The Family and its Members Part 7

=Check Extreme Requirements for Youth in Labor.=--There are many requirements for youth in offered opportunities of training and of work which are distinctly detrimental to respect for, and possibility of continued service of, the old. Take, for example, the age limit in many departments of business and manual labor. During the war we had in the countries most denuded of young men a new sort of trial of the middle-aged in positions where it had been thought youth was required.

What was the result? The trial made in Chicago by fifteen large employers of labor under the leadership of Mr. Benjamin Rosenthal, was distinctly, to use his words, "to upset the fallacious theory that men between the ages of 45 and 65 are fit only for the sc.r.a.p-heap." The result of this experiment showed that in some phases of work the older men did as much work in a given number of hours as the younger men; in other departments they did as much in the week or month, from their steadiness and devotion to their work, but not as much in any one day.

That is, the older men were less quick, but more steady and, therefore, in the end accomplished as much. In some kinds of labor the older men did better than the younger because usually more patient of detail and less restive in monotonous toil. In the larger enterprises older men are proverbially less speculative, more conservative, less venturesome than the young. American business would, perhaps, not suffer if a larger admixture of these qualities were found in all the walks of commerce and business.

The fact that when a man is at the head of a concern, large or small, he is valued usually more at sixty-five than at thirty-five, and the further fact that thirty-five is often the dead-line for admission to the lower ranks of the same industry or commercial position, is a proof that this age-limit of the worker in lower position is not one of definite knowledge of actual incapacity after forty years of age but rather due to other conditions. Those conditions are, first and foremost, the easier management of younger than of older subordinates.

It is hard for many men to "order about," in peremptory fashion, a man older than themselves, and few men can command without abruptness or sharp orders. It is still harder for most men to order about as office a.s.sistant or clerk or secretary a woman older than themselves. And fewer men can a.s.sume a respectful yet commanding att.i.tude toward women than can do so toward men in their employ. Some embarra.s.sment has yet to be worn off in business relations of the s.e.xes. Moreover, the tendency toward upspeeding of all mechanical manufacture is a part of the rushing spirit of an age which has invented more fast-going things than it has as yet mental power to use wisely or with social safety, and it is true that fewer men over forty can rush in their work than can do so below that age.

Youth is nimble; youth can be snubbed for errors of accomplishment without hurt to a "gentleman's instincts;" youth, although so careless as to often get injured by the swift-going machines, can yet exult in their rapid swing; and, above all, youth is flexible and can be shaped to any form of business requirement decided upon by those higher up.

Hence a fict.i.tious value is a.s.signed to youth in all departments of work to-day. Hence, again, a special movement for actual trial of the relative values of workers of different ages in special kinds of work is necessary if we would know whether or not it is possible to prevent that premature old age and tragical financial helplessness at fifty-five or sixty, which makes the workless man or woman a burden where many believe he or she might be still a help to the family income.

We have been a nation of the young. We shall more and more balance the different age-periods, as is already done in the older countries. We should prepare, betimes, for this new aspect of the future's census, by providing against preventable old age by the wiser use of all laborers as long as work-power can be made available for self-dependence.

=Need of Experience in Many Fields of Work.=--There are certain fields of work on the higher side of social ministration in which the more experienced are more needed than the young. Some one has said that "no man is fit to be a pastor of a church until he has been something else for several years and knows something of life." There is a very real demand for any one, man or woman, who ventures to deal with the spiritual life that he or she shall have more than youth can give of sympathy and understanding. There is need also for larger experience and greater breadth of view in professional social work of all sorts, more than the young man or woman can give who has had college, plus "School for Social Work," and nothing else; but who, because "trained," feels expert. There could not be a greater social mistake than is made by schools which attempt to train for child-care, family visiting, rehabilitation of the dependent, aid to the "down-and-out,"

succor to the tempted and help to the weak, and yet deny the opportunities of their cla.s.ses to men and women over thirty-five. The giving of "auditors' privileges," or "special courses for volunteers,"

or like makeshifts for regular student privileges is not what is required; for such provisions carry with them the idea of less than professional standing and usefulness. The initiation and maintenance and increase of schools of training for social work is one of the great educational and social achievements of the past quarter-century, but the age-limit for entrance in many such schools is a huge mistake.

The very essence of true social service to individuals is experience in life. The girl or boy who has had none or little may make a good technician in many departments and may make a fine showing in work that is not personal, and may collect material or knowledge about groups of persons who need help. But the man or woman who is able to be of great value as a "social doctor" is not only born to such service but also is one who has not begun a specialty of social technic too young to have learned something of the difficulty of living. Young students? Yes. But many more who have come later in life to a sense of their social responsibility and to a desire to learn how best to serve society with all that they have gained in rich experience. The psychology of social training must envisage a wider range of years to be most effective.

=Prepare Vocationally for Old-age Needs.=--The third demand, that every man and woman in early youth or in later youth shall be trained in some light and agreeable occupation that can be pursued, perhaps to economic return, in the days when strenuous labor can no longer be carried on, is one that has as yet received little attention but which should be a matter of deep concern. The fact that so many old women of little physical strength and who require much personal care can yet be useful and therefore actually wanted as helpers in many families is indicative of the fundamental fact in industrial life that a general training for general usefulness, such as the housewife has had through the ages, has some advantages still.

Before Mrs. Perkins Gilman gets all women into some specialty, alongside of the already highly specialized men workers, let us see to it that men get a chance for a more general training! The restless idleness of the man whose specialty of manual labor or definite type of business interest is now beyond his strength or opportunity is a sad thing to see. We have had to develop a special charity to furnish a work-interest to aged men in public inst.i.tutions. They were so miserable and pathetic without that occupation. Women fare better in this, as in many other elements of labor, for they can do so many things, usually have to do so many things, most of them, in the family, that some one sort of work, at least, is left to them for special old age. "Mother's pies" or grandmother's cakes or needlework or knack at dusting or baby-tending or what not keeps her young and makes her actually a helper even when old. Grandfather's loss of his job, of his specialty of effort, of his hold on the great industrial machine, leaves him too often hopelessly at sea for the pa.s.sing of time still left to him.

Well-to-do women in the United States, moreover, have acquired through the large leisure inherited wealth or their husband's means have supplied, a social business that has not only delayed old age but nearly obliterated its ancient signs and tokens. The Clubs, the Leagues, the Alliances, the charitable agencies, the inst.i.tutions of care for the defective, the friendless, the infirm, the dependent children, the countless societies and cooperative social organizations for social serviceableness, in which women are leaders and chief workers, bear witness that "grandmother" has found a place for her energies after the children have grown and set up households of their own.

If such a grandmother is a member of the daughter's family she is not half so objectionable to daughter's husband as when mother-in-law had a permanent place at the fireside, perhaps in the exact spot where he wanted to put his easy chair, and had to be "taken out" if she ever ventured into the great world. She now has her own interests, often so many and vital that her day is more completely filled than when she was younger. She has her own set of friends and her own use for the energy and power of direction that often in the old days made her a troublesome member of the family. If only she has a chance at her own little cooking, and her own individual sitting room, and has her own income, if ever so small, she may fit well into even a city apartment and no other member of the family be the worse. The thing required for old men and women alike is some work suited to slower motion and lessened strength and greater need for quiet and independent thought.

This is a need which more women than men have met to-day, we repeat, but it is one that must be understood and effectively satisfied for men and women alike.

Edward Everett Hale said every man needed "both a vocation and an avocation"--something by which he earned his living and something by which he maintained his interest in activity. It is the avocation that must be planned for. The vocation is often thrust upon one by necessity or chance a.s.sociation. If every aged person had something to do that made each day short and each night a welcome rest much of the friction between the older and the younger members of families would be avoided and life would piece the generations together more perfectly.

=The Att.i.tude of Mind Toward Old Age.=--Life calls upon us all to prepare while yet young for the lessened power of old age. The removal from the commanding place to the honorable but more difficult position of the ex-leader and the chief-emeritus is a step that requires care.

The att.i.tude of mind that can keep in harmonious touch with the oncoming generation and yet not lose the value of its own day of contribution to the social inheritance is an art to be acquired only by effort and the exercise of moral and mental power. There was, perhaps, never in the history of our civilization so great a gap between the ideals and social practices of the grandparents and those of the third generation. The parents even are feeling themselves too far from the children; the grandparents often realize a vast distance between themselves and the rising generation. The distance is not always the measure of progress. It is not seldom the effect of rapid changes in mechanical appliances, in material agencies and economic conditions, in literary taste and in ideals of culture; an effect which has unsettled youth in the inherited ways and not yet settled them in well-considered new rules of living. The experience that might aid in easing the process of readjustment is not always at hand and not always used when it is attainable. The experience of age is too often shown in dogmatic rules. The inexperience of youth is too often the accompaniment of a childish conviction that everything that has been is wrong and everything that promises to be is best.

There is, therefore, greater need, perhaps, than ever before for wisdom and patience and sympathetic understanding of those from whom one differs within the family life. It is for the grandparents to set the fashion for these new adjustments. They have loved most because they have given most. They have learned most, or could have learned most, because longer in the school of life. And they have but a little way to travel on the long road their children and their children's children must go to meet their fate.

To the lasting credit of human nature be it said that the grandparents of to-day measure as well for the most part as do the parents in these difficult tasks of family adjustment to a rapidly changing social order. It is often the grandparent who sees what the different life of his or her children have meant to the still greater difference in the condition of the grandchild, and can interpret to the latter the reason for the restraint of the parent. It is often through the tenderness and devotion to the aged called out by the grandparents that the son and daughter learn the real depths of parental love. It is often the partial affection of the grandparent for the grandchild that makes a new tie in family love and enables that family love to grow wiser as well as stronger. It may be, as quoted before, that no house is large enough for two families. It surely is true that no family living room is s.p.a.cious enough for the continuous use of three generations; but it is still more true that with new interests all around the circle of family membership a more varied family life can be managed without friction or loss of privacy for any member if only there is the right att.i.tude of mind. To-day the ideal of the Heaven-father fastens itself as easily to the child's affection for grandpa as on his dependence upon his father. To-day the ideal of mother-love, never lessened even by wrong-doing of the child, is as securely fibred upon the picture of grandma, ever ready to heal and comfort, as upon that of the mother, whose daily ministrations make the child comfortable.

=The Special Gifts of the Old to the Home and the World.=--In some ways it is surely more easy to believe in goodness at the heart of things because some aged man or woman, closely related by blood and breeding, has been a living example of what must be revered. Moreover, to the family, as to the world-at-large, old age brings a special gift--if that old age is what it may be. Each period of life has its own gift to make. Age should make a precious contribution, even the central faith of life.

Youth, eager, responsive to all n.o.ble ambitions and touched by all n.o.ble dissatisfactions with what is, makes its plan for what should be on a strictly logical basis. His rejected Evil is wholly evil; his chosen Good without a flaw. Children are all Calvinists; and youth, for the most part, separates its ideas of good and bad as the sheep and goats within its mind. Well that it is so. The law of growth in life is so far from logical, so operative by inconsistent fluctuations, that it is of the greatest social use for each fresh generation of reformers to hew to the line and express that intolerance of compromise which helps the struggling moral sense to clarify the issues of each new day.

In middle life, if the individual worker for better things is not merely a prophesier but has become an actual agent for the realization of his ideal in practical achievement, he suffers many a disillusion, not in respect to his ideal, but in respect to the ease of working it into the body politic or into the compelling purpose of the social mind. That is the time of danger; and how many lose heart and hope and fall weakly by the way when they first learn that to state a truth with power is not enough to insure its acceptance! That one should set himself with courage and faith to the long, slow processes of actual change of the social order after he has learned how difficult that is, is to be indeed a hero--a hero of the actualization of the ideal, even though he dies with the promised land hardly in sight.

In later life comes to many, and should to all, another gift. Not alone the vision of youth, never lost and always dear; not only the strength of open-eyed effort to achieve so much of the ideal, even its very least atom, as the times and the conditions allow and not lose heart that it is so little, but also the interpretative and harmonizing spirit of those who see, beyond the personal ideal and vision and far beyond the personal achievement, the upward march of all mankind--not alone the leaders of that march; not alone those who will and know the upward way, but all who feel the under-current pressure "toward the better, ever onward toward the best," This pressure even those feel who fondly imagine they are holding all life to outgrown patterns, and they prove its power by their unconscious response.

Another gift of insight they may have who grow old in the spirit of youth. It is the gift of seeing in one picture those who have come a long way up the path of progress and those who have but just entered upon it. The harsh judgments of youth, so tonic and useful, that measure moral actions by their exact position in ethical perception (judgment so tonic and useful that youth without that element misses its own gift to human progress) cease to serve in old age for purposes of just discrimination. In later life may come the wisdom of understanding those from whom one differs, the gift of seeing the helpful interrelations of newer and older "mores" in normal human development and the glad recognition that even defective moral vision, though r.e.t.a.r.ding needed changes, may be used by the powers that balance our complex life to hold, its course steady in chaos of change. These gifts may add patience and love, sweetness and light, to the zeal of the reformer and yet not dull his ardor for the next morning-hour of progress.

Not the old, then, because it is old, nor the new because it is new; not the few who will hold no parley with that which to them is evil, nor the many who cling to what they have inherited lest they lose life's best treasures; not to those who call aloud in the market place, "Behold the coming of the Lord!" nor to those who sit at the fireside and cherish their own only; not on or to any one manifestation of the life in which we have our being can the old, with the spirit of youth, fibre their faith and trust.

In all the struggling, mistaken, weary, selfish, cowardly, alike as in all the brave, heroic, unselfish and lovely, is manifestation that makes "no good thing a failure, no evil thing success." This is the testimony of a ripe and wise old age. In that they must trust who have tested the real things of life in the real world of effort, nor lost hope in the Onward Way for all.

QUESTIONS ON THE GRANDPARENTS

1. What have been the general tendencies in social treatment of the aged?

2. What are some of the social needs in respect to public and private health, vocational training, wages and standards of living, family and personal insurance and educational opportunities which must be met if old age is to be prolonged as far as possible and made happy and comfortable to the end of life?

3. What should be the aim of youth and middle life in respect to preparation for old age?

4. Read _Old Age Support of Women Teachers_, by Dr. Lucille Eaves, _A Study in Economic Relations of Women_, by the Department of Research of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, Ma.s.s., and read "The Trade Union and the Old Man," by John O'Grady, Catholic University of America, published in _American Journal of Sociology_ of November, 1917. Are the suggestions in these articles along needed lines?

FOOTNOTES:

[6] See _The State and Pensions in Old Age_, by J.A. Spender.

CHAPTER V

BROTHERS, SISTERS, AND NEXT OF KIN

"The members of the ancient family were united by something more powerful than birth, affection, or physical strength; this was the religion of the sacred fire and of dead ancestors. This caused the ancient family to form a single body, both in this life and in the next,"--DE COULANGES, in _The Ancient City_.

"Land belonged to the clan and the clan was settled upon the land.

A man was thus not a member of the clan because he lived upon or even owned the land, but he lived upon the land and had interest in it because he was a member of the clan."--HEARN, in _The Aryan Household_.

"Three things if possessed by a man make him fit to be a chief of kindred: that he should speak in behalf of his kin and be listened to; that he should fight in behalf of his kin and be feared; that he should be security on behalf of his kin and be accepted."--WELSH TRIADS (cited by Seebohm).

"I cannot choose but think upon the time When our two loves grew like two buds; School parted us; we never found again That childish world where our two spirits mingled Like scents from varying roses that remain one sweetness.

Yet the twin habit of that earlier time Lingered for long about the heart and tongue.

We had been natives of one happy clime And its dear accent to our utterance clung.

And were another childhood world my share, I would be born a little sister there."

--GEORGE ELIOT, in _Brother and Sister_.

"When love is strong it never tarries to take heed Or know if its return exceed Its gift; in its sweet haste no greed, No strife belong.

It hardly asks if it be loved at all, to take So barren seems, when it can make Such bliss, for the beloved's sake, Of bitter tasks."--H.H.

=Ancient Kinship Bond.=--The relation of brothers and sisters in the family group has pa.s.sed through many changes and must at times have caused much confusion and difficulty in the home. For example, in that state of familial a.s.sociation in which all the brothers of a certain relationship were considered as husbands of all sisters within a certain bond there must have been some heart-burnings and several kinds of family unpleasantness. We have some hints of these from many historical sources. In the era of complete subjection of the individual to the community such unpleasantness may have counted only for negligible unhappiness on the part of a few social rebels, but the custom alluded to did not prove to work well enough to become permanent.

Again, the form of family bond which demanded that a man take to wife the widow of his dead brother and "raise up children to the name" of the deceased had a long but not a permanent life. In the well-known pa.s.sage from Deuteronomy, the 25th chapter, the faithful are commanded that "if brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no son, the wife of the dead shall not be married without unto a stranger: her husband's brother shall ... take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother unto her. And the first-born ... shall succeed in the name of his brother that is dead, that his name be not blotted out of Israel." The same pa.s.sage shows that while it was doubtless at first an imperative social law, there came a time when the living brother had a choice as to whether or not he should take to wife the widow of one who had died. Perhaps there might have been an economic pressure that made it difficult to perform this ancient duty. Perhaps there might have been objection from the wife or wives already in command of the household matters. Perhaps the widow was sometimes of a type to make the brotherly and family duty seem very hard. At any rate, there came a time when, as the writer in Deuteronomy says, "If the man like not to take his brother's wife" he could refuse the family service. It cost him, however, in such cases a severe ordeal. He could be haled before the elders on the complaint that he "refused to raise up unto his brother a name in Israel." The widow "could loose his shoe from his feet and spit in his face" and say "so shall it be done unto the man that doth not build up his brother's house."

The large requirement for the brother, thus indicated, pa.s.sed outward to the next of kin in certain circ.u.mstances. There are many deeply interesting accounts of readjustment of family life through the taking over by the living of duties once undertaken by the dead. The lovely idyl of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz, shows this widely spreading brother-duty. Here the mother-in-law, so sweet and so wise that her sons' wives loved her deeply, shrewdly manages a contact between Ruth and Boaz to the lasting service of her son's inheritance of name and land. The whole story is redolent of the finer side of ancient forms of familial duty, the man being rich and generous enough to take on his more remote relative's responsibilities, the young widow being sweet and charming enough to capture the interest of the rich man even before he knows who she is, and the mother-in-law showing statesmanship of the highest order in managing the affair, together with such fine character of her own that all respect and love her.

To-day we have left in law and custom but the shadow of these ancient demands upon brothers in the family. That shadow is limited to the purely economic aspect of brotherly responsibilities. The old law of inheritance made the sons the preferred heirs. Only when there was no son could the daughter inherit if at all. The responsibility of that heir, however, was often made commensurate with his inheritance. He must financially care for the near relatives--the father and mother first, the sister and brother next, the uncles and aunts and cousins not to be forgotten.

=Present Demands of Kinship.=--The existing statutes make it inc.u.mbent upon any man in receipt of income beyond his own immediate needs to do what is possible to prevent his near relatives from requiring aid from the general public. The custom of all charitable organizations when appealed to for aid for individuals, or for a family, is to ask, "What can your relatives do for you?" The pressure upon those connected even by marriage to help relatives privately, and so reduce public relief, is often very severe. In those of English ancestry the disgrace of having a near relative, even so distant as a great-uncle or great-aunt or sister-in-law, "come upon the town" is felt keenly.