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Yue. A 7
The Integrity of the Family
a Vital Issue
By
Joseph Lee
Reprinted from “The Survey.” New York.
for December 4, 1909
Copies may be had from
Superintendent of Parish Schools
Broad and Vine Streets
Philadelphia

Educational Briefs
No. 29
January, 191C
American Ecclesiastical Review
The Dolphin Press
1305 Arch Street, Philadelphia
The Integrity of the Family a
Vital Issue.
º
The social philosophy which this article is an attempt
to set forth is that life is found in the fulfillment of
those vital relations around which our nature has been
formed and which are imbedded in our instincts.
MARKED phenomenon of the time is the
extent to which what used to be regarded
as functions of the home are being taken over by
other agencies. The home has ceased to be the
industrial unit. With the coming of the apart-
ment house it is ceasing to carry on even the
domestic arts, sewing, cooking and housework.
As a result of these recessions it has largely
ceased to supply industrial and domestic training,
and these duties have been taken over, as that of
supplying general instruction had already been,
by the school. In its cramped city surroundings
the home has ceased to be the playground even
of the smaller children, and this gap also the
school has largely filled. Even in the matter of
physical care the school doctor and school nurse
have, at first sight, apparently taken over what
used to be functions of the home. Now comes
the question of school feeding. At present the
proposal is chiefly that of giving one meal a day;
but a child without breakfast or supper is still
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3
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAMILY
underfed and the question of giving all the meals
is not far distant. Pure air is as essential to life
and vigor as is good food, and public provision
of sleeping quarters must follow logically.
This progressive transfer of functions from
the home to the school has resulted from our de-
termination that the child shall have the best
possible chance; that he shall, if we can bring
it about, grow up straight and strong and fitted
to live a noble and successful life. And it all
looks on the face of it like one process. The
child needs education; he needs industrial train-
ing; he needs playgrounds, protection from dis-
ease; he needs food; if we can supply one, why
not the rest? Why indeed must we not supply
the rest to make the one—the conceded one, pop-
ular education—effective? The question seems
simply how far a single principle shall be carried.
Is it such in truth, or is there somewhere an in-
visible line beyond which we are no longer doing
what we started out to do, but something else,
or are undoing it?
Obviously there must be somewhere such a
line if the existence of the home is of importance
to our purpose. For if we deprive it of all its
attributes the home must cease to be. A bril-
liant writer has said that the family table is an
absurdity because no two people want the same
food or the same hours for their meals, and has
maintained that spiritually the home does not
depend on mere physical functions of that sort.
But if we carry this process far enough, if we
4
A VITAL ISSUE
abolish family meals, family sleeping quarters,
family play and family work; if the family never
meet together for any practical purpose, the
question must arise of what remains to it and
whether anything remains. A true apostle of
loyalty has well asked: Just when were you pa-
triotic; on what day and between what hours;
and what was the nature of your service? If
all particular manifestations of the family are
eliminated it will be difficult to identify the insti-
tution or to specify in what its life consists.
I myself believe that some of the activities
that have been transferred from the home can
be dispensed with. I believe that its industrial
function was accidental and the loss of it not
important. I believe that in the matter of house-
hold duties, and the teaching of them, there has
been a loss; that the family cannot forego these
forms of expression with impunity. I believe
that when we come to physical support—the
family meal, the care by parents of their young,
the physical home and that which it embodies
and symbolizes—the question of the continued
existence of the family is reached. I believe that
we should draw the line here if we are to draw
it anywhere; that we must oppose the general
policy of school feeding if we intend to preserve
the family at all. Outlying territory we can
abandon, but here our citadel is reached. If we
cannot defend this wall we might as well sur-
render.
I do not mean that there should never be a
5
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAMILY
meal supplied in a school building. There comes
an age when the child will leave the home. Chil-
dren in high Schools would have got their noon
meal outside if they had gone to work, and lunch
in a high School may be better in several re-
spects than at a restaurant. Below the high
school age there will be cases in which the child
must, for special reasons, be away from his
home in the middle of the day and so must be
fed away from it. Children at a sanatorium or
at a day camp or a school for tuberculous chil-
dren constitute such a case. What I do mean
is that the home and not the school is society’s
proper organ for providing physical support
during childhood; that the providing of such
support, and the family observances that grow
out of it, are a matter vital to the home; and
that whatever action society may take to insure
the adequacy of such support should be carried
out not through the school but through the home,
and in a way to preserve and foster, not to
weaken it. Some people say, “The home has
already broken down; we must save the child.”
But what if in this question of the home the
child’s life is involved? What if, spiritually
speaking, it is impossible to save the child with-
out the home? It is my own belief that you
might as well try to save the fish and let the
brook run dry, that there is no such thing as the
normal or healthy child without the home, that
such child is an absurdity, a thing that never
was and that cannot exist.
6
A VITAL ISSUE
To decide the merits of this question it is evi-
dently necessary that we should ask ourselves
what are the ultimate data of life and education.
What sort of a creature is it that we are dealing
with, and on what does his successful develop-
ment depend? An answer to that question will
give a new and deeper basis for our social sci-
ence. Incidentally, it will guide and reconcile
the two great wings of the army of the social
workers, that which deals with the improvement
of conditions, and that which is occupied with
cure. Fundamental to both is the question of
the nature of that human life which it is their
common object to foster and enhance. -
Let us approach this question first from the
practical side by studying those methods of treat-
ment that have been found successful. There
are four professions engaged in the cultivation
of human beings: the clergy, the teachers, the
doctors, and the social workers. And fortu-
nately these all agree as to the main features of
successful treatment. At least the social work-
ers have long practically recognized these fea-
tures, the clergy and the doctors are rapidly
discovering them, and the teachers, although
much divided, are now for the most part upon
the right track—the kindergartners in the lead,
the public school teachers following, and the
private schools and the college people, with a few
brilliant exceptions, trailing along behind.
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAMILY
I.
The first principle, as recognized by these
professionals, is that life is to be won by action.
We all know that it is through action that the
muscles are developed and the habits formed.
We are told by the professors of physical educa-
tion that the same is true to a great extent even
of the bones. It is true also, it appears, of mind
and character, of life itself. You cannot go so
deep into the human product that the individual’s
own activity may not have had a part in it.
So soon as you can say “this quality exists'
you must recognize also that you are in a region
where action leaves its trace. That which lies
too deep to have been affected by a man’s own
act must be some over-soul, some extra-personal
visitant, whose footprints only can be seen but
not his face. -
So far, at least, all of the fostering profes-
sions are agreed. Social workers no longer sub-
scribe to the simple-arithmetic view of poverty,
according to which it was supposed that if you
found out how much a man's income fell short
of what it ought to be, and supplied the defi-
ciency, you had remade his life. We cherish no
illusion that the “new basis of civilization *-
which is the new name for food—however
copiously supplied,” will of itself restore the
1 Readers of Patten's New Basis of Civilization will
of course recall that his term stands for numerous other
things besides food.
8
A VITAL ISSUE
wearied soul or supply lost energy of character.
We do not expect to render a man, by feeding,
so replete with purpose that he will rush forth
clamoring for opportunity to work it off. If the
life is already there, indeed, it will make use of
appropriate material placed within its grasp; and
the supplying of such means will, in that case,
be the only treatment needed. But so far as
the life is lacking some other means must be re-
sorted to. Material relief will not strike in ; re-
covery must move outward from the soul. And
the forms and conditions of such outward mo-
tion, and the means of inducing it, must be the
principal subject of our study. -
Analogous to the simple-arithmetic theory of
poverty is Herbert Spencer's theory of play,
namely, that the child, or young animal, plays
because he is possessed of surplus energy. The
theory is undoubtedly correct. In the same way
it is true that Raphael painted the Sistine Ma-
donna because he was possessed of surplus paint.
But it is also true that neither would the child
have played nor Raphael have painted the Ma-
donna unless some other principle had been
present. And it is that other principle, that life
within seeking to express itself, which it must
be the chief task of all true nurturing or curative
activity to augment. Piling on wood is useless
unless the flame is there. Not what you put into
a man, but what you get out of him; not what
you give him, but what you enable him to do,
has become to the charity worker the test of
treatment as well as the measure of results.
9
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAMILY
To the doctor the same thing is becoming
plain. He is finding that in nervous or func-
tional disorders it is only by the investment of
the little strength he has, of the poor one talent
that is left him, that the patient can get well.
Educators, again, have long recognized that it is
only through expression of the life within him
that the child will grow. The clergy also are
learning to call on their parishioners for work
as well as receptivity, to recognize that what
cometh out of a man, not what goeth into him,
is the important thing.
II.
But mere activity is not enough. The work
test has its place but not as a means of cure.
The educator no longer trusts in gymnastics,
whether physical or mental. The doctor sees in
the “constitutional * only a last resort. Works,
whether as a means of grace or as a sign of it,
must be of special quality. The secret of life,
evidently, is not in mere muscular contraction.
Nor is it in the production of crude physical
results. A man may pile up stones, as in the
work test—or to satisfy the wealth test in the
form of palaces; or he may pile up dollars, or
pile Pelion on Ossa, and gain nothing by it. The
question is not of foot-tons but of significance.
Life is won not by moving matter about but by
achievement, by doing something real. And
what shall be real is a question not of arbitrary
choice, not of choice at all, but of what com-
mends itself as such to the human soul.
;
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IO
A VITAL ISSUE
And on this question of what shall be real,
and so shall confer life in the doing of it, some
knowledge has been gained through careful,
long-continued observation and recording—by
social workers and others—of those activities
that have been found in practice to have an edi-
fying or curative effect. Those social workers
who deal with the cure of individuals have found,
for instance, a healing quality in self-support.
They will leave no stone unturned to find a man
a job. They will send him to the ends of the
earth to the work that is waiting for him. They
will fit him to his work by tools or stock in trade
or education. The same is true of those social
workers who have undertaken the whole problem
of helping a class of people. Colonel Armstrong,
Booker Washington, Anagnos, those who have
devoted themselves to the deaf, the insane, the
crippled and deformed, or those who have more
recently taken up the problem of the boy who
leaves school at fourteen; you will find them all
doing what they can to prepare their patients for
useful work. The doctors also recognize the
healing properties of self-support. Dr. Herbert
J. Hall, for instance, in his sanatorium for neu-
rasthenics at Marblehead sets his patients at cer-
tain manual work of which he makes two re-
quirements, that it must be truly artistic and that
it must sell. In the case both of the social
worker and of Dr. Hall an important considera-
tion in favor of self-support on the part of a
patient is doubtless its practical convenience.
II
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAMILY
But that consideration is in neither case the most
important. Dr. Hall has adopted the kind of
occupation indicated because it is the best thera-
peutic agent he has found, and the same is to
the social worker also, its decisive recommenda-
tion. Two other attributes should be noted in
the activity found effective by Dr. Hall—that it
is manual and that it is artistic.
The educators also have rediscovered the im–
portance of the job. Armstrong, Booker Wash-
ington, and the rest above cited are indeed rather
followers of Pestalozzi than of any other pro-
phet. The value of manual occupation may be
called the educational discovery of our time.
The kindergarten, sloyd, industrial training are
instances of its increasing recognition in the
teaching both of the defective and of the sound.
Artistic and creative work is another form of
activity of which the educators have found the
edifying effect, as may be seen in the increasing
attention given to composition—whether in form
and color, in written words, or in musical sound
—in every school and in almost every exercise.
Married to the creative instinct, and partaking
with it in all artistic work, the schools have
recognized the sense of rhythm. Other special
forms of activity in which the power of drawing
out the child’s inner life has been discovered are
nurture—as developed in the care of pets and
plants and smaller children—science, or the satis-
faction of the instinct of curiosity, and team play.
In short we find that those professionally en-
I2
A VITAL ISSUE
gaged in the fostering of life in human beings
rely not upon activity in general but upon cer-
tain special forms of activity which they have
found effective to that end. Groping about in
the course of their professional contact with the
human mechanism, they have touched certain
springs to which they find that it responds and
in the response to which is somehow contained
the secret of its life. A wonderful result, and
one inexplicable from the mechanical or simple-
arithmetic point of view. As a question of
simple addition and subtraction, a vessel that is
nearly empty, whether from exhaustion or from
having never been filled, should be dependent
for any addition to its contents upon some out-
side source. That it should be filled by empty-
ing, should acquire a larger supply by the process
of spending the little it already has, seems from
that point of view an impossible result. And the
result is not less wonderful when we consider
the naturé of the particular activities in which
replenishment is found. A man discouraged,
nervously exhausted—and the cure is not rest
but work. He is sick, needs building up, and the
successful prescription is not fresh air and exer-
cise but an indoor job. An infant lying help-
less, unformed, knowing nothing of the world
or of its place in it, and the means of growth
and adaptation are found not simply in food and
air and training directed from the outside, but
chiefly in self-expression, in activity proceed-
ing from within.
I3
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAMILY
'... •
Most wonderful of all is the ascertained value
of artistic work—that the arrangement of wood
and iron and paint in certain forms, of sounds
in certain sequences and combinations, should
have power to confer life and health. A child
intent upon the shaping of a pile of sand, a man
bending over his canvas or his carving; and in
measure as he strikes the combination or truly
seeks it, it exercises talismanic power; he finds
in it the water of life, the philosopher's stone
that can turn all things to gold.
What is the reason of this miracle? It is, as
always, the simplest one—that these and other
certain activities do in truth constitute the life
of man, that he is an emanation of these and
exists only so far as they are incarnated in his
being. The reason is that man is embodied
act, that action and not the material which it
enlightens is the creative element, the funda-
mental fact; that man is the creature of certain
kinds of action—we may say later of certain
purposes—that he is the expression not of a con-
dition but of a process. He is himself the pro-
cess, to which every atom of his body is subser-
vient, in virtue of which each has its function
and its place. He is not a pond but a river, not
a bundle of fuel but a flame.
I am not speaking in any mysterious or deeply
metaphysical sense and am expressing no opin-
ion upon such hard subjects as the rela-
tion of force and matter. What I mean to say
is that whether the ultimate secret lies in atoms
I4.
A VITAL ISSUE
or in thought, the hard practical fact that we
social workers have got first to understand in
dealing with the human mechanism is not what
it is made of or how it is put together, but what
it is wound up to do.
Material things of course are necessary not
only to the sustaining of life, and as material
for it to work in, but also as possessing the spell
that can call it forth. As the winds call to the
young eagle, the mountains to the chamois, the
forest to the wolf, so man’s physical counter-
part, the world his cunning hands and mind were
made to fit, holds the secret of his strength. His
life can go forth only to meet its destined task,
and depends upon the presence of the material
and spiritual counterpart to which its affinities
relate. But to the reading of the physical need
aright, and so to the fulfilling of it, as to every
other form of fostering activity, the first neces-
sity is the understanding of the active outreach-
ing life to which the need belongs.
Why man's life consists of certain activities
such as we have enumerated rather than of any
others is not our question. If you were a wind
it would be your business to blow, and your life
would be involved in blowing, whatever the ex-
planations of meteorology. For the cat the ulti-
mate fact is that he is the hunter—regardless
of the process, whether of selection or otherwise,
that made him so. Explanation indeed we seem
in our own case to possess to some extent, and
doubtless there is complete explanation awaiting
I5
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAMILY
us somewhere. That the job, for instance, is so
important a part of us is most probably because
the job is as old as life upon this planet, and all
life, accordingly, has been built around it. We
are set to this pressure from the beginning, and
many of us can react to nothing else. Even
genius is not always independent of the ancient
stimulus. Thackeray could not quite do his
work without the very edge of necessity in the
form of the printer's devil at his door. It is
apparently for such reasons that to ignore this in-
stinct is, as the social workers have discovered,
to run grave risks of leaving the man sickly or
unformed.
Manual occupation also is as old as man. In-
deed it appears that it is older, for it was the
hand with its power of accurate manipulation
that made possible the cunning mind by provid-
ing occupation fine enough to employ it. Why
man is a product of artistic effort—why creation,
rhythm, balance, harmony, have such magic
power in our lives—is a more difficult question,
although I believe that even this relation can
already be, in part at least, explained. But for
us social workers it is enough to know that these
things do possess this power, that this strange
creature we are dealing with is in fact related,
as child to parent, to the production of certain
kinds of sound and motion and material ob-
jects; that man is in fact the child of the Muses
in this most practical sense.
Here is the fundamental fact, the central truth,
I6
A VITAL ISSUE
in regard to our whole subject. Whatever may
be the explanation, man is for better or worse
the product of certain acts. He is a manual
worker, a breadwinner, a creator, nurturer and
the rest, and exists only as he embodies these re-
lations. What the sources of his strength shall
be is not left for him or anyone to choose. The
activity that shall make him is prescribed, and
the fulfilment of it is not separable from his
life but the substance of it. Apart from such
fulfilment he does not exist. This is the secret
of the reality, to the human soul, of the life-
giving acts. Such acts are in truth the realest
thing there is. The doing of them is more real
even than the results produced, more real per-
haps than he who produces them, save so far as
he has become their perfect incarnation. They
are at all events the ultimate reality so far as he
is concerned. That action is in fact the direct-
ing principle of growth, and that man is fash-
ioned by those specific activities that his nature
has prescribed, are facts that may be clearly
verified by anyone who will watch a child at
play. Here you may observe the leading in-
stinctive activities in the actual process of form-
ing him in their image and to their purposes.
You will see man the hunter taking shape under
the pressure of the chasing and hiding games;
man the artist and creator fashioned through the
making of mud pies and palaces; mind and body
in the act of being set to music under the rhyth-
mic impulse; man the nurturer growing from
17
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAMILY
the care of dolls and plants and pets; man the
scientist built up through the child's instinctive
collecting, classifying, and investigation; man the
fighter forged in the hundred games of contest,
and man the citizen in team play. In infancy
the active nature fashions mind and body in its
likeness in proportion to their obedience to its
commands.
To know the acorn you must see the tree that
it is dreaming of. You must see it not as a
little lump of vegetable tissue but as that which,
in soberest reality, it truly is, the oak maker—a
thing which even now contains, and can when
rightly called upon, produce that airy edifice of
leaf and twisted branch, of gnarled trunk and
sinewy root, bearing other acorns, parents of
other countless generations, in its turn. What
we are here studying is the spiritual body of
man; the outline of that which in him is most
real. The firm reality in human nature is the in-
visible part, the active principle of which all
actuality, all that can be called life, is the ex-
pression. It is only as we know the form and
habit of this active principle that we social
workers can be said to know anything important
of our subject or are fit to deal with it.
III.
Our present more specific purpose is not to
trace the entire outline of the active principle
in man but to discuss a single salient feature
of it—its relation to the home. And first let us
I8
A VITAL ISSUE
note a constant quality in all vital activity, all
activity that builds up and cures, of which qual-
ity the relation to the home is an example,
namely, Subordination to an end. This quality
is as fully present in play as it is in work. It is
the child who is forgetting himself, who is
truly absorbed, devoted body and mind to the
sand house that he is building, to finding what
it is that makes the wheels go round, to getting
the ball over the line, who is in the act and throe
of growth; just as it is the youth who has
found that the job is bigger than he is from
whose eyes the man is beginning to look out.
So, as we saw, it was not what you do to regain
your health but what you do to serve an outside
purpose, if it be but for five minutes a day—it
is not wholesome exercise but work—that cures.
Not the selfish, the sleek, the clever who have
found the trick and boast that they can cheat
the mechanism of this ancient slot machine and
draw its prizes without troubling about the old
prescribed condition of first putting something
in—it is not the smarties who are growing, but
always the humble servants of a cause. Not what
you try to get out of the thing but what you
put into it is added unto you.
Such devotion is self-assertion in a sense, for
it is the assertion of truth given from within.
But such truth is not of our choice, is not arbi-
trary. It states itself to us as impersonal, pre-
scribed; it comes not as a whim to be gratified
but as an ideal to be obeyed. Man is the crea-
ture of such obedience. -
I9
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAMILY
And most absorbing of all the objects of devo-
tion is a cause. There must, it appears, be a
social dimension in the end we serve to make our
enlistment in it complete. Half the attraction
in the dramatic play of little children is in the
circle in which they so often stand while play-
ing. The full grip of the game is not felt by
the adolescent until he joins the team. The de-
cisive authority even in the job is not in the
primal motive of self-support but in the desire
to make good, to be a citizen in full standing, a
competent member of the social whole. Men,
indeed—firemen, policemen, doctors, nurses, en-
gineers—are giving their lives every day through
the overruling of the primal motive by the later
and more commanding one. Even the artist—
the nearest approach to the temperamental an-
archist that human nature affords—recognizes
a fellowship of his craft, a republic of art or
letters to which he owes allegiance, a profes-
sional standard to be maintained. I think the
noblest word in any language is the Scotch word
“leal *-loyal and happy. There is a whole
philosophy, and a whole religion, in that single
word—the philosophy and the religion of mem-
bership. The land of the leal—of the happy
warriors, the true defenders of the Valhalla,
those who have fought the good fight—the com-
munion of the saints of whatever creed, honor-
ing each other's loyalty. I think Mr. Royce has
done no greater service than in making promi-
nent this name of loyalty for the universal faith.
2O
A VITAL ISSUE
IV.
Membership in the grown-up world has many
forms, but two are instinctive and inevitable.
One of these is the state. Aristotle says that
without participation in government virtue can-
not exist: the man without a country is not quite
a man. That is our democratic creed, and the
reason for democracy's insistence that all men
shall so participate.
The other instinctive form of human member-
ship, and the elder, is the family, the primal
social unit, the type and origin of those social
ends in subordination to which man finds his
fullest life.
By social workers the importance of the fam-
ily relation has long been recognized. They
are unwilling, for instance, to separate mother
and child; they form special organizations to in-
struct mothers in the care of children; and the
breaking of this relation, where necessary, is
regarded as a capital operation, to be entrusted
only to professionals trained in that especial
branch. When the separation of the child from
the family does become necessary the conclu-
sion reached, after a trial of all that the best
institutions can do for him, has been that the
place where he stands the best chance for
healthy growth is in another family. Social
workers see in the appalling death rate in infant
asylums not faulty physical conditions alone
but also the loss of the child’s natural playmate,
of the recognition that assures him of the reality
2I
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAMILY
of his feats of intelligence and skill, of the free-
masonry of that society of two, best of all the
clubs to which he will ever belong. They see
in it the loss of the child’s world, of the needed
counterpart of all his powers and of his help-
lessness. Mother and child are not independent
phenomena but parts of one vital process, of the
one phenomenon of infancy. They can no more
be successfully separated than the leaf and the
tree; neither deprived of the other can possess
its life.
So also of the father's relation to the family.
Social workers are slow to yield to the cry,
“Save the children,” even in the case of the
drinking father. How about the effect on him?
His children may be his only hold on life. And
how of a society in which it was understood
that the father had only to become a drunkard
in order to be relieved of all responsibility, of
a society in which the expectancy of such respon-
sibility had become thus weakened? Will these
or other children be saved by growing up in
such a world? Of the selective effects of plac-
ing a premium on the propagation of the vicious
and improvident it is not my present business
to speak.
Our schools also are thus far endeavoring to
strengthen, not to weaken, the family relation.
The school doctor sends word to the parent of
the presence in his children of physical disability
or disease, and leaves the matter of dealing with
it to him. The school nurse or school visitor
22
A VITAL ISSUE
gives instruction and leaves the parent facing
a more definite responsibility. Similar instruc-
tion is given at parents’ meetings. The school
trains future mothers in cooking and other do-
mestic arts. The kindergartner visits the home
and explains the games and Songs and Occupa-
tions, and leaves the mother not with a less need
of living with her children but with the benefit
of the accumulated insight of eternal mother-
hood, as interpreted by a man of genius, to aid
her in so doing.
Very significant in the social workers’ redis-
covery of the home, are the methods that have
been found successful in children’s institutions.
These have divided themselves into cottages on
what is called the “family plan.” They have
appointed a married couple at the head of each
cottage, to whom the names of “father ” and
“mother ” have been given. They have as-
signed so far as possible to each child definite
duties toward the small community thus formed
—cooking, tending table, making beds, poking
the furnace, raising vegetables—thus giving to
each a chance to contribute to the common life.
These are useful methods. The only improve-
ment that could be made upon them would be
to have the man and his wife the actual father
and mother and to have the duties such as
naturally spring up about the home. There is
only one kind of institution more successful—
the original one, as yet unsurpassed, which is the
natural habitat of the human young.
23
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAMILY
The most valuable of these institutional dis-
coveries is the importance of definite contribu-
tion to the common life. And this is perhaps
the most important feature of the home. The
boy may not relish sawing wood, and he may
think his mother tyrannical to exact it, but such
Sawing is nevertheless the most important factor
in his life. It gives him social reality and a place.
He is the boy who saws the wood. He is a pro-
fessional with a duty towards Society—necessary
to somebody, a sustaining member. If he were
to abdicate, the world would halt a little in its
revolution. You remember Kipling's tradition
of the rivets in The Ship That Found Herself
—how once there was a rivet that let go and
how it resulted that the ship was lost. A boy
needs to be a rivet in that sense. A definite duty
owed to a definite group, required, recognized,
respected. There is nothing to be known, I be-
lieve, beyond that ancient homely method in the
art of induction into successful life. Everybody
needs to know that there is some one who cares
when he comes home and whether he comes, and
this feeling on the part of other members of the
family is an important part of the home influence
upon the child. But a rope to be tightened must
be pulled both ways. It is in his own com-
mittedness, his depth of membership as an arm
or a hand is a member, and the resulting power
of emotional reaction toward the home, that his
strength and life consists. Such depth of mem-
bership is won by his own activity, by his own
24
A VITAL ISSUE
service to the home. Service is the laying-up
of treasure in the cause you serve; and in that
treasure lies your strength.
The concern shown by our social workers in
tenement-house legislation—in the securing, that
is to say, in our cities of some sort of niche in
which it is possible that a home shall rest—shows
their appreciation of the fact that the home, like
the individual, requires proper material environ-
ment for its expression. Savings institutions
have been fostered largely in the interests of
home making and preservation. The spiritual
significance of furniture is duly recognized.
The feeling that makes people store their poor
belongings and look forward, amid all their
difficulties, to the day when they shall take them
out again and form the family life once more
around them is a true and precious sentiment.
The selling of the last few sticks of furniture
represents often the last step down. It is again
a capital operation like parting with an arm or
leg. The Lares and Penates may, in the proces-
sion of the centuries, take different incarnations,
but their presence and favor are always part of
life.
An important discovery in the conduct of in-
stitutions is the value of ceremonies and obser-
vances in celebration of their corporate per-
sonality. Even a hospital for the insane will
have its common dining-hall. All good institu-
tions have rooms for social and religious gath-
erings. They celebrate occasions connected with
25
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAMILY
their history or foundation. They will have
alumni associations, thus making ancestors for
themselves. They will have an institution band
and a ball nine, a yell and an institution color.
They will in all ways proclaim and remind them-
selves that “we are us,” that there is something
there beyond an aggregation of individuals,
something that all serve, that concerns inmates
and officers alike.
In the successful family also there is a ritual
that cannot be neglected with impunity. Family
occasions; Sundays, birthdays, holidays and
trips to the sea shore—such observances are all
enhancements of its life.
And of all ceremonies and observances the
family meal is the most important. Some per-
sons imagine that the question of school feeding
is a question of payment alone, that if the par-
ents pay the cost the last objection disappears.
But the question is not chiefly one of food but
of communion. It was no false instinct that
rendered the man inviolable who had tasted of
your salt. The family meal is a religious cere-
mony, one of the most sacred as it is one of the
most ancient of such. An advocate of school
feeding has spoken of good table manners and
a taste for brown bread as incidental advantages
of that system. These advantages are real and
important, but there are things the love of which
is nearer to our life than that of brown bread,
and there are articles of table manners more
fundamental than the correct manipulation of
26
A VITAL ISSUE -
the knife and fork. The daily manifestation of
the mother's love, the meeting of the children
all together, recounting to her—even if they
all talk at once—their joys and their woes; the
daily reconsecration of the family life; these
things are more important than anything which
the most skilled teaching can impart. Let us
have the brown bread and the knife and fork
drill if we can, but let us not sacrifice for these
the deepest spiritual values of our lives.
Table decoration also is a matter that can be
taught, and one in which we hope that the school,
at least in the case of future generations, will
work improvement. But there is a value in the
little traditions of neatness that the least in-
structed mother will observe, in the dandelion
stuck in a cracked mug by way of centerpiece,
for which the most expert instruction is not a
substitute.
Life is not a thing outside of these relations
of which the relation to the family is the type.
They are its vortices, they compose its sub-
stance. A man who is not a maker, a nurturer,
a citizen, is not quite alive. He is a fire that does
not burn, a wind that does not blow. And of
these relations the family is the oldest and most
essential. It is older than man and has made
him. It first made possible the great phenom-
enon of infancy upon which man’s rise, like that
of all the higher animals, depended. It is in
our inheritance as the maker both of the race
and of the individual. We are built up around
27
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FAMILY
this institution. Our heart and mind are its
creatures and are fitted to it. It is the mother
of the affections, the first schools and the best.
It is the teacher of forbearance and of steady
service. It is the first form of the state, the
parent of all the nations, and still the single
cell of which all nations are composed. We are
children of the family relation as the fish is the
child of the ocean, the bird of the air. As water
could be deduced from a fin or air from a wing
so could the family from the structure of the
human heart. ... • *
Physical life, after early infancy, may be
maintained without the family. So can an eagle
be kept alive in a cage. Potatoes will sprout in
the cellar and grass grow under a board. It is
a question what constitutes life in such a casey
Some people collect musical instruments as curi-
osities and do not play on them. A man in
whom the great instinctive relations remain un-
fulfilled is a Stradivarius with its soul unborn
in sound. Time was that when the brains were
out the man would die. When the heart is out
lie is already dead. \You cannot kill the spiritual
relations that made him, that are built into the
most intimate structure of his being, and leave
the man in any important sense alive. In our
fight to save the child, as it becomes more earn-
est, we shall not impair, nor suffer to decay, that
institution in relation to which, more than in all
else, liis life is found, but shall do all we can to
foster and preserve it.
28
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