Chapter XV

Conclusion

If the foregoing sketch of the Family in its history and present constitution is even approximately true, we are justified in regarding it as an original and probably indispensable institution in human society. However it may vary in form and strength, no race has been found in which it does not exist in some form, and no people has advanced far in civilisation in which it has not been highly organised and firmly knit together.

But we find that this organisation may be motived and sustained in very different ways, at different stages of a people's life, and amongst different peoples. We find, for instance, one form of the patriarchal Family, perhaps the most rigid and highly organised form of all, based upon a religion, upon a system of ancestor - worship. Nearer to ourselves we find another form, hardly less permanent and rigid, based upon a system of landed property, as in agricultural communities, or in the feudal Family which elaborated itself by means of primogeniture into something very like that based upon ancestor-worship. And in our own day we find the modern Family which has freed itself both from the spiritual tyranny of ancestorworship and the material tyranny of landed property, but has inherited and preserved the best traditions of both.

For the modern Family is in no sense a weakened or degenerate form. Its strength lies in the fact that in it we are attaining on the one hand to a higher knowledge of the true spiritual forces which bind the generations together, on the other hand to a better theory of material prosperity. If the sons of the modern Family do not dread the avenging spirits of their ancestors, yet they recognise the compelling power of the traditions and qualities bequeathed by those ancestors, and fear to fall below them. If the father of the modern Family has lost or relinquished the power which he exercised over wife and children as autocrat in an industrial community, or by his hold upon the family property, he has found a stronger basis for his authority, a firmer hold upon their affections, in the loyalty which responds to a wise and generous rule. And the recognition of the fact that a more unfailing source of material prosperity lies in personal qualities than in either land or money, has enabled the modern Family to maintain itself independently of inherited wealth, while it has restored the younger brothers to their equality of sonship.

And this development of the modern Family has a new significance for the State. As we have seen, State and Family have always been intimately connected in their mutual influence. From time to time the State has made strenuous efforts to mould the Family according to its needs; but ultimately the State itself must always be moulded by the Family, since it is in the Family that the citizen is made. Now the development of the modern Family has meant the restoration of the younger brothers, and the restoration of the younger brothers means Democracy. It means, that is, the absence of all privilege but what is conceded by loyalty in the interests of the community. But, as we have seen, there are two types of younger brothers. There is the type of which the true modern Family is constituted: courageous, enterprising, self-reliant, and self-controlled; and these are the strength of the nation and the salt of the earth. There is also the type which is characteristic of the feudal Family in its worst form: timid, selfish, with no higher ambition than to find a "soft job" and draw upon the public purse; it was these younger brothers who were the first to claim the "right to work" on their own terms and at the expense of the State. Both notes are sounded in our Democracy of to-day, and the fortunes of the nation depend upon which prevails.

It is inevitable that to some of my readers the thought will have occurred hat there are Families known to them which serve no such purpose as those which I have tried to indicate, whose influence is for evil rather than for good. If this is raised as an objection to the function of the Family as here represented, my answer is that however true the contention may be it is irrelevant. To understand the purpose and meaning of an organism or institution we must take it in its completeness at any stage of development, and not in a degraded or mutilated form. The best institutions may easily become the most mischievous when they are perverted or mismanaged, but that does not affect their intrinsic value unless it can be shown to be inherent in their nature to be perverted or mismanaged. Nevertheless, although it is only incidental to the main purpose of this study, it will be interesting to touch very briefly upon some of the conditions under which the Family does seem to break down and to have its real purpose perverted.

Personal defects of character stand, of course, preeminent as causes militating against family life. Self-indulgence of all kinds, whether in drink or gambling or any form of greed, make a man difficult to live with in any kind of community, and more especially when he can exercise direct power over the lives of others. On the other hand, no influence is so strong to guard against the development of such defects as these as the Family itself, when it is allowed to have free play.

Of failure due to wider and more external influences we may note the following instances:—In the first place, we find the Family failing and perverted whenever the burden of maintaining it is transferred to any great extent from the strong members to the weak. It was so, for instance, in the early days of the factory system, when child labour was much employed though it is significant that even then it was the children of the Poor Law, the children without Families, who were the first and principal sufferers. It is so at the present day whenever we find the Family mainly dependent upon the earnings of women and girls. It seems to be almost inevitable that the man who accepts a subordinate economic position in the Family degenerates into a loafer and tyrant.

We find the Family weak again and perverted wherever there is an extensive reliance upon external sources of maintenance. It is as if the man in abdicating from his economic independence inflicts an injury upon his moral nature which poisons all his natural relations. For an illustration on a large scale we need only turn to the generation living in the early part of the nineteenth century, when under the influence of the old Poor Law family life suffered a terrible and widespread degeneration. For instances on a smaller scale the student may go to any town or district—fortunately they are not now very numerous—where men are in the habit of looking to external aid for maintenance rather than to their own exertions. There he will find without fail that family ties are weak, and that family rights and responsibilities are perverted into abuses. It is perhaps chiefly in the large towns that he will find this cause at work, owing partly to the greater number of charitable agencies and the greater difficulty of carrying on their work wisely, and partly to the greater ease of evading responsibilities in the busy and crowded life. And it is to this evasion of the responsibility which is the strength of the Family that we mainly owe the degenerate family life which is characteristic of the worst, not necessarily the poorest, parts of our towns.

But there is, I think, another main reason why family life tends to degenerate in large towns. It is the habit of facile and superficial intercourse which grows up when people are hoarded together in very close quarters. Real interests, even outside interests, are not necessarily hostile to family life; indeed, they usually serve to enrich it unless of such a nature as to absorb all time and strength. They form an organic union between those who share in them, which is itself analogous to the Family; and intercourse based upon true interests deepens and sweetens the very springs of life. But this is something quite different from the intercourse which is based upon no common interest, but is the mere outcome of casual proximity. (I say casual proximity, because there may be an organic proximity, which is another thing altogether.) We are taught that we are to love our neighbour; we are also taught that our neighbour is not every man who happens to pass us in the street, but the man with whom we are able to establish real relations of sympathy and helpfulness. No genuine attempt can be made to establish these relations with all the casual acquaintances of town life, or if made it is doomed to failure. The very meaning of neighbourliness tends to disappear in proportion to the density of population and the habit of facile acquaintanceship. Hence the paradox that human lives may be more unutterably lonely in the crowds of a town than is possible in the smallest village. Friendship is a plant which needs sedulous cultivation, and, with a practically infinite circle of acquaintances to draw upon, few people will be at the trouble to make friends; at the first breath of coolness, the first casual friction, they will turn to another, to repeat the process indefinitely. It is this habit which is hostile to family life as well as to friendship; we cannot live with members of our Family on terms of mere acquaintanceship, but mere acquaintanceship is much easier, and appears for the time at least to give us what we need at much less cost to ourselves.

It is in this way that we tend to get in our large towns a number of people, men and women, who have let slip their membership of a family group without raising themselves to anything higher. They have become disconnected atoms drifting through the life of the community, bound by no ties of duty or responsibility, seeking only the satisfaction of the moment, and often becoming incapable even of selfmaintenance. If the production of a class like this were the inevitable outcome of city life, it would seem to be another proof, or at least another suggestion, that man is not naturally a gregarious animal, except to a very limited extent, and that he cannot become so in a high degree without deterioration to a level which is scarcely human. Fortunately such phases as we have been considering have so far proved to be temporary. Always the Family has reasserted itself, at latest in the next generation, and always it has proved itself the means of restored independence and prosperity.

It has been impossible for me, with very limited resources of knowledge and experience to draw upon, to do more than suggest in its crudest outlines what the history of the Family has been in the past. It is a great work waiting for a great scholar. It has been perhaps still more impossible to show with any hope of adequacy what the Family is at any time, more especially at the present time, for the people who live beneath its sway. It may be that it is a theme fitter for the poet than for sober prose; for there is hardly a subject which poets have made peculiarly their own which does not find a place within the Family. It is greater than love itself, for it includes, ennobles, makes permanent all that is best in love. The pain of life is hallowed by it, the drudgery sweetened, its pleasures consecrated. It is the great trysting-place of the generations, where past and future flash into the reality of the present. It is the great storehouse in which the hardly earned treasures of the past, the inheritance of spirit and character from our ancestors, are guarded and preserved for our descendants. And it is the great discipline through which each generation learns anew the lesson of citizenship that no man can live for himself alone.

But when in writing of the Family one is baffled by the magnitude of the theme, then the thought comes to one's aid that inadequacy need not mean failure. For, like all the greatest things in life, it lies open to all; it is a book where he who runs may read, and every one may supply from his own knowledge and experience what he misses in the picture offered to him. But it is one of the sad truisms of daily life that our eyes are wont to overlook the things which lie nearest to us, and some service may be done by one who can recall our wandering attention, however imperfectly, and if only by saying, “look there!"

There is danger, no doubt, lest an inadequate attempt to bring into fuller consciousness the reality and importance of so intimate a part of our lives should tend to make it appear commonplace. Against that must be set the very real risk that in our unconsciousness we may heedlessly endanger its very existence, or at least neglect to guard it as jealously as we might. If we are to prefer other institutions to it, to seek other methods of ordering our lives, it should at least be with the full realisation of what it is we are prepared to sacrifice. To some who watch the social movements and legislation of to-day, it seems that this choice is being made without a full and conscious deliberation, and that we are thus in danger of bartering the substance for the shadow.

It is clear, then, that this book has had nothing new to offer. It only calls attention to a great fact which lies within the experience of every one, and attempts—how roughly and imperfectly no one knows better than the writer—to suggest what its significance is and has been in the great drama of humanity.