IS THE HOME DOOMED?

Evening Star, Issue 19776, 28 January 1928, Page 2

IS THE HOME DOOMED?

Tip it be, with its disappearance will go one of the most distinctive features of British civilisation. A Hindu gentleman is on record as saying that there was “ no word for home as we understand it in the Indian language.” To the same effect is the testimony of a celebrated Japanese military general. He had been trained and educated in England. Talking with the representative of a London' newspaper, he said that the English and American homes were the great strength of the people. “It is not your business power, nor your mechanical force, but your homes. It is on this point wo have most to learn; from you. . . . Your family ideals, combined with the virtues our women have, will do more to aid Japan than any victories in the field.” And such estimates of this institution do but confirm those of our leading thinkers. Burns’s ideal to make a happy fireside for weans and wife was, he said, the true pathos and sublime of human life; and, speaking of his own, he declared, truly enough, that it was such homes that were the secret of old Scotia’s grandeur, and made her “beloved at home, revered abroad,” But it would seem that this great institution is being white-anted, and its decay and disappearance from these southern lands is only a matter of time, and not a long time at that. Let us pick out a few of the borers that are working havoc in it. « * * “a* There are first of all the politicoeconomic ones. The mother has to assist the father—sometimes, indeed, take the place of the father—in order to provide the necessaries of life. As soon as the children are fit for work they enter the industrial field to be competitors with their parents. The wages they gain tend to make them independent of home. They earn money ; they assert themselves. Parental authority grows limp. Parents no longer issue orders and expect them to bo obeyed; they give advice and beg for submission. Thus homes become disrupted. The dependence of the young upon mother and father, which originally created and gave force to the home in proportion as it lasted long, has practically ceased. Other causes co-operate to bring this about.. The whole tendency of social legislation is towards a lessening of the parents’ control of and responsibility for the children. Agencies and institutions of various kinds already exist working towards this goal. Insurance, pension schemes, motherhood endowments, nursery schools, kindergartens, etc., all make for the lessening of parental responsibility and the withdrawal of the children early from home influences. No doubt much good is effected by these institutions, but none the less is it true that they and the like are boring into the foundations of family life and the home.

***** Then there are the scientific and philosophic borers. The Communists and the Left Wing of the Socialists produce these in abundance. They want the State to take over the whole function of the parents, even to the begetting of children. Thus it is in Russia to-day. And the Russian doctrines in this and other questions are working like leaven among our own kith and kin. Plato long ago, in his ideal republic, advocated that children should be taken over by the State, because the home life tended to make them selfish. We have gone much further than that. Writers 'like Bertrand Russell and his wife think that in the absence of children “ sexual relations are a purely private matter which does not concern either the State or the neighbors.” His wife demands that every man and woman should have the right to livo out their sexual lives as they pleased. “It would not be wrong for a man to have six wives provided he and they were happy; nor for a woman to have six husbands and a child by each if they found life satisfactory.” A British author who has gained renown as an othical writer foresees a time wherein married people should have a kind of change partners at stated intervals, and each member choose another if he or she wished. These may bo extreme views. But they are undoubtedly winning recruits. They are meanwhile mostly the theories of scientists and philosophers. But they are already being translated into common thought through the agencies of novelists and others. Of course, all this means the break-up of family life and the destruction of the home as it has hitherto existed in British communities.

« * * * As we have said, these ideas are falling into prepared soil. They are in consonance with the ease-loving, independent spirit that is permeating all society. The demand is for human nature to have free way to develop itself in whatever direction it feels the strongest urge. This is the teaching, direct or indirect, of a great deal of the modern fiction which is the only sort of reading that filters down through the masses. In accordance with this the business of the divorce courts grows rapidly. One after another the grounds for dissolution of ■ the marriage bond increase. Every year, almost, some new excuse is urged in Parliament for widening the door of uncomfortable wedlock. We have not yet reached the toboggan slide down which Russia and America are flying headlong, when, as in the Roman Empire, there is the record of a man who was taking his twenty-third wife and a woman her twenty-first husband. But w© are on the road thereto; and there is nothing to prevent it but man’s desire for happiness and irresponsible liberty. And when these get into the driver’s seat anything may happen. Co-operating with these causes for the break-up of the home is the false idea of what constitutes a home. The average young man and young woman think that, it depends upon things—upon furniture aud luxuries of one sort and another. When means do,, not allow of this their marriage becomes an impossible ideal. Or, when a union is contracted and the equipments of the home are not as good as their neighbors’, dishonest methods may be resorted to in order to make them such. If not, bickerings may ensue, regrets and recriminations may be bitterly expressed. So begins the breach that finally wrecks the home; What people need to learn is that the . true home does not depend upon, its externals, but upon the love and good-will of those who inhabit it. The happiest homes are thus established and maintained, and where these do-not exist no luxuries, however elaborate, will compensate for their absence.

' It may be emphasised in this connection that the true and original maker cf the home was the child. Love and sacrifice are not the necessary products of the sexual relation. Whence came they? “If neither the husband nor the wife bestowed this gift upon the world, who did it? It was a little child.” Till this appeared man’s affection was non-existent; woman’s was frozen. But the child draws them together through the delicate sutures of a sacrificial love. “ Had the institution of the family depended on sex and not on affection, it would probably never have endured for any time. Love is eternal; sex is transient.” This is the rationale of the child as a moral educationist. A nation does well, therefore, to bo alarmed at the gradual disappearance of the child from its homes. The decline of the birth rate, if not arrested, means the decay of those elements that make strong characters, and then in the not distant future the extinction of the nation itself. But Western civilisation is face to face with a condition of things that is making for the elimination of the child from family life. A spirit of selfishness, of. arrogant individual independence, is the most marked growth of our time. It is not the least of the functions of family life “ to tamo this arrogant ego, bring i selfishness and irresponsibility under ■f > control of finer motives, and make it a sweet, strong, vitalising power instead of the unruly force it becomes if unchecked.” It thus collides with the spirit of the age in its avid passion fa- tho unrestrained assertion of all its faculties and the lust for selfish pleasures. * * ' * In one of his books Stevenson makes a doctor put it bluntly. He tejls his wife that it is one of tho fortunate things that fate has given them to have no children. How much they would have missed had it been othcrwisc—her health, his studious quiet, and so many other little luxuries of one sort and another would have had to be given up. “ Children are the last word c 0 human imperfection. They cry, my dear; they put vexatious questions; they demand to bo fed, to be washed, to bo educated, to have their noses hlowed; and then when the time comes they break our hearts as I break this piece of sugar. A pair of professed egoists like you and mo should avoid offspring like an infidelity.” Feelings and ideas of that sort, consciously or unconsciously, lie at the back of the decline of the birth rate, and so are making, in conjunction with those other factors, for the extinction of the home. Wj would do well to give heed to Mr Tregear’s passionate protest in his poem, ‘ Tho White Peril.’ That peril, he tells us, will not come from armies of East or West, of Latin or Slav, or Teuton.

Peril is here! is here! here in the childless-land. Lite sits high in the chair of fools twistihg her ropes of sand. Here the lisping of babies and cooing of mothers cease; . • Here the man, the woman fail, and only the flocks increase. Axes may bite in the forest, science harness the streams, Railway and dock bo bnilded—all in a, land of dreams. Sunk in spiritual torpor ye flout these words of the wise: “Only to music of children’s_ song shall the walls of a nation rise.” We have said enough to indicate that the doom of the home is darkening the horizon. In a subsequent article we may suggest some things that may still work for its salvation.