Society: Its Origin and Development Part 3

42. =The Story of the Home.=--Marriage is the gateway of the home; the home is the shelter of the family. It is the cradle of children, the nursery of mutual affection, and the training-school for citizenship in the community. The physical comfort of its inmates depends upon the house and its furnishings, but fondness for the home develops only in an atmosphere of good-will and kindness.

The home has a story of its own, as has the family. In primitive days there was little necessity of a dwelling-place, except as a nest for young or a cache for provisions. A cave or a rough shelter of boughs was a makeshift for a home. Thither the hunter brought the game that he had killed, and there slept the glutton's sleep or went supperless to bed. When the hunter became a herdsman and shepherd and moved from place to place in search of pasture, he found it convenient to fashion a tent for his home, as the Hebrew patriarchs did when they roamed over Canaan and as the Bedouin of the desert does still.

A settled life with a measure of civilization demanded a better and a stationary home, the degree of comfort varying with the desire and ambition of the householder and the amount of his wealth. To thousands home was little more than a place to sleep. Even in imperial Rome the proletariat occupied tall, ramshackle tenements, like the submerged poor who exist in the slums of modern cities. In mediaeval Europe the peasant lived in a one-room hovel, cl.u.s.tered with others in a squalid hamlet upon the estate of a great landowner. The hut was poorly built, often of no better material than wattled sticks, cemented with mud, covered over with turf or thatch, usually without chimneys or even windows. The place was absolutely without conveniences. Summer and winter the family huddled together in the single room of the hut, faring forth to work in the morning, sleeping at night on bundles of straw, each person in the single garment that he wore through the day, and at convenient intervals breaking fast on black bread, salt meat, and home-brewed beer. There was no inducement for a landless serf to spend care or labor upon houses or surroundings; pigs and babies were permitted to tumble about both indiscriminately.

Peasant homes in the Orient are little if any better now than European homes in the Middle Ages. The houses are rude structures and ill-kept.

In the villages of India it is not unusual to occupy one house until it becomes so unsanitary as to be uninhabitable, and then to move elsewhere. Even royal courts in mediaeval Europe moved from palace to palace for the same reason. It is a mistake to suppose that the squalid conditions found in the slums are peculiar to them; they are survivals of a lower stage of human existence found in all parts of the world, due to psychical, social, and economic conditions that are not easily changed, but conspicuous in the midst of modern progress.

43. =The Ancestral Type.=--In ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome only the higher cla.s.ses enjoyed any degree of comfort. Accustomed to inconveniences, few even among them knew such luxuries as are common to middle-cla.s.s Americans. The castle and manor-house of the mediaeval lord were still more comfortless. In America the colonial log cabin and the sod house of the prairie pioneer were primitively incomplete.

The struggle for existence and the difficulty of manufacture and transportation allowed few comforts. American homes, even a hundred years ago, knew nothing of furnaces and safety-matches, refrigerators and electric fans, bathtubs and sanitary accommodations, carpet-sweepers and vacuum cleaners, screen doors and double windows, hammocks and verandas. Neither law nor social custom required a good water or drainage system. A healthful or attractive location for the house received little thought; outbuildings were in close proximity to the house, if not attached to it. The furnishings of the house lacked comfort and beauty. Interior decorations of harmonious design were absent. Instruments of music were rare; statuary and paintings were beyond the reach of any but the richest purse.

44. =Social Values.=--On the other hand, there was in many a dwelling a home atmosphere that made up for the lack of conveniences. There was a bond of unity that was felt by every member of the family, and a spirit of mutual affection and self-sacrifice that stood a hard strain through poverty, sickness, and ill fortune of every sort. Father and mother, boys and girls were not afraid to work, and when the time came for relaxation there was little to attract away from the home circle.

People had less to enjoy, but they were better contented with what they had. They had little money to spend, but their frugal tastes and habits of thrift fortified them against want, and there was little need of public or private charity.

The home was frequently a school of moral and religious education.

Selfishness in all its forms was discountenanced. There was no room for the idler, no time for laziness. Social hygiene and domestic science were not taught as such, but young people learned their responsibilities and grew up equipped to establish homes of their own.

Parents were faithful instructors in the homely virtues of truthfulness, honesty, faithfulness, kindness, and love. Religion in the family was by no means universal, but in hundreds of homes religion was recognized as having legitimate demands upon the individual; religious exercises were observed at the mother's knee, the table, and the family altar; all the family attended church together, and were expected to take upon themselves the responsibilities of church membership.

45. =Gains and Losses.=--In the making of a modern home there have been both addition and subtraction. Life has gained immeasurably in comfort and convenience for the well-to-do, but the comfortless quarters of the poor drive the man to the saloon and the child to the streets. For the fortunate the home has become enriched with music, art, and literature, but it has lost much of the earlier simplicity, economic thrift, moral st.u.r.diness, and religious principle and practice. For the poor life is so hard that the good qualities, if they ever existed, have tended to disappear without any compensation in culture.

It is well understood that the home environment has most to do with shaping individual character. If the homely virtues are not cultivated there, society will suffer; if cold and cheerlessness are characteristic of its atmosphere, there will be little warmth in the disposition of its inmates toward society. Every home of the right sort is an a.s.set to the community. It is an experiment station for social progress. Every married couple that sets up housekeeping starts a new centre of group life. If they diffuse a helpful atmosphere social virtues will develop and social efficiency increase. On the other hand, many homes are a menace to the community, because an ill-mated pair, poorly equipped for the struggle of existence, create a centre of group life in which the individual is handicapped physically and morally and too often becomes a curse to society at large. When it is remembered that the home is at the same time the power-house that generates the forces that push society forward, and the channel through which are transmitted the ideas and achievements of all the past, it will seem to be the supremely important inst.i.tution that human experience has devised and sanctioned.

46. =The Ideal Home.=--The ideal home toward which the average home will be gradually approximating will be housed in a well-built dwelling of approved architecture; erected in a healthy location with room enough around it to give air s.p.a.ce, and a bit of out-of-doors to enjoy; tastefully furnished and decorated inside, but without ostentation or extravagance; occupied by a healthy, happy family of parents and children who care more for each other and for their neighbors than for selfish pleasure and display, and who are learning how to play a worthy part in the folk life of their community and nation, and how to appreciate the highest and finest qualities that mind and spirit can develop in themselves or others. If for economic or social reasons any of this is impossible, there is a weakness in society that calls for prompt repair.

READING REFERENCES

STARR: _First Steps in Human Progress_, pages 149-158.

JESSOPP: _The Coming of the Friars_, pages 87-104.

GILLETTE: _Constructive Rural Sociology_, pages 170-178.

CARNEY: _Country Life and the Country School_, pages 18-38.

RICHARDS: "The Farm Home," art. in _Cyclopedia of Agriculture_, IV, pages 280-284.

CHAPTER VI

CHILDREN IN THE HOME

47. =Children Complete the Home.=--If the legend of the Pied Piper of Hameln should come true and all the children should run away from home, or if by some strange stroke of fortune no children should be born in a village or town for ten years or more, the tragedy of the childless home would be realized. There are localities and even nations where the birth-rate is so small that population is little more than stationary. In the United States the native birth-rate tends to decline, while the rate of immigrant foreigners greatly exceeds it.

The higher the degree of comfort and luxury in the home the smaller the birth-rate seems to be a principle of social experience. There are selfish people who shirk the responsibilities and troubles of parenthood, and there are social diseases that tend to sterility, but the childless home is always an incomplete home. Children are the crown of marriage, the enrichment of the home, the hope of society in the future. The needs of the children stimulate parents to unselfish endeavor. Children are the comfort of the poor and distressed. The wedded life of a human pair may be ideal in every other respect, but one of the main functions of marriage is unaccomplished when the family remains incomplete.

48. =The Right to be Well-Born.=--The child comes into the home in obedience to the same primary instinct that draws the parents to each other. He calls out the affections of the parents and their intellectual resources, for he is dependent upon them, and often taxes their best judgment in coping with the difficulties that beset child life. But they often fail to realize that the child has certain inalienable rights as an individual and a potential member of society that demand their best gifts.

There is first the right to be well-born. There is so much to contend with when once ushered into the world, that a child needs the best possible bodily inheritance. He needs to be rid of every enc.u.mbrance of physical unfitness if he is to live long and become a blessing and not a burden to society. Handicapped at the start, he cannot hope to achieve a high level of attainment. It is little short of criminal for a child to be condemned to lifelong weakness or suffering, because his parents were not fit to give him birth. Yet large numbers of parents make the thought of child welfare subordinate to their own desires. A man's primary concern in choosing a wife is his own personal satisfaction, not the birth and mothering of his children. Many young women regard the attractiveness, social position, or wealth of a young man as of greater consequence than his physical or moral fitness to become the father of her children. There are thousands of persons who are mentally deficient or unmoral, who nevertheless are unrestrained by society from a.s.sociation and even marriage. It is a social misfortune that the unfit should be taken care of by the tender mercies of philanthropists and even permitted to propagate their kind, while no special encouragement is given to those who are supremely fit to give their best to the upbuilding of the race. The principle of brotherly kindness requires that the weak and unfortunate be taken care of, but they should not be permitted to increase. It is a principle of social welfare that those who are incapable of exercising self-control should be placed under the control of the larger group.

49. =Eugenics in Legislation.=--It is the conviction that the right to be well-born is a valid one, that has given rise to the science of eugenics. As a science it was first discussed by Francis Gallon, and it has interested writers, investigators, and legislators in all progressive countries. Various specific proposals have been made in the interest of posterity, and agitation has resulted in certain experiments in legislation. It is not proposed that any should be required to marry, but it is thought possible to encourage the well qualified and to discourage and restrain the incapable. Some of these proposals, such as the offering of a premium by the State for healthy children, or endowing mothers as public functionaries, are not widely approved, but Great Britain in a National Insurance Act in 1911 included the provision of maternity benefits in recognition of the mother's contribution to the citizenship of the nation. Restrictive laws have been pa.s.sed by certain of the States in America, which are eugenic experiments. Feeble-mindedness, in so many ways a social evil, is readily reproduced, and the weak-minded are easily controlled by the s.e.x instinct. To prevent this certain State legislatures have forbidden the marriage of any feeble-minded or epileptic woman under the age of forty-five. It is well known that insanity is a family trait, and that criminal insanity is liable to recur if those who are afflicted are permitted to indulge in parenthood. Certain States accordingly annul the marriage of insane persons. Venereal disease is easily transmitted; there has been a beginning of legislation prohibiting persons thus tainted to marry. It is well established that very many persons, while not actually tainted with such diseases as tuberculosis and alcoholism, are predisposed to yield to their attack.

For this reason the scope of eugenic legislation is likely to be extended. Some States have gone so far as to sterilize the unfit, that they may not by any chance exercise the powers of parenthood; it is urged in many quarters that clergymen require a medical certificate of good health before sanctioning marriage.

50. =Family Degeneracy.=--Several impressive ill.u.s.trations have been published of degenerate families that show the far-reaching effects of heredity. In contrast to these pictures, has been set the life story of families who have won renown in successive generations because of unusual ability. Nothing so effective is presented by any argument as that of concrete cases. Perhaps the best known of these stories is that of the Jukes family. About the middle of the eighteenth century a normal man with a coa.r.s.e, lazy vein in his nature built himself a hut in the woods of central New York. In five generations he had several hundred descendants. A study of twelve hundred persons who belonged to the family by kinship or marriage was made carefully, with the following findings. Nearly all of the family were lazy, ignorant, and coa.r.s.e. Four hundred were physically diseased by their own fault. Two hundred were criminals; seven of them murderers. Fifty of the women were notoriously immoral. Three hundred of the children died from inherited weakness or neglect. More than three hundred members of the family were chronic paupers. It is estimated that they cost the State a thousand dollars apiece for pauperism and crime.

Another family called the Kallikak family, which has been made the subject of investigation, is a still better example of heredity. The family was descended from a Revolutionary soldier, who had an illegitimate feeble-minded son by an imbecile young woman. The line continued by feeble-minded descent and marriage until four hundred and eighty descendants have been traced. Of these one hundred and forty-three were positively defective, thirty-six were illegitimate, thirty-three s.e.xually immoral, mostly prost.i.tutes, eight kept houses of ill repute, three were criminal, twenty-four were confirmed drunkards, and eighty-two died in infancy.

On the other hand, there are striking examples of what good birth and breeding can do. It happened that the ancestor of the Kallikak family, after he had sown his wild oats, married well and had about five hundred descendants. All of them were normal, only two were alcoholic, and one s.e.xually loose. The family has been prominent socially and in every way creditable in its history. In contrast to the Jukes family, the history of the Edwards family has been written. Its members married well, were well-bred, and gave much attention to education.

Out of fourteen hundred individuals more than one hundred and twenty were Yale graduates, and one hundred and sixty-five more completed their education at other colleges; thirteen were college presidents, and more than a hundred college professors; they were founders of schools of all grades; more than one hundred were clergymen, missionaries, and theological professors; seventy-five were officers in the army and navy; more than eighty have been elected to public office; more than one hundred were lawyers, thirty judges, sixty physicians, and sixty prominent in literature. Not a few of them have been active in philanthropy, and many have been successful in business. It is impossible to escape from the conviction that whatever may be the physical and social environment, heredity perpetuates physical and mental worth or defectiveness and tends to produce social good or evil, and that the right to a worthy parentage belongs with the other rights to which individuals lay claim. It is as important as the right to a living, to an education, to a good home, or to the franchise. Without it society is incalculably poorer and the ultimate effects of failure are startling to consider.

51. =Marriage and Education.=--Some enthusiasts have demanded that to make sure of a good bodily inheritance, individuals be permitted to produce children without the trammels of marriage if they are well fitted for parenthood, but such persons seem ignorant or forgetful that free love has never proved otherwise than disastrous in the history of the race, and that physical perfection is not the sole good with which the child needs to be endowed, but that it must be supplemented with moral, mental, and spiritual endowment, and with the permanent affection and care of both parents in the home. Galton himself acknowledges marriage as a prerequisite in eugenics by saying: "Marriage, as now sanctified by religion and safeguarded by law in the more highly civilized nations, may not be ideally perfect, nor may it be universally accepted in future times, but it is the best that has. .h.i.therto been devised for the parties primarily concerned, for their children, for home life, and for society."

The greatest hope of eugenics lies in social education. s.e.x hygiene must in some way become a part of the child's stock of information, but knowledge alone does not fortify action. More important is it to deal with the springs of action, to teach the equal standard of purity for men and women, and the moral responsibility of parenthood to adolescent youth, and at the same time to impress upon the whole community its responsibility of oversight of morals for the good of the next generation. Conviction of personal and social responsibility as superior to individual preferences is the only safety of society in all its relations, from eugenics through economics to ethics and religion.

52. =Euthenics.=--Euthenics is the science of controlled environment, as eugenics is the science of controlled heredity. The health and good fortune of the child depend on his surroundings as well as on his inheritance, and the gift of a perfect physique may be vitiated by an unwholesome environment. Environment acts directly upon the physical system of the individual through climate, home conditions, and occupation; it acts indirectly by affecting the personal desires, idiosyncrasies, and possible conduct. When the child of an early settler was carried away from home on an Indian raid, and brought up in the wigwam of the savage, he forgot his civilized heritage, and love for his foster-parents sometimes proved stronger than his natural affections. The child of the Russian Jew in Europe has little ambition and rises to no high level, but in America he gains distinction in school and success in business. A natural environment of forest or plain may determine the occupation of a whole community; a fickle climate vitally affects its prosperity. Whole races have entered upon a new future by migration.

It is necessary to be cautious and not to ascribe to environment, as some do, the sole influence. Every individual is the creature of heredity plus environment plus his own will. But it is not possible to overlook environment as some do, and expect by a miracle to make or preserve character in the midst of conditions of spiritual asphyxiation. If social life is to be pure and strong, communities and families, through the official care of overseers of health and industry and through the loving care of parents in the homes, must see that children grow up with the advantages of nourishing food, pure air, proper clothing, and means for cleanliness; that at the proper age they be given mental and moral instruction and fitted for a worthy vocation; that wholesome social relations be established by means of playgrounds, clubs, and societies; that industrial conditions be properly supervised, and young people be able to earn not alone a living but a marriageable wage; and that some means of social insurance be provided sufficient to prevent suffering and want in sickness and old age. In such an environment there is opportunity to realize the value that will accrue from a good inheritance, and there is incentive to make the most of life's possibilities as they come and go.

Ever since the importance of environment was made plain in the nineteenth century, social physicians have been trying all sorts of experiments in community therapeutics. Many of the remedies will be discussed in various connections. It is enough to remark here that social education, social regulation, and social idealism are all necessary, and that a social Utopia cannot be obtained in a day.

53. =The Right to Proper Care.=--Granted the right of the child to be well-born and the right to a favorable environment, there follows the right to be taken care of. This may be involved in the subject of a proper environment, but it deserves consideration by itself. There is more danger to the race from neglect than from race suicide. It is better that a child should not be born at all, than that he should be condemned to the hard knocks of a loveless home or a callous neighborhood. There is first the case of the child born out of wedlock, often a foundling with parentage unacknowledged. Then there is the child who is legitimately born as far as the law is concerned, but whose parents had no legitimate right to bring him into the world, because they had no reasonable expectation that they could provide properly for his wants. The wretched pauper recks nothing of the future of his offspring. Since the family group can never remain independent of the community, it may well be debated whether society is not under obligation to interfere and either by prohibition of excessive parenthood or by social provision for the care of such children, to secure to the young this right of proper care.

Cruelty is a twin evil of neglect. The history of childhood deserves careful study side by side with the history of womanhood. In primitive times not even the right to existence was recognized. Abortion and infanticide, especially in the case of females, were practices used at will to dispose of unwelcome children, and these practices persisted among the backward peoples of Asia and Africa, until they were compelled to recognize the law of the white master when he extended his dominion over them. In the patriarchal household of cla.s.sic lands, the child was under the absolute control of his father. Religious regulations might demand that he be instructed in the history and obligations of the race, as in the case of the Hebrew child, or the interests of the state might require physical training for its own defense, as in the case of Sparta, but there was no consideration of child rights in the home. Until the eighteenth century European children shared the hardships of poverty and discomfort common to the age, and often the cruelty of brutal and degraded parents; they were often condemned to long hours of industry in factories after the new industrial order caught them in its toils. In the mine and the mill and on the farm children have been bound down to labor for long and weary hours, until modern legislation has interfered.

There are a number of reasons why child labor has been common.

Hereditary custom has decreed it. Children have been looked upon by many races as a care and a burden rather than a responsibility and a blessing. Their economic value was their one claim to be regarded as a family a.s.set. Even the religious teaching of Jews and Christians about the value and responsibility of children has not been influential enough to compel a recognition of their worth, though their innocence and purity, their faith and optimism are qualities indispensable to the race of mankind if social relations are to approach the ideal.

54. =The Value of Work.=--Labor is a social blessing rather than a curse. There can be no doubt that habits of industry are desirable for the child as well as for the adult. Idleness is the forerunner of ignorance, laziness, and general incapacity. It is no kindness to a child to permit him to spend all his time out of school in play. It gives him skill, a new respect for labor, and a new conception of the value of money, if he has a paper route, mows a lawn, shovels snow, or hoes potatoes. Especially is it desirable that a boy should have some sort of an occupation for a few hours a day during the long summer vacation. The child on the farm has no lack of opportunity, but for the boy of the city streets there is little that is practicable, outside of selling papers or serving as messenger boy or bootblack; for the girl there is little but housework or department-store service. Both need steady employment out of doors, and he who devises a method by which boys and girls can be taught such an occupation as gardening on vacant lots or in the city outskirts, and at the same time can be given a love for work and for the growing things of the country, will help to solve the problem of child labor and, incidentally, may contribute to the solution of poverty, incipient crime, and even of the rural problem and the high cost of living.

READING REFERENCES

BOSANQUET: _The Family_, pages 299-314.

G.o.dDARD: _The Kallikak Family._

EAMES: _Principles of Eugenics._

SALEEBY: _Parenthood and Race Culture_, pages 213-236.

MCKEEVER: _Farm Boys and Girls_, pages 171-196.

GALTON: _Inquiries into Human Faculty._