of civilisation, they are not utterly cut off.

The growth of the world has followed the widening lives of men, outside the home. The specialised trade, with its modification of character; the surplus production and every widening range of trade and commerce; the steadily increasing power of distribution, and transportation, with its increased area, ease, and speed; the ensuing increase in travel now so general and continuous; and following that the increase in our knowledge and love of one another; all—all that makes for civilisation, for progress, for the growth of humanity up and on toward the race ideal—takes place outside the home. This is what has been denied to the lady of the house—merely all human life!

Some human life she must needs partake of by the law of heredity, sharing in the growth of the race through the father; and some she has also shared through contact with the man in such time as he was with her in the house, to such a degree as he was willing and able to share his experience. Also her condition has been steadily ameliorated, as he, growing ever broader and wiser by his human relationships, brought wisdom and justice and larger love into his family relationship. But the gain came from without, and filtered down to the woman in most niggardly fashion.

Literature was a great world-art for centuries and centuries before women were allowed to read—to say nothing of write! It is not long since the opinion was held that, if women were allowed to write, they would but write love letters! In our last century, in civilised Christian England, Harriet Martineau and Jane Austen covered their writing with their sewing when visitors came in; writing was "unwomanly!"

The very greatest of our human gains we have been the slowest to share with woman: education and democracy.

We have allowed them religion in a sense—as we have allowed them medicine—to take; not to give! They might have a priest as they might have a doctor, but on no account be one! Religion was for man to preach—and woman to practise.

In some churches, very recently, we are at last permitting women to hold equal place with men in what they deem to be the special service of God, but it is not yet common. Her extra-domestic education has been won within a lifetime; and there are still extant many to speak and write against it, even in the Universities—those men of Mezozoic minds! And her place as active participant in democratic government is still denied by an immense majority, on the ground—the same old underlying ground—that it would take her from the house! Here, clear and strong, stands out that ancient theory, that the very existence of womanhood depends on staying in the house.

We have seen what has been denied to woman by absence from the world; what do we find bestowed upon her by the ceaseless, enclosing presence of the house? How does staying in one's own house all one's life affect the mind? We cannot ask this question of a man, for no man has ever done it except a congenital invalid. Nothing short of paralysis will keep a man in the house. He would as soon spend his life in petticoats, they are both part of the feminine environment—no part of his. He will come home at night to sleep, at such hours as suit him. He likes to eat at home, and brings his friends to see the domestic group—house, wife, and children; all, things to be fond and proud of, things a man wishes to own and maintain properly. But for work or play, out he goes to his true companions—men, full-grown human creatures who understand each other; in his true place—the world, our human medium.

The woman, with such temporary excursions as our modern customs permit, works, plays, rests, does all things in her house, or in some neighbouring house—the same grade of environment. The home atmosphere is hers from birth to death. That this custom is rapidly changing I gladly admit. The women of our country and our time are marching out of the home to their daily work by millions, only to return to them at night with redoubled affection; but there are more millions far, many more millions, who are still housewives or ladies of houses.

The first result is a sort of mental myopia. Looking always at things too near, the lens expands, the focus shortens, the objects within range are all too large, and nothing else is seen clearly. To spend your whole time in attending to your own affairs in your own home inevitably restricts the mental vision; inevitably causes those same personal affairs to seem larger to you than others' personal affairs or the affairs of the nation.

This is a general sweeping consequence of being house-bound; and it is a heavily opposing influence to all human progress. The little-mindedness of the house-lady is not a distinction of sex. It is in no essential way a feminine distinction, but merely associatively feminine in that only women are confined to houses.

A larger range of interest and care instantly gives a resultant largeness of mind, in women as well as men. Such free great lives as have been here and there attained by women show the same broad human characteristics as similar lives of men. It can never be too frequently insisted upon, at least not in our beclouded time, that the whole area of human life is outside of, and irrelevant to, the distinctions of sex. Race characteristics belong in equal measure to either sex, and the misfortune of the house-bound woman is that she is denied time, place, and opportunity to develop those characteristics. She is feminine, more than enough, as man is masculine more than enough; but she is not human as he is human. The house-life does not bring out our humanness, for all the distinctive lines of human progress lie outside.

In the mind of the lady of the house is an arrangement of fact and feeling, which is untrue because it is disproportionate. The first tendency of the incessant home life is to exaggerate personality. The home is necessarily a hotbed of personal feeling. There love grows intense and often morbid; there any little irritation frets and wears in the constant pressure like a stone in one's shoe. The more isolated the home, the more cut off from the healthy movement of social progress, as in the lonely farmhouses of New England, the more we find those intense eccentric characters such as Mary E. Wilkins so perfectly portrays. The main area of the mind being occupied with a few people and their affairs, a tendency to monomania appears. The solitary farmer is least able to escape this domestic pressure, and therefore we find these pathological conditions of home life most in scattered farms.

Human creatures, to keep healthy, must mingle with one another. The house-bound woman cannot; therefore she does not maintain a vigorous and growing mind. Such contact as she has is mainly through church opportunities; and along all such lines as are open to her she eagerly flocks, finding great relief therein. But compare the interchange between a group of house-ladies, and a corresponding group of men—their husbands perhaps. Each of these men, touching the world through a different trade, has an area of his own; from which he can bring a new outlook to the others. Even if all are farmers, in which case there is much less breadth and stimulus in their intercourse, they still have some connection with the moving world. They seek to meet at some outside point, the store, the blacksmith's shop, the railroad station, the post-office; the social hunger appeasing itself as best it may with such scraps of the general social activities as fall to it. But the women, coming together, have nothing to bring each other but personalities. Some slight variation in each case perhaps, a little difference in receipts for sponge-cake, cures for measles, patterns for clothes, or stitches for fancy-work. (Oh, poor, poor lives! where fancy has no work but in stitches, and no play at all!)

The more extended and well-supplied house merely gives its lady a more extended supply of topics of the same nature. She may discuss candle-shades instead of bed-quilts, "entrées" instead of "emptin's"; ferns for the table instead of "yarbs" for the garret; but the distinction is not vital. It is still the lady prattling of her circumambient house, as snails might (possibly do!) dilate upon the merits of their ever-present shells. The limitations of the house as an area for a human life are most baldly dreary and crippling in the lower grades, the great majority of cases, where the housewife toils, not yet become the lady of the house. Here you see grinding work, and endless grey monotony. Here are premature age, wasting disease, and early death. If a series of photographs could be made of the working housewives in our country districts, with some personal account of the "poor health" which is the main topic of their infrequent talk; we should get a vivid idea of the condition of this grade of house-bound life.

The lady is in a different class, and open to a different danger. She is not worn out by overwork, but weakened by idleness. She is not starved and stunted by the hopeless lack of expression, but is, on the contrary, distorted by a senseless profusion of expression. There is pathos even to tears in the perforated cardboard fly-traps dangling from the gaudy hanging lamp in the farmhouse parlour; the little weazened, withered blossom of beauty thrust forth from the smothered life below. There is no pathos, rather a repulsive horror, in the mass of freakish ornament on walls, floors, chairs, and tables, on specially contrived articles of furniture, on her own body and the helpless bodies of her little ones, which marks the unhealthy riot of expression of the overfed and underworked lady of the house.

Every animal want is met, save those of air and exercise, though nowadays we let her out enough to meet those, if she will do it in games and athletic sports—anything that has not, as Veblen puts it, "the slightest taint of utility." She is a far more vigorous lady physically, than ever before. Also, nowadays, we educate her; in the sense of a large supply of abstract information. We charge her battery with every stimulating influence during youth; and then we expect her to discharge the swelling current in the same peaceful circuit which contented her great-grandmother! This gives us one of the most agonising spectacles of modern times.

Here is a creature, inheriting the wide reach of the modern mind; that socially-developed mind begotten of centuries of broadest human intercourse; and, in our later years of diffused education, rapid transit, and dizzying spread of industrial processes, increasing its range and intensity with each generation. This tremendous engine, the healthy use of which requires contact with the whole field of social stimulus to keep up its supplies, and the whole field of social activity for free discharge, we expect to find peaceful expression in its own single house. There is of course a margin of escape—there must be.

In earlier decades the suppressed activity of this growing creature either still found vent in some refined forms of household industry, as in the exquisite embroideries of our grandmothers, or frankly boiled over in "society." The insatiate passion of woman for "society" has puzzled her unthinking mate. He had society, the real society of large human activities; but he saw no reason why she should want any. She ought to be content at home, in the unbroken circle of the family. While the real labours of the house held her therein she stayed, content or not; but, free of those, she has reached out widely in such planes as were open to her, for social contact. As women, any number of women, failed to furnish any other stimulus than that she was already overfilled with—they being each and all mere ladies of houses—she was naturally more attracted to the more humanly developed creature, man.

Man's power, his charm, for woman is far more than that of sex. It is the all-inclusive vital force of human life—of real social development. She has hung around him as devotedly as the cripple tags the athlete. When women have their own field of legitimate social activity, they retain their admiration for really noble manhood, but the "anybody, Good Lord!" petition is lost forever. A hint is perhaps suggested here, as to the world-old charm for women, of the priest and soldier. Both are forms of very wide social service—detached, impersonal, giving up life to the good of the whole—infinitely removed from the close clinging shadow of the house!

In our immediate time the progress of industry has cut the lady off from even her embroidery. Man, alert and inventive, follows her few remaining industries relentlessly, and grabs them from her, away from the house, into the mill and shop where they belong. But she, with ever idler hands, must stay behind. He will furnish her with everything her heart can wish—but she must stay right where she is and swallow it.

This amiable programme, so exquisitely ludicrous, when offered to the world's most inherently industrious worker, becomes as exquisitely cruel when applied. The physical energies of the mother—an enormous fund—denied natural expression in bodily exertion, work morbidly in manifold disease. The social energies, boundless, resistless, with which she is brought more in contact every year, denied natural expression in world-service, work morbidly inside the painfully inadequate limits of the house.

Here we have the simple explanation of that unreasonable excess which characterises the lady of the house. The amount of wealth this amiable prisoner can consume in fanciful caprices is practically unlimited. Her clothing and ornament is a study in itself. Start any crazy fad or fashion in this field, and off goes the flood of self-indulgence, the craving for "expression," absurdity topping extravagance. There is nothing to check it save the collapse of the source of supplies.

A modern "captain of industry" has a brain so socially developed as to require for its proper area of expression an enormous range of social service. He gets it. He develops great systems of transportation, elaborate processes of manufacture, complex legislation or financial manœuvres. Without reference to his purpose, to the money he may acquire, or the relative good or evil of his methods, the point to be noted is that he is exercising his full personal capacity.

His sister, his wife, has a similar possibility of brain activity, and practically no provision for its exercise. So great is the growth, so tremendous the pressure of live brains against dead conditions, that in our current life of to-day we find more and more women pouring wildly out into any and every form of combination and action, good, bad, and indifferent. The church sewing circle, fair, and donation party no longer satisfy her. The reception, dinner, ball, and musicale no longer satisfy her. Even the splendid freedom of physical exercise no longer satisfies her. More and more the necessity for full and legitimate social activity makes itself felt; and more and more she is coming out of the house to take her rightful place in the world.

Not easily is this accomplished, not cheaply and safely. She is breaking loose from the hardest shell that ever held immortal seed. She is held from within by every hardened layer of untouched instinct which has accumulated through the centuries; and she is opposed from without by such mountain ranges of prejudice as would be insurmountable if prejudice were made of anything real.

The obsequious terror of a child, cowed by the nurse's bugaboo, is more reasonable than our docile acquiescence in the bonds of prejudice. It is pleasantly funny, knowing the real freedom so easily possible, to see a strong, full-grown woman solemnly state that she cannot pass the wall of cloudy grandeur with Mrs. Grundy for gate-keeper, that seems to hem her in so solidly. First one and then another reaches out a courageous hand against this towering barricade, touches it, shakes it, finds it not fact at all, but merely feeling—and passes calmly through. There is really nothing to prevent the woman of to-day from coming out of her old shell; and there is much to injure her, if she stays in.

The widespread nervous disorders among our leisure-class women are mainly traceable to this unchanging mould, which presses ever more cruelly upon the growing life. Health and happiness depend on smooth fulfilment of function, and the functional ability of a modern woman can by no means be exercised in this ancient coop.

The effect of the lady of the house upon her husband is worth special study. He thinks he likes that kind of woman, he stoutly refuses to consider any other kind; and yet his very general discontent in her society has been the theme of all observers for all time. In our time it has reached such prominence as to be commented upon even in that first brief halcyon period, the "honeymoon." Punch had a piteous cartoon of a new-married pair, sitting bored and weary on the beach, during their wedding journey. "Don't you wish some friend would come along?" said she. "Yes," he answered—"or even an enemy!"

Men have accepted the insufficiencies and disagreeablenesses of "female society" as being due to "the disabilities of sex." They are not, being really due to the disability of the house-bound. Love may lead a man to "marry his housekeeper," and we condemn the misalliance; but he makes a housekeeper of his wife without criticism. The misalliance is still there.

A man, a healthy, well-placed man, has his position in the world and in the home, and finds happiness in both. He loves his wife, she meets his requirements as a husband, and he expects nothing more of her. His other requirements he meets in other ways. That she cannot give him this, that, and the other form of companionship, exercise, gratification, is no ground of blame; the world outside does that. So the man goes smoothly on, and when the woman is uncertain, capricious, exacting, he lays it to her being a woman, and lets it go at that.

But she, for all field of exertion, has but this house; for all kinds of companionship, this husband. He stands between her and the world, he has elected to represent it to her, to be "all the world" to her. Now, no man that ever lived, no series or combination of husbands that widowhood or polyandry ever achieved can be equivalent to the world. The man needs the wife and has her—needs the world and has it. The woman needs the husband—and has him; needs the world—and there is the husband instead. He stands between her and the world, with the best of intentions, doubtless; but a poor substitute for full human life.

"What else should she want?" he inquires in genuine amazement. "I love her, I am kind to her, I provide a good home for her—she has her children and she has me—what else should she want?"

What else does he want? He has her—the home and the children—does that suffice him? He wants also the human world to move freely in, to act fully in, to live widely in, and so does she.

And because she cannot have it, because he stands there in its stead, she demands of him the satisfaction of all these thwarted human instincts. She does not know what ails her. She thinks he does not love her enough; that if he only loved her enough, stayed with her enough, she would be satisfied. No man can sit down and love a woman eighteen hours a day, not actively. He does love her, all the time, in a perfectly reasonable way, but he has something else to do.

He loves her for good and all; it is in the bank, to draw on for the rest of life, a steady, unfailing supply; but she wants to see it and hear it and feel it all the time, like the miser of old who "made a bath of his gold and rolled in it."

The most glaring type of this unfortunate state of mind in recent fiction is that of the morbid Marna in the "Confessions of a Wife"—a vivid expression of what it is to be a highly-concentrated, double-distilled wife—and nothing else! No shadow of interest had she in life except this man; no duty, no pleasure, no use, no ambition, no religion, no business—nothing whatever but one embodied demand for her Man. He was indeed all the world to her—and he didn't like it.

If the woman was fully developed on the human side she would cease to be overdeveloped on the feminine side. If she had her fair share of world-life she would expect of her husband that he be a satisfactory man, but not that he be a satisfactory world, which is quite beyond him. Cannot men see how deeply benefited they would be by this change, this growth of woman? She would still be woman, beautiful, faithful, loving; but she would not be so greedy, either for money or for love.

The lady of the house may be most softly beautiful, she may be utterly devoted, she may be unutterably appealing; but all her centuries of cherished existence have but brought us to Punch's "Advice to Those About to Marry": "Don't!"

The world's incessant complaint of marriage, mockery of marriage, resistance, outbreak, and default, gives heavy proof that that great human institution has serious defects. The blame has generally been laid on man. Suppose we now examine the other fact, the equal factor, and see if there is not some essential error in her position. This might furnish a wide field of study in the leisure hours of The Lady of the House.

  XII

THE CHILD AT HOME

There are upon earth many millions of people—most of them children. Mankind has been continuous upon earth for millions of years; children have been equally continuous. Children constitute a permanent class, the largest class in the population. There are men, there are women, there are children, and the children outnumber the adults by three to two.

In the order of nature, all things give way before the laws and processes of reproduction; the individual is sacrificed to the race. Natural forces, working through the unconscious submission of the animal, tend steadily to improve a species through its young.

Social forces, working through our conscious system of education, tend to improve our species through its young. Humanity is developed age after age through a gradual improvement in its children; and since we have seen this and learned somewhat to assist nature by art, humanity develops more quickly and smoothly.

Every generation brings us more close to recognition of this great basic law, finds us more willing to follow nature's principle and bend all our energies to the best development of the child. We early learned to multiply our power and wisdom by transmission through speech, and, applying that process to the child, we taught him what we knew, saving to humanity millennial periods of evolution by this conscious short-cut through education.

Nature's way of teaching is a very crude one—mere wholesale capital punishment. She kills off the erring without explanation. They die without knowing what for, and the survivors don't know, either. We, by education, markedly assist nature, transmitting quick knowledge from mouth to mouth, as well as slow tendency from generation to generation. More and more we learn to collect race-improvement and transmit it to the child, the most swift and easy method of social progress. To-day, more than ever before, are our best minds giving attention to this vital problem—how to make better people. How to make better bodies and better minds, better tendencies, better habits, better ideas—this is the study of the modern educator.

Slowly we have learned that the best methods of education are more in modifying influence than in transmitted facts; that, as the proverb puts it, "example is better than precept." The modifying influences of social environment have deeper and surer effect on the human race than any others, and that effect is strongest on the young. Therefore, we attach great importance to what we call the "bringing up" of children, and we are right. The education of the little child, through the influences of its early environment, is the most important process of human life.

Whatever progress we make in art and science, in manufacture and commerce, is of no permanent importance unless it modifies humanity for the better. That a race of apes should live by agriculture, manufacture, and commerce is inconceivable. They would cease to be apes by so living; but, if they could, those processes would be of no value, the product being only apes. We are here to grow, to become a higher and better kind of people. Every process of life is valuable in proportion to its contributing to our improvement, and the process that most contributes to our improvement is the most important of human life. That process is the education of the child, and that education includes all the influences which reach him, the active efforts of parent and teacher, the unconscious influence of all associates, and the passive effect of the physical environment.

All these forces, during the most impressionable years of childhood, and most of them during the whole period, are centered in the home. The home is by all means the most active factor in the education of the child. This we know well. This we believe devoutly. This we accept without reservation or inquiry, seeing the power of home influences, and never presuming to question their merit.

In our general contented home-worship we seem to think that a home—any home—is in itself competent to do all that is necessary for the right rearing of children. Or, if we discriminate at all, if we dare admit by referring to "a good home" that there are bad ones—we then hold all the more firmly that the usual type of "a good home" is the perfect environment for a child. If this dogma is questioned, our only alternative is to contrast the state of the child without a home to that of the child with one. The orphan, the foundling, the neglected child of the street is contrasted with the well-fed and comfortably clothed darling of the household, and we relapse into our profound conviction that the home is all right.

Again the reader is asked to put screws on the feelings and use the reason for a little while. Let us examine both the child and the home, with new eyes, seeing eyes, and consider if there is no room for improvement. And first, to soothe the ruffled spirit and quiet alarm, let it be here stated in good set terms that the author does NOT advocate "separating the child from the mother," or depriving it of the home. Mother and child can never be "separated" in any such sense as these unreasoning terrors suggest. The child has as much right to the home as anyone—more, for it was originated for his good. The point raised is, whether the home, as it now is, is the best and only environment for children, and, further, whether the home as an environment for children cannot be improved.

What is a child? The young of the human species. First, a young animal, whose physical life must be conserved and brought to full development. Then, a young human, whose psychical life, the human life, must be similarly cared for.

How does the home stand as regards either branch of development? In what way is it specifically prepared for the use, enjoyment, and benefit of a child? First, as to the structure of the thing, the house. We build houses for ourselves, modifying them somewhat according to climate, position, and so on. How do we modify them for children? What is there in the make-up of any ordinary house designed to please, instruct, educate, and generally benefit a child? In so far as he shares our own physical needs for shelter and convenience he is benefited; but, as a child, with his own specific necessities, desires, and limitations, what has the architect planned for the child—what have the mason and carpenter built for the child? Is there anything in the size and proportion, the material, the internal arrangement, the finish and decoration, to hint of the existence of children on earth?

The most that we find, in the most favoured houses, is "a sunny nursery." In one home of a thousand we find one room out of a dozen planned for children. What sort of an allowance is this for the largest class of citizens? Suppose our homes had, among the more expensive ones, one room for the adult family to flock into, and all the rest was built and arranged for children! We should think ourselves somewhat neglected in such an arrangement. But we are not as numerous as our children, nor as important; and, in any case, the home belongs to the child; he is the cause of its being; it is for him, hypothetically, that we marry and start a home.

What, then, is the explanation of this lack of special provision for the real founder of the home? This utter unsuitability of the house to the child, and the child to the house, finds its crowning expression in our cities, where house-owners refuse to let their houses to families with children! What are houses for? What are homes for? For children, first, last, and always! How, then, have we come to this vanishing point of absurdity? What paradoxical gulf stretches between these houses where "no children need apply" and the rest of the houses. There is no visible difference in their plans and construction. No houses are built for children; and these particular landlords simply accent the fact, and try to limit the use of the house to the persons for whom it was intended—the adults.

What is there in the presence of children in a house to alarm the owner? "They are so destructive," he will tell you; "they are mischievous, they are noisy. Other tenants object to them. They injure the house when old enough to run about, and squall objectionably when babies." All this is true enough. Most babies are a source of distress to their immediate neighbours because of their painful wailing, and most little children continue to cause distress by their noise in play and shrieks under punishment. Is all this outcry necessary? Must the poor baby suffer by night and day; must the small child bang and yell, and must it be punished so frequently? Why is the process of getting acclimated to the world so difficult and agonising? Is there really no way that the experience of all the ages may be turned to account to facilitate the first years of a child's life?

Our behaviour to the child rests on several assumptions which are, at least, not proven. We assume that he has to be sick. We assume that he has to be naughty. We assume that life is hard and unpleasant, anyway, and that, the sooner he learns this and gets broken into it, the better. There is no more reason why a child should be sick than a calf or colt. Infancy is tender, and needs care, but it is not a disease. The Egyptian mother loves her baby, no doubt, though it goes blind through her ignorance and neglect—she knows nothing of ophthalmia, and lets the flies crawl over its helpless face, even while she loves it. We scorn and pity her ignorance, but we accept the colic, disorders of teething, and all the train of "preventable diseases" which kill off our babies, precisely as she accepts ophthalmia.

We have not learned yet how to make a baby the happy, contented, smoothly developing little animal that he should be. Some of us do better than others, but the knowledge of one is no gain to the rest, being confined to one family. Slowly the wider human care, the larger love, the broader knowledge, of doctor, nurse, and teacher are penetrating the innermost fortress of the home, and teaching the mother how to care for the child. The home did not teach her, and never would. In the untouched homes of ancient Eastern races, countless generations of mothers transmit the same traditional mistakes, love in the same blind way, and weep the same loss as unprofitably as they did ten thousand years ago.

In the homes of civilised races, where the light of social progress is most fully felt, we see the most improvement; but even here the pressure of growing knowledge is still combated by the jealous arrogance of the untaught mother, and the measureless inertia of the home.

In plain fact, what does the average home offer to the newcomer, the utterly defenceless baby, the all-important Coming Generation? See physical conditions first. To what sort of world is the new soul introduced? To a place built and furnished for several mixed and conflicting industries; not to a place planned for babies—aired, lighted, heated, coloured, and kept quiet to suit the young brain and body; but a building meant for a number of grown people to cook in, sweep and dust in, wash and iron in, cut and sew in, eat and wash dishes in, see their friends in, dress, undress, and sleep in; and incidentally, in the cracks and crevices of all these varied goings on, to "bring up" children in.

In that very small percentage of families where a nursery is arranged for children, and a nurse and a nursery-governess do deputy service for the always alleged "mother's care," we find some provision made for children; but of what sort? This deputy is inferior to the mother, save in a certain rule-of-thumb experience which enables her to "manage children." Her knowledge of infant hygiene is not much greater, nor of infant psychology. Look, for instance, at the babies of our richer classes, as we see them continually in the streets and parks. Our only alternative from the home is the street, we having as yet no place for our babies. If near a park so much the better, but in general the sidewalk must serve, for rich or poor.

As one immediate physical condition, examine the dress of these babies and young children; this among parents of wealth, and, presumably, intelligence. See the baby in the perambulator so rolled and bedded in, so tucked and strapped, that he cannot move anything but perhaps a stiffly projecting arm. Think of an adult cocooned in this manner, unable to roll, stir, turn, in any way relieve the pressure or change the attitude. And, when you have considered the sensations of a tough and patient adult frame, think further of those of a soft, tender, active, and impatient baby body.

The dress of a baby or little child bears no relation to his immediate comfort or to the needs of his incessant growth. Among our wisest parents there is to-day a new custom, happily increasing, of barefoot freedom, of dirt-proof overalls, of a chance for beautiful, unconscious growth; but this does not reach the vast majority of suffering little ones. It does not spread because of the seclusion and irresponsible dominance of the separate home; and further—because of the low-grade intelligence of the home-bound mother.

She whose condition of arrested development makes her unquestioningly submit to the distortion, constriction, weight, and profusion of fashion in clothing for her own body, is not likely to show much sense in dressing a child. Beautiful fabrics, rich textures, expensive adornments, she heaps upon it. She wishes it to look pretty, according to her barbaric taste; and she disfigures the grave, sweet beauty of a baby face, the lovely moving curves of the little body, with heavy masses of stiff cloth, starched frippery, and huge, nodding, gaily decorated hats that would please an Ashantee warrior.

If some cartoonist would give us a copy of the Sistine Mother and Child in the costume of our mothers and children, showing those immortal cherub faces blinking obliquely from under flopping hat brims and rich plumes, perhaps we might in sudden shocked perception see with what coarse irreverence we disfigure our blessed little ones.

The child does not find in the home any assurance of health, beauty, or free growth. He, and especially she, must wear the dainty garments on which our misguided mother love so wastefully lavishes itself; and must then be restricted in all natural exercise lest they be torn or soiled. To dress a little child so that he may be perfectly comfortable, and grow in absolute freedom, has not occurred to the home-bound mother.

Neither has she learned how to feed it. If the home is the best place for children, if the home is the best place for the preparation of food, would it not seem as if in all these long, long years we might have evolved some system of feeding little children so as to keep them at least alive—to say nothing of their being healthy?

The animal mother, guided by her unspoiled instinct, does manage to feed her young, and to teach it how to feed itself. The human mother, long since cut off from that poor primitive guidance, and proudly refusing to put knowledge in its place, feeds the baby in accordance with her revered domestic traditions, and calls in the doctor to remedy her mistakes. One man, in Buffalo, has recently saved fifteen hundred babies in a year, lowering the annual death rate by that amount, by public distribution of directions for preparing milk. He was not a mother. He was not shut up in a home. He studied and he taught in the light of public progress, in a growing world; and succeeded in filtering some of this saving knowledge into the darkness of fifteen hundred homes.

The average child is not fed properly; and there is nothing in the home to teach the mother how. She must learn outside, but she is not willing to. She still believes, and her husband with her, in the infallible power of "a mother's love" and "a mother's care"; and our babies are buried by thousands and thousands without our learning anything by the continual sacrifice. This is owing to the isolation of the home. If there were any general knowledge, general custom, association, comparison; if mothers considered their enormous responsibility as a class, instead of merely as individuals, this could not be. Knowledge and experience have to be gathered by wide and prolonged study; they do not come by an infinite repetition of the same private experiments.

We have to-day the first stirring of this great multitude of separately concealed experimenters toward that association and exchange of view, that carefully recorded observation, that reasonable study, which are necessary for any human advance. Our mothers are beginning to come out of their isolation into normal human contact; to take that first step toward wisdom—the acknowledgment of ignorance; and to study what little is known of this new science, Child-culture.

But it is only a beginning, very scant and small, and ridiculed unmercifully by the great slow dead-weight of the majority. The position of the satirist of modern motherhood is a safe and easy one. To ally one's self with the great mass of present humanity, and the far greater mass of the past, of all our hoary and revered traditions, and to direct this combined weight against the first movement of a new idea—this is an old game. Humanity has thus resisted every step of its own progress; but, though it makes that progress difficult and slow, it cannot wholly prevent it.

If the home and the home-bound mother do not ensure right food or clothing for the child, what do they offer in safety, and in the increasing educational influence which early environment must have? As to safety—the shelter of the home—we have already seen that even to the adult the home offers no protection from the main dangers of our time: disease, crime, and fire or other accident. The child not only shares these common dangers, but is more exposed to them, owing to more absolute confinement to the home and greater susceptibility. Whatever we suffer from sewer-gas, carbonic dioxide, or microbes and bacteria, the child suffers more.

He breathes the dust of our carpets, and eats it if we do not watch him. "I can't take my eyes off that child one minute," cries the admiring mamma, "or he'll be sure to put something in his mouth!" That a perfectly clean place might be prepared for a creeping baby, where there was nothing whatever he could put in his mouth, has never occurred to her. The child shares and more than shares every danger of the home, and furthermore suffers an endless list of accidents peculiar to his limitations. Even our dull nerves are roused to some sort of response by the terrible frequency of accidents to little children.

I have here a number, taken from one newspaper in one city during one year; not exhaustive daily scrutiny either; merely a casual collection:

"Mother and Baby Both Badly Burned." A three-year-old baby this—a match, a little night-dress flaming, struggle, torture, death! "Choked in Mother's Arms" is the next one; the divine instinct of Maternity giving a two-year-old child half a filbert to eat. It was remarked in the item that the "desolate couple" had lost two other little ones within two months. It did not state whether the two others were accidentally murdered by a mother's care.

"Child's Game Proved Fatal" is the next. Three-years-old twins were these; "playing fire engine in the parlour while their mother prepared the midday meal."

One climbed on the table and lit a newspaper at a gas jet, and set fire to the other. It is then related "Both children cried out, but their mother, thinking they were only playing, did not hasten to find what was the matter." "The child died at 3 P.M." is the conclusion.

"Accidentally Killed His Baby" follows. The fond father, holding his two-year-old son on his knee, shot and killed him with a revolver "which he believed to be empty."

"Escaping Gas Kills Baby"—"Boy Has Cent in His Throat"—"Insane Mother's Crime"—"Drowns her Eight-year-old Daughter"—and here a doctor says, "It would be an excellent idea for every family to have a little book giving briefly prompt antidotes for various poisons. Physicians know that there are scores of cases of accidental poisoning never heard of outside the family concerned. I've had several cases of poisoning by an accidental dose of chloroform and aconite liniment, and one woman gave her child muriatic acid that was kept for cleaning the marbles."

Another "Mother and Child Burned"—"Child Scratched by a 60-foot Fall"—(this one was saved by striking several clothes-lines after she fell out of the window)—"Kitten was Life Preserver"—another fall out of a window, but the child was holding a kitten, and her head struck on it—so only the kitten was smashed.

"A Governor's Child badly Hurt"—"will probably prove fatal," this was a two-story drop over a staircase; and shows that it is not only in the homes of the poor that these things happen. Another "Baby Burned" follows—this poor little one was left strapped into its carriage, and set fire to by an enterprising little brother.

"Tiny Singer Fell Dead" describes a five-year-old boy as singing a selection from "Cavalleria Rusticana" as a means of entertaining a party of young friends—and burst a blood-vessel in the brain. Then there is a story of a grisly murder in which a tiny child testifies as to seeing her father kill her mother; the child was not hurt—physically. And then a bit of negative evidence quite striking in its way, describing "The Mother of Twenty-five Children" and incidentally stating "of these only three sons and four daughters are now living." Seven out of twenty-five does not seem a large proportion to survive the perils of the home.

These are a few, a very few, instances of extreme injury and death. They are as nothing to the wide-spread similar facts we do not hear of; and as less than nothing to the list of minor accidents to which little children are constantly exposed in the shelter of the home. We bar our windows and gate our stairs in some cases; but our principal reliance is on an unending watchfulness and a system of rigid discipline. "Children need constant care!" we maintain; and "A child must be taught to mind instantly, for its own protection." A child is not a self-acting poison or explosive. If he were in an absolutely safe place he might be free for long, bright, blessed hours from the glaring Argus-eyed watchfulness which is so intense an irritant. Convicts under sentence of death are in their last hours kept under surveillance like this, lest they take their own lives. Partly lest the child injure himself among the many dangers of the home, and partly lest he injure its frail and costly contents, he grows up under "constant watching." If this is remitted, he "gets into mischief" very promptly. "Mischief" is our broad term for the natural interaction of a child and a home. The inquiry of the young mind, and the activity of the young body, finding no proper provision made for them, inevitably fall foul of our complicated utensils, furniture, and decorations, and what should be a normal exercise becomes "mischief."

Our chapter of accidents here leads us to the great underlying field of education. Say that the child lives to grow up, during these wholly home-bound years; in spite of wrong clothing, wrong feeding, and the many perils we fatuously call "incident to babyhood" (when they are only incident to our lack of proper provision for babyhood). If he battles through his infancy and early childhood successfully, what has he gained from his early environment in education? What are the main facts of life, as impressed upon every growing child by his home surroundings?

The principal fact is eating. This he learns perforce by seeing his mother spending half her time on that one business; by seeing so much house-space given to it; by the constant arrival of food supplies, meat, groceries, milk, ice, and the rest; and excursions to get them. The instincts of early savagery, which every child has to grow through, are heavily reinforced by the engrossing food-processes of the home.

They do not necessarily please him or her, either. The child does not grow up with a burning ambition to be a cook. Whether the ever-present kitchen business was run by the mother or by a servant, it was not run joyously and proudly; nor was it run in such wise as to really teach the child the principles of hygiene in food-values and preparation. If the family is a wealthy one the child is not allowed in the kitchen perhaps, but is the more impressed by the complicated machinery of the dining-room, and that elaborate cult of special "manners" used in this sacred service of the body. Thus and thus must he eat, and thus handle his utensils; and if the years and the tears spent in acquiring these Eleusinian mysteries make due impression on the fresh brain tissue, then we may expect to find the human being more impressed by the art of eating than by any other.

And so we do find him. The children of the kitchen are differently affected from the children of the dining-room. These last, of our "upper classes," receive the indelible stamp of the tri-daily ritual, and go through the rest of life thinking more highly of "table manners" than of any other line of conduct, for the reason that they were more incessantly, thoroughly, and importunately taught that code than any other. To handle a fork properly is insisted upon far more imperatively than to properly handle a temper.

The principal business of the home being the care of the body, and this accomplished through these archaic domestic industries, the unending up-current of young life, which should so steadily purify and uplift the world, in every generation is steeped anew in this exaggeration of physical needs and caprices.

Beyond the overwhelming cares of the table the other home industries involve the care and replenishment of furniture and clothes. Hour after hour, day after day, the child sees his mother devoting her entire life to attendance upon these things—the daily cleaning, the weekly cleaning, the spring and fall cleaning, the sewing and mending at all times.

These things must be done, by some people, somewhere; but must they be done by all people, that is by all women, the people who surround the child, and all the time? Must the child always associate womanhood with house-service; and assume, necessarily assume, that the main business of life is to be clean, well-dressed, and eat in a proper manner?

If the mother is not herself the house-servant—what else is she? What does the growing brain gather of the true proportions of life from his dining-room-and-parlour mamma? Her main care, and talk, is still that of food and clothes; and partly that of "entertainment," which means more food and more clothes.

Can we not by one daring burst of effort imagine a home where there was still the father and mother love, still the comfort, convenience, and beauty we so enjoy, still the sweet union of the family group, and yet no kitchen? Perhaps even, in some remote dream, no dining-room? Where the mother was a wise, strong, efficient human being, interested in and working for the progress of humanity; and giving to her baby, in these sweet hours of companionship, some true sense of what life is for and how it works. No, we cannot imagine it, most of us. We really cannot. We are so indelibly kitchen-bred, or dining-room-bred, that mother means cook, or at least housekeeper, to our minds; and family means dinner-table.

So grows the child in the home. In the school he learns something of social values, in the church something, in the street something; from his father, who is a real factor in society, something; but in the home he learns by inexorably repeated impressions of every day and hour, that life, this deep, new, thrilling mystery of life consists mainly of eating and sleeping, of the making and wearing of clothes. We are irresistibly reminded of the strange text, "Take no thought of what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink or wherewithal ye shall be clothed." A little difficult to follow this command when mother does nothing else!

  XIII

THE GIRL AT HOME

What is the position of the home toward us in youth? We have seen something of its effect upon the child, the wholly helpless child, who knows no other place or power. We have seen something of its effect upon the woman in her life-long confinement there. Between childhood and maturity comes youth; holding what is left of the child's pure heart and vivid hopes, and what begins to stir of man's or woman's power. The gain of a race, if there is a gain, must make itself felt in youth—more strength, more growth, more beauty, a larger conscience, a sounder judgment, a more efficient will.

Each new generation must improve upon its parents; else the world stands still or retrogrades. In this most vivid period of life how does the home meet the needs of the growing soul? The boy largely escapes it. He is freer, even in childhood; the more resistant and combative nature, the greater impatience of pain, makes the young male far harder to coerce. He sees his father always going out, and early learns to view the home from a sex-basis, as the proper place for women and children, and to push incessantly to get away from it.

From boy to boy in the alluring summer evenings we hear the cry, "Come on out and have some fun!" Vainly we strive and strive anew to "keep the boys at home." It cannot be done. Fortunately for us it cannot be done. We dread to have them leave it, and with good reason, for well we know there is no proper place for children in the so long unmothered world; but even in danger and temptation they learn something, and those who struggle through their youth unscathed make better men than if they had been always softly shielded in the home.

The world is the real field of action for humanity. So far humanity has been well-nigh wholly masculine; and the boy, feeling his humanity, pushes out into his natural field, the world. He learns and learns, from contact with his kind. He learns about all sorts of machinery, all manner of trades and businesses. He has companions above him and below him and beside him, the wide human contact in which we grow so rapidly. If he is in the city he knows the city, if he is in the country he knows the country, far more fully than his sister. A thousand influences reach him that never come to her, formative influences, good and bad, that modify character. He has far less of tutelage, espionage, restraint; he has more freedom by daylight, and he alone has any freedom after dark. All the sweet, mysterious voices of the night, the rich, soft whisperings of fragrant summer, when the moon talks and the young soul answers; the glittering, keen silence of winter nights, when between blue-black star-pointed space and the level shine of the snow stands but one living thing—yourself—all this is cut off from the girl. The real intimacy with nature comes to the soul alone, and the poor, over-handled girl soul never has it.

In some few cases, isolated and enviable, she may have this common human privilege, but not enough to count. She must be guarded in the only place of safety, the home. Guarded from what? From men. From the womanless men who may be prowling about while all women stay at home. The home is safe because women are there. Out of doors is unsafe because women are not there. If women were there, everywhere, in the world which belongs to them as much as to men, then everywhere would be safe. We try to make the women safe in the home, and keep them there; to make the world safe for women and children has not occurred to us. So the boy grows, in the world as far as he can reach it, and the girl does not grow equally, being confined to the home. In very recent years, within one scant century, we are letting the girls go to school, even to college. They pour out into the larger field and fill it at once. Their human faculties have some chance to grow as well as the over-emphasised feminine ones; and in our schools and colleges youth of both sexes finds the room, stimulus, and exercise it could not find at home.

The boy who does not go to college goes to business, to work in some way. To find an able-bodied intelligent boy in a home between breakfast and supper would argue a broken leg. But girls we find by thousands and thousands; "helping mother," if mother does the work; and if there are servants to do the work, the girl does—what?

What is the occupation of the daughter of the house? Let us suppose her to be healthy. Let us suppose her to have a fair share of ability and education. She has no longer the school or the college, she has only the home. Not that she is physically confined there. She may go out by daylight, giving careful account of her steps, and visit other girls in their homes. She may receive visits, both from girls and boys; and she may go out continually to all manner of entertainments. Perhaps she is expected to dust the parlour, to arrange the flowers, to "keep up her music." She has enough to eat, enough and more than enough to wear; but what exercise has she for body or brain? Perhaps in games and dances she keeps her body active—but what sort of occupation is that for a young human creature of this century, a creature of power? The young woman has the same race inheritance of ability, the same large brain-growth, as the man. The physical improvement of our times is reflected in them too; fine stalwart girls we see, tall, straight, broad-shouldered. She has had, in specific education, the same mental training as the boy.

How would her brother be content with a day's work of dusting the parlour and arranging the flowers; of calling and being called on? Amusement is good, sometimes necessary; best and most necessary to the tired, unhappy, and overworked. But youth—healthy, happy, and vigorous, full of the press of unused power and the accumulating ambition of all the centuries—why should youth waste its splendour in such unsatisfying ways?

If you ask the father, he will merely say that it is the proper position for a girl; he is "able to support her," she does not "have to work," she can amuse herself, and as for a field for her abilities—she will find that in her own home when she is married. Ask her mother—and she will tell you, making a sad confession all unknowingly—"let her enjoy herself now; she will have care enough later." There is a tacit agreement that girls shall have all the "good time" possible while they are girls, that they may have it to remember! Does this "good time" satisfy the girl? Is she happy in her father's home, just passing the time till she moves into her husband's?

Sometimes she is. Her education has been strong to make her so. The home atmosphere of predominant clothes and food has been about her from the cradle, and she still has clothes and food, and may elaborate them without limit. She may devote as much time to the adornment of the table as she wishes; and if her inclination take her also to the kitchen, perhaps even to the cooking school, that is more than well. She may also devote herself to the parlour and its adornment; but most naturally of all to the adornment of her own young body—all these are proper functions of the home. She may love and serve her immediate dear ones also, to any extent; that is the basic principle of it all, that is occupation enough for any girl. Yes, there is occupation enough as far as filling time goes; but how if it does not satisfy? How if the girl wants something else to do—something definite, something developing?

This is deprecated by the family. "Work" is held by all to be a thing no mortal soul should do unless compelled by want. We speak sadly, tenderly, of the poor girl whose father died and left her unprovided for, wherefore "she had to work." We have not learned to see that some kind of work is necessary to all human creatures to use their powers; not mere tread-mill repetition of small, useless things, but such range of action as shall exercise all the faculties. And least of all have we learned to see that a human soul, to be healthy, must love and care for more than its own blood relations.

What the girl, as a normal human being, wants is full exercise in large social relation; things to think about, feel, and do, which do not in any way concern the home. Race-babyhood may be content at home—it was first made for babies. But as we grow up into our modern human range of power, no home can or ought to content us. We need not, therefore, cease to love it, need not neglect or ignore it. We simply need something more. That is the great lack which keeps girlhood unsatisfied; the call of the human soul for its full field of action, the world. We try to meet this lack by a surfeit of supplies for lower needs.

Since we first began to force upon our girl baby's astonished and resisting brain the fact that she was a girl; since we curbed her liberty by clothing and ornament calculated only to emphasise the fact of sex, and by restrictions of decorum based upon the same precocious distinction, we have never relaxed the pressure. As if we feared that there might be some mistake, that she was not really a girl but would grow up a boy if we looked the other way, we diligently strove to enforce and increase her femininity by every possible means. So by the time her womanhood does come it finds every encouragement, and the humanhood which should predominate we have restricted and forbidden. Moreover, whatever of real humanness she does manifest we persist in regarding as feminine.

For instance, the girl wants friends, social contact. She cannot satisfy this want in normal lines of work, in the natural contact of the busy world, so she tries to meet it on the one plane allowed—in what we call "Society." Her own life being starved, she seeks to touch other lives as far and fast as possible. Next to doing things one's self is the association with others who can do them. So the girl reaches out for friends. Women friends can give her little; their lives are empty as her own, their talk is of the same worn themes—their point of view either the kitchen or the parlour. Therefore she finds most good in men friends; they are human, they are doing something. All this is set down to mere feminine "desire to attract"; we expect it, and we provide for it. Our "social" machinery is largely devoted to "bringing young people together"; not in any common work, in large human interests, but in such decorated idleness, with music, perfume, and dance, as shall best minister to the only forces we are willing to promote.

Is the girl satisfied? Is it really what she wants, all she wants? If she were a Circassian slave, perhaps it would do. For the daughter of free, active, intelligent, modern America it does not do; and therefore our girls in ever-increasing numbers are leaving home. It is not that they do not love their homes; not that they do not want homes of their own in due season; it is the protest of every healthy human soul against the-home-and-nothing-else.

Our poorer girls are going into mills and shops, our richer ones into arts and professions, or some educational and philanthropic work. We oppose this proof of racial growth and vitality by various economic fallacies about "taking the bread out of other women's mouths"—and in especial claim that it is "competing with men," "lowering wages" and the like. We talk also, in the same breath, or the next one, about "the God-given right to work"—and know not what we mean by that great phrase.

To work is not only a right, it is a duty. To work to the full capacity of one's powers is necessary for human development. It is no benefit to a human being to keep him, or her, in down-wrapped idleness, it is a gross injury. If a man could afford to put daughters and wife to bed and have them fed and washed like babies, would that be a kindness? "They do not have to walk!" he might say. Yes, they do have to, else would their muscles weaken and shrink, and beauty and health disappear. For the health and beauty of the body it must have full exercise. For the health and beauty of the mind it must have full exercise. No normal human mind can find full exercise in dusting the parlour and arranging the flowers; no, nor in twelve hours of nerve-exhaustion in the kitchen. Exhaustion is not exercise.

"But they are free to study—to read, to improve their minds!" we protest. Minds are not vats to be filled eternally with more and ever more supplies. It is use, large, free, sufficient use that the mind requires, not mere information. Our college girls have vast supplies of knowledge; how can they use it in the home? Could a college boy apply his education appropriately to "keeping house"—and, if not, how can the girl? Full use of one's best faculties—this is health and happiness for both man and woman.

But how about those other people's wages?—will be urged. Productive labour adds to the wealth of the world, it does not take away. If wealth were a fixed quantity, shared carefully among a lot of struggling beggars, then every new beggar would decrease the other's share.

To work is to give, not to beg. Every worker adds to the world's wealth, increases everyone's share. Of course there are people whose "work" is not of value to anyone; who simply use their power and skill to get other people's money away from them; the less of these the better. That is not productive labour. But so long as we see to it that the work we do is worth more than the pay we get, our consciences may be clean; we give to the world and rob no one. As to the immediate facts that may be alleged, "overcrowded labour market," "over-production," and such bugaboos, these are only facts as watered stock and stolen franchises are facts; not economic laws, but criminal practices. A temporary superficial error in economic conduct need not blind us to permanent basic truth, and the truth which concerns us here is that a human creature must work for the health and power and pleasure of it; and that all good work enriches the world.

So the girl need not stay at home and content her soul with chocolate drops lest some other girl lose bread. She may butter that bread and share the confections, by her labour, if it be productive. And by wise working she may learn to see how unwise and how unnecessary are the very conditions which now hold her back. At present she is generally held back. Her father will not allow her to work. Her mother needs her at home. So she stays a while longer. If she marries, she passes out of this chapter, becoming, without let or change, "the lady of the house." If she does not marry, what then? What has father or mother, sister or brother, to offer to the unmarried woman? What is the home to her who has no "home of her own"?

The wife and mother has a real base in her home: distorted and overgrown though it may have become, away in at the centre lies the everlasting founder—in the little child. Unnecessary as are the mother's labours now, they were once necessary, they have a base of underlying truth. But what real place has a grown woman of twenty-five and upwards in anyone else's home? She is not a child, and not a mother. The initial reason for being at home is not there. What business has she in it? The claim of filial devotion is usually advanced to meet this question. Her parents need her. And here comes out in glaring colours the distinction between girl and boy, between man's and woman's labour.

Whatever of filial gratitude, love, and service is owed to the parent is equally owed by boy and girl. If there is a difference it should be on the boy's side, as he is more trouble when little and less assistance in the house when big. Now, what is the accepted duty of the boy to the parents, when they are old, feeble, sick, or poor? First, to maintain them, that is, to provide for them the necessaries of life and as much more as he can compass. Then, to procure for them service and nursing, if need be. Also himself to bestow affection and respect, and such part of his time as he can spare from the labour required to maintain them. This labour he performs like a civilised man, by the service of other people in some specialised industry; and his ability to care for his parents is measured by his ability to perform that larger service.

What is the accepted duty of the girl to the parents in like case? She is required to stay at home and wait upon them with her own hands, serve them personally, nurse them personally, give all her time and strength to them, and this in the old, old uncivilised way, with the best of intentions, but a degree of ability measured by the lowest of averages.

It is the duty of the child to care for the infirm parent—that is not questioned; but how? Why, in one way, by one child, and in so different a way by another? The duty is precisely the same; why is the manner of fulfilling it so different? If the sick and aged mother has a capable son to support her, he provides for her a house, clothing, food, a nurse, and a servant. If she has but a daughter, that daughter can only furnish the nurse and servant in her own person, skilled or unskilled as the case may be; and both of them are a charge upon the other relatives or the community for the necessaries of life. Why does not the equally capable daughter do more to support her parent when it is necessary? She cannot, if she is herself the nurse and servant. Why does she have to be herself the nurse and servant? Because she has been always kept at home and denied the opportunity to take up some trade or profession by which she could have at once supported herself, her parents, and done good service in the world. Because "the home is the place for women," and in the home is neither social service nor self-support.

There is another and a darker side to this position. The claim of exclusive personal service from the daughter is maintained by parents who are not poor, not old, not sick, not feeble; by a father who is quite able to pay for all the service he requires, and who prefers to maintain his daughter in idleness for his own antiquated masculine pride—and by a mother who is quite able to provide for herself, if she choose to; who is no longer occupied by the care of little children, who does not even do house-service, but who lives in idleness herself, and then claims the associate idleness of her daughter, on grounds past finding out. Perhaps it is that an honourably independent daughter, capable, respected, well-paid, valuable to the community, would be an insupportable reproach to the lady of the house. Perhaps it is a more pathetic reason—the home-bound, half-developed life, released from the immediate cares, which, however ill-fulfilled, at least gave sanction to her position, now seeks to satisfy its growing emptiness by the young life's larger hope and energy. This may be explanation, but is no justification.

The value and beauty of motherhood depend on the imperative needs of childhood. The filial service of the child depends on the imperative needs of the parent. When the girl is twenty-one and the mother is forty-five, neither position holds. The amount of love and care needed by either party does not require all day for its expression. The young, strong, well-educated girl should have her place and work, equally with her brother. Does not the mother love her son, though he is in business? Could she not manage to love a daughter in business, too? It is not love, far less is it wisdom, which so needlessly immolates a young life on the altar of this ancient custom of home-worship. The loving mother is not immortal. What is to become of the unmarried daughter after the mother is gone?

What has the home done to fit her for life. She may be rich enough to continue to live in it, not to "have to work," but is she, at fifty, still to find contentment in dusting the parlour and arranging the flowers, in calling and receiving calls, in entertaining and being entertained? Where is her business, her trade, her art, her profession, her place in life? The home is not the whole of life. It is a very minor part of it—a mere place of preparation for living. To keep the girl at home is to cut her off from life.

More and more is this impossible. The inherited power of the ages is developing women to such an extent that by the simple force of expansion they are cracking the confining walls about them, bursting out in all directions, rising under the enormous pressure that keeps them down like mushrooms under a stone. The girl has now enough of athletic training to strengthen her body, balance her nerves, set her tingling with the healthy impulse to do. She has enough mental training to give some background and depth to her mind, with the habit of thinking somewhat. If she is a college girl, she has had the inestimable privilege of looking at the home from outside, in which new light and proportion it has a very different aspect.

The effort is still made by proud and loving fathers, unconscious of their limitations, to keep her there afterward, and by loving mothers even more effectually. They play upon the strings of conscience, duty, and affection. They furnish every pleasant temptation of physical comfort, ease, the slow corruption of unearned goods. To oppose this needs a wider range of vision and a greater strength of character than the daughter of a thousand homes can usually command.

The school has helped her, but she has not had it long. The college has helped her more, but that is not a general possession as yet, and has had still shorter influence. Strong, indeed, is the girl who can decide within herself where duty lies, and follow that decision against the combined forces which hold her back. She must claim the right of every individual soul to its own path in life, its own true line of work and growth. She must claim the duty of every individual soul to give to its all-providing society some definite service in return. She must recognise the needs of the world, of her country, her city, her place and time in human progress, as well as the needs of her personal relations and her personal home. And, further, using the parental claim of gratitude and duty in its own teeth, she must say: "Because I love you I wish to be worthy of you, to be a human creature you may be proud of as well as a daughter you are fond of. Because I owe you care and service when you need it, I must fit myself now to render that care and service efficiently. Moreover, my duty to you is not all my duty in the world. Life is not merely an aggregation of families. I must so live as to meet all my duties, and, in so doing, I shall better love and serve my parents."

Conscience is strong in women. Children are very violently taught that they owe all to their parents, and the parents are not slow in foreclosing the mortgage. But the home is not a debtor's prison—to girls any more than to boys. This enormous claim of parents calls for examination.

Do they in truth do all for their children; do their children owe all to them? Is nothing furnished in the way of safety, sanitation, education, by that larger home, the state? What could these parents do, alone, in never so pleasant a home, without the allied forces of society to maintain that home in peace and prosperity. These lingering vestiges of a patriarchal cult must be left behind. Ancestor-worship has had victims enough. Girls are human creatures as well as boys, and both have duties, imperative duties, quite outside the home.

One more protest is to be heard: "Most girls marry. Surely they might stay at home contentedly until they leave it for another." Yes, most girls marry. All girls ought to—unless there is something wrong with them. And, being married, they should have homes. But, to have a home and enjoy it, is one thing; to stay in it—the whole time—is quite another. It is the same old assumption that woman is a house-animal; that she has no place in the open, no business in the world. If the girl had a few years of practical experience in the world she would be far better able to enjoy and appreciate her own home when she had one. At present, being so much restricted where she is, she very often plunges from the frying-pan into the fire, simply from too much home.

"Why should she have married that fellow!" cries the father; "I gave her a good home—she had everything she wanted." It does not enter the mind of this man that a woman is something more than a rabbit. Even rabbits, well-fed rabbits, will gnaw and dig to get out—they like to run as well as eat. Also, the girl whose character has time to "set" a little in some legitimate business associations, instead of being held in everlasting solution at home, will be able to face the problems of domestic industry and expense with new eyes.

No men, with practical sense and trained minds, would put up for a week with the inchoate mass of wasted efforts in the home; and, when women have the same trained minds and practical sense, they will not put up with it much longer. For the home's sake, as well as her own sake, the girl will profit by experience in the working world.

Once she learns the pleasure and power of specialisation, the benefits of organisation, the advantages of combination, the whole tremendous enginery of civilised life, she can no more drop back into her ancestral cradle than her brother could turn into an Arcadian shepherd, piping prettily to his fleecy charge.

  XIV

HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN

In our peculiar and artificial opposition of "the Home" and "the World," we have roughly ascribed all the virtues to the first, and all the vices to the second. "The world, the flesh, and the devil" we still associate, forgetting that home is the very temple of the flesh, and in no way impervious to the devil. Sin is found at home as generally as elsewhere—must be, unless women are sinless and men absolved on entering the sacred door.

There are different sins and virtues, truly, as we have seen in the chapter on Domestic Ethics. There is less fighting at home, as there is but one man there. There is less stealing, the goods being more in common, only sometimes a sly rifling of pockets by the unpaid wife. A man pays his housekeeper, or his housemaids, because he has to; and he pays, and pays highly, the purely extortionate women of pleasure; but sometimes he forgets to pay his wife, and sometimes she steals. The home has patience, chastity, industry, love. But there is less justice, less honour, less courage, less truth; it does not embrace all the virtues. Such as it is, strong for good and also very weak for some good, possibly even showing some tendencies to evil, what is its influence on men?

The boy baby feels it first; and that we have touched on. The home teaches the boy that women were made for service, domestic service, that the principal cares and labours of life are those which concern the body, and that his own particular tastes and preferences are of enormous importance. As fast as he gets out of the home and into the school, he learns quite other things, getting his exaggerated infant egotism knocked out of him very suddenly, and, as he gets out of school and into business, also into politics, he learns still further of the conditions of life. Proportion changes, perspective changes; he grows to have a very different view of life from the woman's view. The same thing happening to a man and a woman produces a widely varying effect; what is a trifle in the day's large activities to him is an event of insistent pressure to her; and, here, in the eternal misunderstanding between the home-bred woman and the world-bred man, lie the seeds of ceaseless trouble. The different range of vision of the occupant of the home and the occupant of the world makes it impossible for them to see things similarly. We are familiar with the difference, but have always considered it a distinction of sex.

We have called the broader, sounder, better balanced, more fully exercised brain "a man's brain," and the narrower, more emotional and personal one "a woman's brain"; whereas the difference is merely that between the world and the house. The absolute relation between any animal's brain and his range of activity is patent to the zoölogist, and simply furnishes the proof of its law of development. The greater the extent and complexity of any creature's business, the greater the mental capacity, of course.

We are familiar with the mental effect of living on small islands—"the insular mind," "insular prejudice" are well known terms. The smaller the island, the more deprived of contact and association with the rest of the world, the greater the insularity of mind. The Englishman is somewhat affected by the size of his country; the Manxman still more, and the dwellers on the lighthouse rock most of all. Our homes are not physically isolated, save on scattered farms and ranches—where the worst results are found; but they are isolated in their interests and industries.

The thought used every day is thought about half a dozen people and their concerns, mainly their personal bodily care and comfort; the mental processes of the woman must needs be intensified in personality as they are limited in range. Hence her greater sensitiveness to all personal events, and that quick variation in attitude so inevitable in a mind whose daily work involves continual and instant change. Varium et mutabile! murmurs the man sagely—"A woman's privilege is to change her mind!" If the nature of his industry were such that he had to change his mind from cooking to cleaning, from cleaning to sewing, from sewing to nursing, from nursing to teaching, and so, backward, forward, crosswise and over again, from morning to night—he too would become adept in the lightning-change act.

The man adopts one business and follows it. He develops special ability, on long lines, in connection with wide interests—and so grows broader and steadier. The distinction is there, but it is not a distinction of sex. This is why the man forgets to mail the letter. He is used to one consecutive train of thought and action. She, used to a varying zigzag horde of little things, can readily accommodate a few more.

The home-bred brain of the woman continually puzzles and baffles the world-bred brain of the man; and from the beginning of their association it has an effect upon him. In childhood even he sees his sister serving in the home functions far more than he is required to do; she is taught to "clean up" where he is not; different values are assigned to the same act in boy or girl, and he is steadily influenced by it. The first effect of the home on the boy is seen very young in his contempt for girls, and girls' play or work. When, after a period of separation wherein he has consorted as far as possible only with boys and men, he is again drawn towards the girl on lines of sex-attraction, a barrier has risen between them which is never wholly removed.

He has immense areas of experience utterly unknown to her. His words and acts in a given case are modified by a thousand memories and knowledges which she has not; so word and act differ sharply, though the immediate exciting cause be the same. The very terms they use have different weight and meaning; the man must pick and choose and adopt a different speech in talking to a woman. He loves, he admires, he venerates; and from this attitude considering all her foolishness and ignorance as feminine and therefore charming, he is thus taught to worship ignoble things.

Charles Reade in his "Peg Woffington" describes that strong, brave, intelligent, and most charming woman as starting and screaming at a very distant rat—and her lover being therefore more strongly attracted to her. Every sign of weakness, timidity, inability to understand and do, is deemed feminine and admired. Yet we all know that the best love is that which exalts, that which truly respects as well as fondly enjoys.

The smallness of the home-bound woman is not so injurious as the still smaller nature of the harem-bound, by as much as the home is larger and freer than the harem; but just as harem women limit man's growth, so do home women in slighter degree. The influence of women upon men is enormous. The home-bound mother limits the child and boy; the home-bound girl limits the youth; and the home-bound wife keeps up the pressure for life. It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating; but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed, and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it.

The woman is narrowed by the home and the man is narrowed by the woman. In proportion as man is great, as his interests are world-wide and his abilities high, is he injured by constant contact with a smaller mind. The more ordinary man feels it less, being himself nearer to the domestic plane of thought and action; but the belittling effect is there all the time.

If the boy's mother commanded as wide a range of action as his father; if her work were something to honour and emulate as well as her dear self something to love, the boy would never learn to use that bitter term "only mother." The father is a soldier, and the boy admires and longs to follow in great deeds. The father is a captain of industry—a skilled tradesman, a good physician—the boy has the father to love, and the work to admire as well. The father is something to other people, as well as all in all to him; and the boy has a new respect for him, seeing him in the social relation as well as the domestic. But his mother he sees only in the domestic relation and is early taught by the father himself, that he is "to take care of her!" Think of it! Teaching a child that he is to take care of his mother! A full-grown able-bodied woman will take a child of ten out with her at night—"to protect her!"

The exquisite absurdity of this position has no comparison or parallel. Think of a cow protected by a calf! A bear by a cub—a cat by a kitten! A tall, swift mare by a lanky colt! An alert, sharp-toothed collie by a tumbling, fat-pawed pup! How can a boy respect a thing that he, a child, can take care of! He can love, and does. He can take care of, and does. He can later on support, and does; and even—this in a recent instance of this sublime monstrosity—he can "give away" his own mother in marriage! No wonder he so soon learns to say "only mother!" When she is not only mother, but mother and much besides, a real human being, usefully exercising her human faculties, the boy will make a better man.

Again, if his sister shared every freedom and advantage of childhood; were equally educated, not only in school, but in play, and in the ever-stimulating experiences of daily life, he would feel far differently toward her.

See two children on a journey, the mother holding fast to the girl from beginning to end, only the car seat and window for her; the boy on the steps, the platform, running about the station, asking questions of brakeman and engineer, learning all the time. The boy gets five times as much out of life as the girl, and he knows it. It is not long before he is ashamed to play with girls, and one cannot blame him.

Then comes the sweetheart. A new deep love, a great overmastering reverence for the Woman, rises in his heart. In the light of that love he accepts her as she is, glorifying and idealising every weakness, every limitation, because it is hers. This is not well. He could love her just as well, better, if his reverence were better deserved, if the dignity of sex were enhanced by the dignity of a wise, strong, capable human being.

Of course the man feels that he would not love her as well if she were different. So he felt in past ages when she was even more feminine, even less human. So he will feel in coming ages, when she is truly his equal, a strong and understanding friend, a restful and stimulating companion, as well as the beautiful and loving woman. We have always been drawn together by love and always will be. The beautiful Georgian slave is beloved, the peasant lass, the princess; man loves woman, and she need not fear any change in that.

Our error lies in a false estimate of womanhood and manhood. The home, its labours, cares, and limitations we have called womanly; and everything else in life manly; wherefore if a woman manifested any power, ambition, interest, outside the home, that was unwomanly and must cost her her position as such. This is entirely wrong.

A woman is a woman and attractive to the men of her place and time, whether she be a beaded Hottentot, a rosy milkmaid, a pretty schoolma'am, or a veiled beauty of the Zenana.

We are taught that man most loves and admires the domestic type of woman. This is one of the roaring jokes of history. The breakers of hearts, the queens of romance, the goddesses of a thousand devotees, have not been cooks.

Women in general are attractive to men, but let a woman be glaringly conspicuous—the great singer, dancer, actress—immediately she has lovers without number. The best-loved women of all time have not been the little brown birds at home, by any means. Of course, when a man marries the queen of song he expects her to settle at once to the nest and remain there. But does he thereafter maintain the same degree of devotion that he bestowed before? It is not easy, after all, to maintain the height of romantic devotion for one's house-servant—or even one's housekeeper. The man loves his wife; but it is in spite of the home—not because of it. And wherever the shadow of unhappiness falls between them, wherever the sad record of sorrow and sin is begun, it is too often because love strays from that domestic area to follow a freer bird in a wider field.

It is not marriage which brings this danger, it is domestic service; it is not the perfect and mutual ownership of love, nor the sanction of law and religion; it is the one-sided ownership wherein the wife becomes the private servant, cook, cleaner, mender of rents, a valet, janitor, and chambermaid. Even as such she has more practical claim to respect than the wife who does not do this work nor any other; who is not the servant of the house, but merely its lady; who has absolutely no claim to human honour, no place in the social scheme, except that of the female.

Thus we find that the influence of the home upon man, as felt through the home-restricted woman, is not always for the best; and that even, as supposedly increasing the woman's charm, it does not work.

What follows further of the influence of the home upon man directly? How does it modify his personal life and development? The boy grows and breaks out of the home. It has for him a myriad ties—but he does not like to be tied. He strikes out for himself. If he is an English boy of the upper classes he is cut off early and sent to a boarding school; later he has "chambers" of his own. If an American, he simply goes into business, and in most cases away from home, boarding for a while. Then he loves, marries, and sets up a home of his own; a woman-and-child house, which he gladly and proudly maintains and in many ways enjoys.

So satisfied are we in our convictions regarding this status that we really and practically worship the home and family, holding it to be a man's first duty to maintain them. No man does it more patiently and generously than the American, and he is supported in his position by all the moral opinion of our world. He is "a good family man" we say, and can say no more. To stay at home evenings is especially desirable; the more of life that can be spent at home the better, we think, for all concerned. Now what is the real effect upon the man? Is the home, as we have it, satisfying to the real needs of man's nature; and if not, could it be improved?

The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home is found in his universal absence from it. It is not only that his work takes him out (and he sees to it that it does!) but the man who does not "have to work" also goes out, for pleasure.

The leisure classes in any country have no necessity upon them to leave home, yet their whole range of uneasy activity is to get outside, or to furnish constant diversion and entertainment, to while away the hours within. A human creature must work, play, or rest. Men work outside, play outside, and cannot rest more than so long at a time.

The man maintains a home, as part of his life-area, but does not himself find room in it. This is legitimate enough. It should be equally true of the woman. No human life of our period can find full exercise in a home. Both need it, to rest in; to work from; but not to stay in.

This we find practically worked out in the average man's attitude toward the home. He provides it, cheerfully, affectionately, proudly; at any cost of labour, care, and ingenuity; but if he has to stay in it too much, he knows it softens and enfeebles him.

So he goes out, to meet men, to work and live as far as he can; and when he wants "a real good time,"—rest, recreation, healthful amusement,—he goes altogether with "the boys." The distant camp in the woods, the mountain climb, the hunting trip,—real rest and pleasure to the man are found with men away from home.

There is a sort of strain in the constant association with the smaller life, as there is in the painful keeping step with shorter legs; a slow, soft, gentle downward pull, against which every active man rebels. But he is bound to it, for life. The immutable laws of sex hold him to the woman; and as she is so he must be, more or less.

He is bound to the home by the needs of the child, and by the physical convenience and necessity of the place. If it were all that it should be, it would offer to the man rest, comfort, stimulus, and inspiration. In so far as it does, it is right. In so far as it does not, it is wrong. The ideal home shines clear and bright, at the end of the day's work. Peace and happiness, relief from all effort and anxiety, the calm replenishment of food and sleep, the most delightful companionship. In some cases it gives all this in fact. In many, many others the man has to descend in coming home—to come down to it instead of up. In it is a whole new field of cares, worries, and labours. The primitive machinery of the place, so imperfectly managed by the inexpert average woman, jars rudely on his specialised consciousness. The children are his pride and joy—that is as it should be. But when their lack of intelligent care robs him of his rest at night; and their lack of intelligent education, makes them an anxiety and a distress instead of a comfort; that is as it should not be.

He does not bring his deficiencies in business home to his wife and expect her to walk the floor at night with them. The systematised man's work is done for the day, and he comes home to shoulder a share of the unsystematised inadequate woman's work. When the woman of exceptional ability keeps the whole house running smoothly, has no trouble with servants, no trouble with the children, then the influence of the home on man is pure beneficence. Such cases are most rare. So used are we to the contrary, so besotted in our blind adoration of ancient deficiencies, that we exhort the young couple to face "the cares and troubles of married life" as if they really were an essential part of it. They have nothing to do with married life. They are the cares and troubles of our antiquated, mischievous system of housekeeping.

If men in their business were still using methods of a million years ago, they would need some exhortation too. It is marvellous that the same man who casts upon the scrap heap his most expensive machinery to replace it with still better, who constantly adjusts and readjusts his business to the latest demands of our rapidly changing time, can go home and contentedly endure the same petty difficulties which his father and his grandfather and all his receding ancestors endured in turn.

The inadequacy of the home, the gross imperfections of its methods and management have anything but a helpful influence on men. Necessary difficulties are to be borne or overcome, but to suffer with a sickle when a steam reaper is to be had is contemptible rather than elevating. There will be some pathetic protest here that it is a man's duty to help woman bear the troubles and difficulties of the home. The woman ardently believes this, and the man too, sometimes. Of all incredible impositions this is the most astounding.

Here we see half the human race, equally able with the other half (equal does not mean similar, remember!), content to see every industry on earth taken away from them, save house-service and child-culture, growing up in the full knowledge and acceptance of this field of labour, generally declining to study said industries before undertaking them, cheerfully undertaking them without any pretense of efficiency, and then calling upon the other half of the world, upon men, who do everything else that is done to maintain our civilisation, to help them do their work!

We object to seeing the man harness the woman to the plough, and we are right. It is a poor way to work. A horse is more efficient, a steam-plough still better. It is time that we objected to the woman's effort to harness the man to the home, in all its cumbrous old-world inefficiencies. It is not more labour that the home wants, it is better machinery and administration.

Some hold that the feebleness of woman has a beneficent effect on man, draws out many of his nobler qualities. He should then marry a bed-ridden invalid—a purblind idiot—and draw them all out!

The essential weakness and deficiencies of the child are quite sufficient to call out all the strength and wisdom of both parents, without adding this travesty of childhood, this pretended helplessness of a full-grown woman. The shame of it! That a mother, one who needs every attainable height of wisdom and power, should forego her own human development—to make good her claim on man for food and clothes and draw out his nobler qualities! The virtue of parentage is to be measured by its success, not by the amount of effort and sacrifice expended.

Granting that the care of the body is woman's especial work; the feeding, clothing, and cleaning of the world; she should by this time have developed some system of doing it which would make it less of a burden to the man as well as the woman. It is most discreditable to the business sense of a modern community that these vitally important life processes should be so clumsily performed, at such heavy cost of time, labour, and money.

The care and education of children are legitimately shared by the father. In this a man and his wife are truly partners. They engage in a common business and both labour in it. At present the man by no means does his share in this all-important work, save as he does it collectively, through school and college; there the woman is in default.

In the early years the man gives little thought and care to the child, this being supposed to be perfectly well attended to by the woman. That it is not, we may readily see; but the man can by no means assist in it; because he is so overburdened already in the material provision for the home.

The enormous and unnecessary expense of our domestic processes constitutes so excessive a drain on man's energy that it would be cruel, as well as useless, to expect him to do more.

With the reduction in expense which we have shown to be possible, lessening the cost of living by two-thirds and adding to productive labour by nearly half, the home, instead of being an unconscionable burden and ceaseless care, would become what it should be: an easily attained place of complete rest, comfort, peace, and invigoration.

The present influence of the home on men is felt most through this inordinate expense. The support of the family we have laid entirely upon man, thus developing in the dependent woman a limitless capacity for receiving things, and denying her the power to produce them. If this result remained in its simple first degree it would be bad enough; requiring of the man the maintenance of himself, a healthy able-bodied woman, and all the children, instead of having a vigorous helpmate, to honourably support herself, and do her share toward supporting her own children.

This result is cumulative, however. The confinement of the woman to the home, when she does not labour, results in her becoming a parasite, and the appetite of a parasite is insatiable. She has no sense of what we call "the value of money,"—meaning how much labour it represents,—because she never laboured for it. She received it from her father, all unthinking of where he got it, as is natural to a child; and she continues to be a child, receiving as unthinkingly from her husband. This position we consider right, even beautiful; man stoutly maintains it himself, and considers any effort of the woman to support herself as a reflection on him. He has arrogated to himself as a masculine function the power of producing wealth; and considers it "unfeminine" for a woman to do it; and as indicating a lack of manliness in him.

He should "consider the ant," in this capacity, or the bee; and see that a purely masculine functionary has no other occupation whatsoever. He should consider also the male savage—he is "masculine" enough surely; but he is little else. Last, nearest, and most practical he should consider the immense majority of women all over the world to-day who labour in the home. The Lady of the House is a pure parasite, almost wholly detrimental in her influence, but the Housewife is one of the hardest workers on earth. She works unceasingly; as Mrs. Diaz put it years ago, in a thoughtful husband's sudden consideration of his wife's working hours—"No noonings—no evenings—no rainy days!" She works harder and longer than the man, in a miscellaneous shifting field of effort far more exhausting to vitality than his specialised line; and she bears children too! If any man could make a boast equal to that of the mother of nine children—(whose son told me this himself) that she had never missed washing on Monday but twice—there might be some ground for the claim of superior strength.

In this kind of home—and it is still the rule on earth—what is the influence on man? Does this grade and amount of labour on the part of women lighten the burden, as we so fondly and proudly assume? It shows great ignorance of economic values to assume it.

The poorer a man is, the more he has to pay for everything. In this nine-tenths of our population where the woman works in the home, the man works harder and gets less comfort for his money than among those more successful men able to maintain a parasite. He sustains to the fullest degree all the economic disadvantages we have previously enumerated—the last extreme of wasteful purchase, the lowest stage of industrial exchange. With him, a self-supporting wife would at once double the family income, and the benefits of organised labour and purchase would reduce their expenses at the same time. The unnecessary expenses of a poor man's home are far greater in proportion than those of the rich man; and his enjoyment of the place is less.

He has always a tired wife, an unprogressive wife, a wife who cannot be to him what a strong, happy, growing woman should be. If she had eight hours (to take even the custom of our labour-wasting time) of specialised work, to be done with and left with eagerness for the beloved home, she would have a far fresher and more stimulating mind than she has after her ceaseless, confusing toils in the confined domestic atmosphere. The two, together, could afford a better house. The two, together, with twice the money and half the expense for food, could furnish their children with far better care than the overworked and undereducated housewife can give them.

The result upon the man would be pleasant, indeed. A clean, pretty, quiet home—not full of smell and steam and various messy industries, but simply a place to rest in when he comes to it. A wife as glad to be at home as he. Children also glad of the reunion hour, and the mother and father both delighted to be with their children. What is there in this a man should dread?

Would not such a home be good to come to, and would not its influence be wholly pleasant? Our Puritanism shrinks at the idea of homes being wholly pleasant. They should be something of a trial, we think, for our soul's good. The wife and mother ought to be tired and overworked, careworn, dirty, anxious from hour to hour as she tries to "mind the children" and all her other trades as well. The man ought to be contented with the exhausted wife, the screaming babies, the ill-cooked food, the general weary chaos of the place, the endless demand on his single purse.

Is he? What is the average workingman's attitude toward this supposed haven of rest? The statistics of the temperance society are enough to show us the facts. A man does not like that kind of a place—and why should he?

He is tired, working for six or ten; and to go from his completed labour of the day, back to his wife's uncompleted labour of the day and night, does not rest him. He wants companionship. She cannot give it him. Her talk is of the suds, the coal, the need of shoes, clothes, furniture, utensils—everything!

He wants amusement, she cannot give it him. An exhausted woman, taken every day, is not entertaining. The children are, or should be, in bed. The wife wants rest and companionship, and amusement, too; but that is another story. We are considering the man. She must stay at home in any case, the home being her place; but he does not have to, and out he goes.

The instinctive demands of a highly developed human creature, a social creature, are strong within him; needs as vital as the needs of the body, and utterly unsatisfied at home. Out he goes, and to the one pleasant open door—the saloon. Ease, freedom, comfort, pleasant company, talk of something new, amusement—these are the main needs; and if a stimulating drink is the necessary price, there is nothing in the average man's ill-fed stomach, overdeveloped personal selfishness, or untrained conscience, to refuse it.

The measureless results in evil we all know well. Many are the noble souls devoting their life's efforts to the closing of the saloon, the driving back of erring man to the safe and supposedly all-satisfying shelter of the home. We do not dream that it is the home which drives him there.

One thing we have divined at last; that insufficient and ill-chosen food, villainously cooked, is one great cause of man's need for stimulants. Under this much illumination we now strive mightily to make man's private cook a better cook. If every man's wife were a Delmonico, if his appetites were catered to with absolute skill and ingenuity, would that teach him temperance and self-control?

The worse the private cook, the greater the physical need for stimulant. The better the private cook, the greater the self-indulgence developed in the happy Epicurean. But good or bad, no man of any grade can get the social stimulus he needs by spending every evening with his cook!

That is the key to the whole thing. Your cook may be "a treasure," she may cater to your needs most exquisitely, she may also be the mother of your children, as has been the case from the earliest times; but she is none the less your own personal servant, and as such not your social equal. You may love her dearly and honour her in her female capacity, also honour the excellence of her cooking, but you are not satisfied with her conversation or her skill in games.

The influence of the home with a working wife is not all that could be desired; and we may turn with some hope of better things to the home with a parasite wife. Here certainly the man comes home to rest and peace and comfort, and to satisfying companionship with the "eternal feminine." Here is a woman who is nothing on earth but a woman, not even a cook. Here, of course, the food is satisfactory; the children all a father's heart could wish, having the advantage of the incessant devotion of an entire mother; the machinery of the home, so painfully prominent to the workingman, is here running smoothly and unseen; and the whole thing is well within the means of the proud "provider."

What the food supply is in the hands of the housemaid we have seen. What the child is in the hands of the nursemaid, we may see anywhere. The parasitic woman by no means uses the time free of housework to devote herself to her children. A mother is essentially a worker. When a woman does not work it dries the very springs of motherhood. The idler she is, the less she does for her children. The rich man's children are as often an anxiety and disappointment to him as the poor man's.

The expense of the place is a thing of progressive dimensions. The home of the parasitic woman is a bottomless pit for money. She is never content. How could a human creature be content in such an unnatural position? She is supplied with nourishment; she has such social stimulus as her superficial contact with her kind affords, but nothing comes out; there is no commensurate action.

In the uneasy distress of this position her only idea of relief is to get something more; if she is not satisfied after one dinner, get or give another dinner; if not satisfied with one dress, get two, get twenty, get them all! If the home does not satisfy, by all means get another one in the country; perhaps that will feel different; try first one and then the other. If the two, or three, should pall, get a yacht, go to some other country, get more things to put in the home or on one's pretty body; get, get, get! and never a thought of the ease and freedom and joy that would come of Doing. Not of playing at doing, with a hot poker or a modelling tool—but really doing human work. It does not occur to her, and it does not occur to him. He thinks it right and beautiful to maintain the dainty domestic vampire, and pours forth his life's service to meet her insatiate demands. All the reward he asks is her love and faith, her sweet companionship.

May we look, then, in homes of this class for an ideal influence on man? Consecrating his life to the business of not only feeding and clothing, but profusely decorating and amusing a useless woman,—does this have an elevating effect on him? When he thinks of how charming she will look in the costly fur, the lace, the jewels, how she will enjoy the new home, the new carriage, the new furniture; of her fresh and ceaseless delight in her "social functions"—does his heart leap within him?

He performs wonders in business, honest or dishonest, useful to mankind or cruel; he slowly relinquishes the ideals of his youth, devotes his talents to whatever will make the most money, even prostitutes his political conscience, and robs the city and the state, in order to meet the demands of that fair, plump, smiling Queen of the Home.

And she gives in return—? Her influence is—? The working wife does not lift a man up very high. The parasite wife pulls him down. The home of the working wife gives to boy and man the impression that women are servants. The home of the idle wife gives to boy and man the impression that women are useless and rapacious; but, we must have them because they are women.

This is the worst that the home shows us, and is, fortunately, confined to a minority of cases. But it is none the less an evil influence of large extent. It leaves to the woman no functions whatever save those of the female, and, as exaggeration is never health, does not improve her as a female.

The really restful and stimulating companionship of man and wife, the general elevating social intercourse between men and women, is not to be found in the homes of the wealthy any more than in those of the poor. The demands upon the man are unending, and the returns in good to body or mind bear no proportion to the expense. The woman who has no other field of usefulness or growth than a home wherein she is not even the capable servant, cannot be the strong, noble, uplifting creature who does good to man; but rapidly becomes the type most steadily degrading.

  XV

HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

If there is one fact more patent than another in regard to social evolution, it is that our gain is far greater in material progress than in personal. The vast and rapid increase in wealth, in power, in knowledge, in facility and speed in production and distribution; the great spread of political, religious, and educational advantages; all this is in no way equalled by any gain in personal health and personal happiness.

The world grows apace; the people do not keep pace with it. Our most important machines miss much of their usefulness because the brain of the workman has not improved as rapidly as the machine. Great systems of transportation, involving intricate mechanical arrangement, break continually at this, their weakest link—the human being. We create and maintain elaborate systems of justice and equity, of legislation, administration, education; and they are always open to failure in this same spot—the men are not equal to the system.

The advance in public good is far greater than the advance in private good. We have improved every facility in living; but we still live largely as before—sick, feeble, foolishly quarrelling over small personal matters, unaware of our own great place in social evolution. This has always been known to us and has been used only to prove our ancient theory as to the corrupt and paltry stuff humanity is made of. "Frail creatures of dust, and feeble as frail," is our grovelling confession; and to those who try to take comfort in our undeniable historic gains, it has been triumphantly pointed out that, gain as we would, "the human heart" was no better—"poor human nature" was unimprovable. This is utterly untrue.

Human nature has changed and improved in tremendous ratio; and, if its improvement has been strangely irregular, far greater in social life than in personal life, it is for a very simple reason. All these large social processes which show such marked improvement are those wherein people work together in legitimate specialised lines in the world. These personal processes which have not so improved, the parts of life which are still so limited and imperfectly developed, may be fully accounted for by their environment—the ancient and unchanging home. Bring the home abreast of our other institutions; and our personal health and happiness will equal our public gains.

Once more it must be stated that the true home, the legitimate and necessary home, the home in right proportion and development, is wholly good. It is at once the beautiful beginning, the constant help, and one legitimate end of a life's work. To the personal life, the physical life, this is enough. To the social life, it is not. If human duty had no other scope than to maintain and reproduce this species of animal, that duty might be accomplished in the home. The purely maternal female, having no other reason for being than to bear and rear young; a marauding male, to whom the world was but a hunting ground wherein to find food for his family—these, and their unimproved successors, need nothing more than homes. But human duty is not so limited. These processes of reproduction are indeed essential to our human life, as are the processes of respiration and digestion, but they do not constitute that life, much less conclude it.

As human beings, our main field of duty lies in promoting social advance. To maintain ourselves and our families is an animal duty we share with the other animals; to maintain each other, and, by so doing to increase our social efficiency, is human duty, first, last, and always. We have always seen the necessity for social groups, religious, political, and other; we have more or less fulfilled our social functions therein; but we have in the main supposed that all this common effort was merely for the greater safety and happiness of homes; and when the interests of the home and those of the state clashed, most of us have put home first.

The first person to learn better was that very earliest of social servants, the soldier. He learned first of all to combine for the common good, and though his plane of service was the lowest of all, mere destruction, the group sentiments involved were of the highest order. The destructive belligerence of the male, and his antecedent centuries of brute combat, made fighting qualities most prominent; but the union and organisation required for successful human warfare called out high social qualities, too. The habit of acting together necessarily develops in the brain the power and desire to act together; the fact that success or failure, life or death, advantage or injury, depends on collective action, necessarily develops the social consciousness. This modification we find in the army everywhere, gradually increasing with race-heredity; and, long since, so far overwhelming the original egoism of the individual animal, that the common soldier habitually sacrifices his life to the public service without hesitation.

The steps in social evolution must always be made in this same natural order, from one stage of development to another, by means of existing qualities. Primitive man had no altruism, he had no honour, his courage was flickering and wholly personal; he had no sense of order and discipline, of self-control and self-sacrifice; but he had a strong inclination to fight, and by means of that one tendency he was led into relations which developed all those other qualities.

It is easy to see that this stage of our social development was diametrically opposed by the home. The interests of the home demanded personal service; the habits of the home bred industry and patience; the influence of the inmates of the home, of the women and children, did not promote martial qualities. So our valorous ancestor promptly left home and went a-fighting, for thousands and thousands of years, while human life was maintained by the women at home.

When men gradually learned to apply their energies to production, instead of destruction; learning in slow, painful, costly ages that wealth was in no way increased by robbing, nor productive strength by slaughter; they were able to apply to their new occupations some of the advantageous qualities gained in the old. Thus industry grew, spread, organised, and the power and riches and wisdom of the world began to develop.

As far back as history can go we find some men producing, even while a large and important caste was still fighting. The warriors sought wealth by plundering other nations, not realising that if the other nations had been all warriors there would have been nothing to plunder. Slowly the wealth-makers overtook the wealth-takers, caught up with them, passed them; and now the greater part of the masculine energy of the world is devoted to productive industry in some form, and the army is recruited from the lowest ranks of life.

In this new field of social service, productive industry, what is the influence of the home? At first it was altogether good. To wean the man from his all too-natural instinct to wander, kill, and rob, the attractions of home life were needed. To centre and localise his pride and power, to make him bend his irregular expansive tendencies to the daily performance of labour, was a difficult task; and here again he had to be led by the force of existing qualities. The woman was the great drawing power here, the ease and comfort of the place, the growing love of family, and these influences slowly overcame the warrior and bound him to the plough.

Thus far the home influence led him up, and, in turn, his military qualities lifted the home industries from the feminine plane to the human. To produce wealth for the home to consume was a better position than that of living by plunder; but we should have small cause to glory in the march of civilisation if that was all we had done.

Just as the fierce and brutal savage, entering into military combination, under no better instincts than self-defence and natural belligerence, yet learned by virtue of that combination new and noble qualities; so the still fierce and brutal soldier, entering into industrial combination under no better instincts than those of sex-attraction and physical wants in increasing degree, yet learned, by virtue of this form of union, new qualities even more valuable to the race.

The life of any society is based on the successful interaction of its members, rather than the number of its families. For instance, in those vast, fat, ancient empires, where a vast population, scattered over wide territory, supported local life in detached families, by individual effort; there was almost no national life, no general sense of unity, no conscious connection of interests. The one tie was taxation; and if some passing conqueror annexed a province, the only change was in the tax-collector, and the people were not injured unless he demanded more than the previous one.

A vital nation must exist in the vivid common consciousness of its people; a consciousness naturally developed by enlarging social functions, by undeniable common interests and mutual services. If any passing conqueror were to annex—or seek to annex—a portion of our vast territory, he would find no slice of jellyfish, no mere cellular existence with almost no organised life. He would find that every last and least part of the country was vitally one with the whole, and would submit to no dismemberment. This social consciousness, on which our civilised life depends, in the growth of which lies social progress, is not developed in the home. On the contrary it is opposed by it. Up to a certain level the home promotes social development. Beyond that level it hinders it, if allowed to do so.

Self-interest drove men into military combination—where they learned much. Family interest drove them into industrial activity, and even allowed a low form of combination. But social interest is what leads us all farthest and highest; the impulse to live, not for self-preservation only, not for reproduction only, but for social progress. It should not be hard to see that these apparently dissimilar and opposed interests can only be harmonised by the dominance of the greatest. The man who would strive for his own advantage at the expense of his family, we call a brute. The man who strives for the advantage of his family at the expense of his country—we should call a traitor! Yet this is the common attitude of the citizen of to-day, and in this attitude he is maintained and extolled by the home! The soldier who would seek to save his own life to the injury of the army we promptly shoot. If he should seek to save his home at the same risk, we should still dishonour and punish him.

The army, very highly developed in a very low scheme of action, knows that neither self nor family must stand for a moment against the public service. Industry is not so well organised as warfare, and so our scale of industrial virtues is not so high. We degrade and punish for "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman"; but we take no cognisance of "conduct unbecoming a manufacturer and a gentleman," unless he is an open malefactor. Yet a manufacturer is a far higher and more valuable social servant than a soldier of any grade. We do not yet know the true order of importance in our social functions, nor their distinctly organic nature.

With our proven capacity, why do we manifest so little progress in industrial organisation and devotion? A student of prehuman evolution, one familiar only with nature's long, slow, stumbling process of developing by exclusion—like driving a flock of sheep by killing those who went the wrong way—might answer the question in this manner: That we have not been engaged in industrial processes long enough to develop the desired qualities. This is usually considered the evolutionary standpoint; and from it we are advised not to be impatient, and are told that a few thousand years' more killing will do much for us.

But social evolution takes place on quite other grounds. We have added education to heredity; mutual help to the cruel and wasteful processes of elimination. The very essence of social relation is its transmission of individual advance to the collective. Physical evolution acts only through physical heredity; we have that in common with all animals; but we have also social heredity, that great psychic current of transmitted wisdom and emotion which immortalises the gains of the past and generalises the gains of the present.

A system of free public education does more to develop the brains of a people than many thousand years of "natural selection," and does not prevent natural selection, either.

The one capacity wherein the world does not progress as it should is the power of social intelligence; of a rational, efficiently acting, common consciousness. Our "body politic" is like that of a vigorous, well-grown idiot. We have all the machinery for large, rich, satisfying life; and inside is the dim, limited mind, incapable of enjoyment or action. It has been found in recent years that idiocy may result from a too small skull; the bones have not enlarged, and the brain, compressed and stunted, cannot perform its functions. In one case this was most cruelly proven, by an operation upon an old man, from birth and idiot. His skull was opened and so treated as to give more room to the imprisoned brain, and, with what hopeless horror can be imagined, the man became intelligently conscious at last—conscious of what his life had been!

There is some similar arrest in the development of the social consciousness; else our cities would not sit gnawing and tearing at themselves, indifferent to dirt, disease, or vice, and enjoying only physical comfort. If any operation should give sudden new light to this long-clouded civic brain, we might feel the same horror of the years behind us, but not the same hopelessness—society is immortal.

It is here suggested that one check to the social development proper to our time is the pressure of the rudimentary home. We are quite willing to admit that a home life we consider wrong, as the Chinese or Turkish, can paralyse a nation. We have even come to see that the position of women is a good gauge of progress. Is it so hard, then, to admit at least a possibility that the position of our women, the nature of our homes, may have some important influence upon our social growth? There is no demand that we destroy the home, any more than that we destroy the women, but we must change their relative position.

The brain is the medium of social contact, the plane of human development. The savage is incapable of large relation because his mental area is not big enough; he is not used to such extensive combinations. Where the brain is accustomed only to incessant consideration of its own private interests, and to direct personal service of those interests, it is thereby prevented from developing the capacity for seeing the public interests, and for indirect collective service of those interests. The habit, continuous and unrelieved, of thinking in a small circuit checks the power to think in a large circuit.

This arrested brain development, this savage limitation to the personal, and mainly to the physical, is what we have so rigidly enforced upon women. The primitive home to the primitive mind is sufficient; but the progress of the mind requires a commensurate progress of the home—and has not had it. Owing to our peculiar and unnatural division of life-area, half the race has been free to move on, and so has accomplished much for all of us; but the other half, being confined to the same position it occupied in the infancy of society, has been denied that freedom and that progress. Owing again to the inexorable reunion of these divided halves in each child, physical heredity does what it can to bridge the gulf, the ever-widening gulf; pouring into the stationary woman some share of the modern abilities of social man; and also forcing upon the moving man some share of the primitive disabilities of the domestic woman. We thus have a strange and painful condition of life.

Social progress, attained wholly by the male, gives to the unprogressive woman unrest, discontent, disease. The more society advances, the less she can endure her ancient restrictions. Hence arises much evil and more unhappiness. Domestic inertia, maintained by the woman, gives to the progressive man a tremendous undertow of private selfishness and short-sightedness. Hence more evil, far more; for the social processes are the most important; and a deeper unhappiness too; for the shame of the social traitor, the helplessness of the home-bound man who knows his larger duty but cannot meet it, is a higher plane of suffering than hers, and also adds to hers continually.

All this evil and distress is due not at all to the blessed influence of the true home, suited to our time, but to the anything but blessed influence of a home suited to the Stone Age—or perhaps the Bronze! It is not in the least necessary. The change we require does not involve the loss of one essential good and lovely thing. It does not injure womanhood, but improves it. It does not injure childhood, but improves it. It does not injure manhood, but improves that too.

What is the proposed change? It is the recognition of a new order of duties, a new scale of virtues; or rather it is the practical adoption of that order long since established by the facts of business, the science of government, and by all great religions. Our own religion in especial, the most progressive, the most social, gives no sanction whatever to our own archaic cult of home-worship.

What is there in the teachings of Christianity to justify—much less command—this devotion to animal comfort, to physical relations, to the A B C of life? In his own life Christ rose above all family ties; his disciples he called to leave all and follow him; the devotion he recognised was that of Mary to the truth, not of Martha to the housekeeping; and the love he taught, that love which is the beginning and the end of Christian life, is not the love of one's own merely, but of the whole world. "Whoso careth not for his own is worse than an infidel"—truly. And whoso careth only for his own is no better!

Besides—and this should reconcile the reluctant heart—this antiquated method of serving the family does not serve them to the best advantage. In what way does a man best benefit his family? By staying at home and doing what he can with his own two hands—whereby no family on earth would ever have more than the labour of one affectionate amateur could provide; or by going out from the home and serving other people in a specialised trade—whereby his family and all families are gradually supplied with peace and plenty, supported and protected by the allied forces of civilisation?

In what way does a woman best benefit her family? By staying at home and doing what she can with her own two hands—whereby no family ever has more than the labour of one affectionate amateur can provide—or by enlarging her motherhood as man has enlarged his fatherhood, and giving to her family the same immense advantages that he has given it? We have always assumed that the woman could do most by staying at home. Is this so? Can we prove it? Why is that which is so palpably false of a man held to be true of a woman? "Because men and woman are different!" will be stoutly replied. Of course they are different—in sex, but not in humanity. In every human quality and power they are alike; and the right service of the home, the right care and training of the child, call for human qualities and powers, not merely for sex-distinctions.

The home, in its arbitrary position of arrested development, does not properly fulfil its own essential functions—much less promote the social ones. Among the splendid activities of our age it lingers on, inert and blind, like a clam in a horse-race.

It hinders, by keeping woman a social idiot, by keeping the modern child under the tutelage of the primeval mother, by keeping the social conscience of the man crippled and stultified in the clinging grip of the domestic conscience of the woman. It hinders by its enormous expense; making the physical details of daily life a heavy burden to mankind; whereas, in our stage of civilisation, they should have been long since reduced to a minor incident.

Consider what the mere protection and defence of life used to cost, when every man had to be fighter most of his life. Ninety per cent., say, of masculine energy went to defend life; while the remaining ten, and the women, in a narrow, feeble way, maintained it. They lived, to be sure, fighting all the time for the sorry privilege. Now we have systematised military service so that only a tiny fraction of our men, for a very short period of life, need be soldiers; and peace is secured, not by constant painful struggles, but by an advanced economic system. "Eternal vigilance" may be "the price of liberty," but it is a very high price; and paid only by the barbarian who has not risen to the stage of civilised service.

Organisation among men has reduced this wasteful and crippling habit of being every-man-his-own-soldier. We do not have to carry a rifle and peer around every street-corner for a hidden foe. As a result the released energy of the ninety per cent. men, a tenth being large allowance for all the fighting necessary, is now poured into the channels that lead to wealth, peace, education, general progress.

Yet we are still willing that the personal care of life, the service of daily physical needs, shall monopolise as many women as that old custom of universal warfare monopolised men! Ninety per cent. of the feminine energy of the world is still spent in ministering laboriously to the last details of bodily maintenance; and the other tenth is supposed to do nothing but supervise the same tasks, and flutter about in fruitless social amusement. This crude waste of half the world's force keeps back human progress just as heavily as the waste of the other half did.

By as much as the world has grown toward peace and power and unity since men left off spending their lives in universal warfare, will it grow further toward that much-desired plane when women leave off spending their lives in universal house-service. The mere release of that vast fund of energy will in itself increase all the facilities of living; but there is a much more important consequence.

The omnipresent domestic ideal is a deadly hinderance to the social ideal. When half our population honestly believe that they have no duties outside the home, the other half will not become phenomenal statesmen. This cook-and-housemaid level of popular thought is the great check. The social perspective is entirely lost; and a million short-sighted homes, each seeing only its own interests, cannot singly or together grasp the common good which would benefit them all.

That the home has improved as much as it has is due to the freedom of man outside it. That it is still so clumsy, so inadequate, so wickedly wasteful of time, of money, of human life, is due to the confinement of woman inside it.

What sort of citizens do we need for the best city—the best state—the best country—the best world? We need men and women who are sufficiently large-minded to see and feel a common need, to work for a common good, to rejoice in the advance of all, and to know as the merest platitude that their private advantage is to be assured only by the common weal. That kind of mind is not bred in the kitchen.

A citizenship wherein all men were either house-servants or idlers would not show much advance. Neither does a community wherein all women, save that noble and rapidly increasing minority of self-supporting ones, are either house-servants or idlers. Our progress rests on the advance of the people, all the people; the development of an ever-widening range of feeling, thought, action; while its flowers are found in all the higher arts and sciences, it is rooted firmly in economic law.

This little ganglion of aborted economic processes, the home, tends to a sort of social paralysis. In its innumerable little centres of egoism and familism are sunk and lost the larger vibrations of social energy which should stimulate the entire mass. Again, society's advance rests on the personal health, sanity, and happiness of its members. The home, whose one justification is in its ministering to these, does not properly fulfil its purpose, and cannot unless it is managed on modern lines.

Social progress rests on the smooth development of personal character, the happy fulfilment of special function. The home, in its ceaseless and inexorable demands, stops this great process of specialisation in women, and checks it cruelly in men. A man's best service to society lies in his conscientious performance of the work he is best fitted for. But the service of the home demands that he do the work he is best paid for. Man after man, under this benumbing, strangling pressure, is diverted from his true path in social service, and condemned to "imprisonment with hard labour for life."

The young man, for a time, is comparatively free; and looks forward eagerly to such and such a line of growth and large usefulness. But let him marry and start a home, and he must do, not what he would—what is best for him and best for all of us; but what he must—what he can be sure of pay for. We have always supposed this to be a good thing, as it forced men to be industrious. As if it was any benefit to society to have men industrious in wrong ways—or useless ways, or even slow, stupid, old-fashioned ways!

Human advance calls for each man's best, for his special faculties, for the work he loves best and can therefore do best and do most of. This work is not always the kind that commands the greater wages; at least the immediate wages he must have. The market will pay best for what it wants, and what it wants is almost always what it is used to, and often what is deadly bad for it. Having a family to support, in the most wasteful possible way, multiplies a man's desire for money; but in no way multiplies his ability, his social value.

Therefore the world is full of struggling men, putting in for one and trying to take out for ten; and in this struggle seeking continually for new ways to cater to the tastes of the multitude, and especially to those of the rich; that they may obtain the wherewithal to support the ten, or six, or simply the one; who though she be but one and not a worker, is quite ready to consume more than any ten together! Social advantage is ruthlessly sacrificed to private advantage in our life to-day; not to necessary and legitimate private interests either; not to the best service of the individual, but to false and scandalously wasteful private interests; to the maintenance and perpetuation of inferior people.

The position is this: the home, as now existing, costs three times what is necessary to meet the same needs. It involves the further waste of nearly half the world's labour. It does not fulfil its functions to the best advantage, thus robbing us again. It maintains a low grade of womanhood, overworked or lazy; it checks the social development of men as well as women, and, most of all, of children. The man, in order to meet this unnecessary expense, must cater to the existing market; and the existing market is mainly this same home, with its crude tastes and limitless appetites. Thus the man, to maintain his own woman in idleness, or low-grade labour, must work three times as hard as is needful, to meet the demands of similar women; the home-bound woman clogging the whole world.

Change this order. Set the woman on her own feet, as a free, intelligent, able human being, quite capable of putting into the world more than she takes out, of being a producer as well as a consumer. Put these poor antiquated "domestic industries" into the archives of past history; and let efficient modern industries take their place, doing far more work, far better work, far cheaper work in their stead.

With an enlightened system of feeding the world we shall have better health—and wiser appetites. The more intelligent and broad-minded woman will assuredly promote a more reasonable, healthful, beautiful, and economical system of clothing, for her own body and that of the child. The wiser and more progressive mother will at last recognise child-culture as an art and science quite beyond the range of instinct, and provide for the child such surroundings, such training, as shall allow of a rapid and enormous advance in human character.

The man, relieved of two-thirds of his expenses; provided with double supplies; properly fed and more comfortable at home than he ever dreamed of being, and associated with a strong, free, stimulating companion all through life, will be able to work to far better purpose in the social service, and with far greater power, pride, and enjoyment.

The man and woman together, both relieved of most of their personal cares, will be better able to appreciate large social needs and to meet them. Each generation of children, better born, better reared, growing to their full capacity in all lines, will pour into the world a rising flood of happiness and power. Then we shall see social progress.