Any Fool Can Find Fault

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3442, 12 March 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

Any Fool Can Find Fault

T The present depression calls for greater co-operation in family life, and makes special demand upon the young people. How many of them realise that? How many of them are restricting themselves for the benefit of the home? Have they as much tennis, golf, cricket and hiking as they always had? Have they curtailed their sport in the slightest degree in order to help father with gardening or domestic carpentry, or mother with her thousand and one home duties? Or is it just “sport as usual”? Are the young fellows still devoting themselves to the arduous task of taking other men’s sisters to places, of entertainment ? How many sufficiently recognised the claims the family ties and risen to such . height of virtue as to take their own sisters to the pictures? When r did they fetch home tickets for father and mother and offer to guard the house while they went to a concert? The truth is that the. family seems fairly developed in business girls and boys, but in too many cases the modern tendency is towards absolute and aggressive individualism. The idea of the family as a commonwealth in which each one makes definite and happy contribution to the general welfare has scarcely dawned upon some of the younger generation. The home is treated as a boarding house, where one sleeps and eats, but has few ~ duties. “Home, Sweet Home,” is not often sung, because the home connation is ignored. An American boy. whose parents were Polish, was asked which language he spoke to his mother, and answered, in some surprise, “I don’t talk to mother. I just eat and run out.” Probably some young people whose ancestors came over in the Mayflower pay no more attention to mother and home. They just “eat and run out.” A home is the place

you go out of as quickly as possible, and you do not get back until father + and mother are in bed. As for spending three evenings a week in the home, it simply isn’t done. What a compliment to the home, to father and mother, and to the rest of the family! That is, to conduct ourselves as if our happiness were to be found everywhere rather than at home, and as if father and mother were persons to whom we owed nothing.

It is not a little singular that the two human groups which made least of home life were savages and Greeks. We know what savages are, and we know how the Egyptian said to the great Athenian, “Solon, Solon, you Greeks are all children.” The Greeks knew how to play; but Greece died. A people making much of comedy do not easily obey, and are not keen upon authority. They prefer self-expression, but stay not to ask which self is to find expression, the lower or the higher. Is the conception of self to include that of duty to others? Does it simply mean follow-

iwf one’s impulses and not thinking ■^Joifothers? Is life, then, merely a prolonged effort after self-gratification? a monkey? The youth who says, “I please myself,” has not time to ask whether that is the best and most beautiful thing he can do, and whether it will bring him the respect and esteem of his fellows. Selfishness is suicidal. Unhappily many young people to-day simply give family claims the go-by. They pay perhaps a trifle for their board, but seldom devote an hour or two a week to home helpfulnes in the way of lightening the burden carried by father and mo-

BUT THE NEED IS FOR ACTIVE, SUSTAINED CONSTRUCTIVENESS. HOME IS THE FOUNDATION OF NATION BUILDING NO OTHER NATIONAL PROBLEM EQUALS THE PRESERVATION OF THE HOME.

tiher. Seldom do they say, “Now, what can Ido for you? Does anything need fixing about blinds and pictures, clothes lines or carpets?” There is an old saying that an Englishman’s house is his castle. Nobody dare enter it unbidden. More to the point nowadays it should be said that a house is a ship, and everybody in it has a place to fill and a work to do. It carries no passengers; it knows no idlers. Its safety during the voyage depends not on the captain and officers only, but on officers and the crew working in perfect concord. Happy the parents who have won their children’s respect; happy the parents who can respect their children! These consummations devoutly to be wished are never realised unless there is and joyous co-operation in the family.

One of the finest illustrations of the united family is furnished in a picture sketched by an ancient Hebrew prophet when describing a lapse into idolatry: “ The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough to make cakes to the queen of heaven.” One purpose throbbed in every heart in that family, and every member contributed towards its fulfilment. Father, mother and children constituted an organic and ethical unity. Here is the ideal embodied in actual life. A family is not a heap of stones but a living tree in which not only root, trunk and branches, but . the very smallest twig and leaf contribute their share towards the common life and joy. There are parents who boast that they believe in giving their children complete liberty. Unfortunately there are men and women who should never have been parents. They do not care where their children get their social life or who has the control of their leisure. Theodore Roosevelt declared that questions like the tariff and the currency were literally of no consequence whatsoever compared with the vital question of having the home preserved, “If we have solved every other problem in the wisest possible way it shall profit us nothing if we have lost our own national soul, and we have lost it if we do not have the question of the relations of the family put upon the proper basis.” That will never be done as long as our homes are centrifugal —that is, places which the young people neglect. Organised sensational amusements drag them from home. Over-prosperity in the past has given them the means to run off on their own pet tangent, and the old home loyalty falls to pieces. Perhaps the mother devotes herself individualistically to bridge, and the no less individualistic father to his club or his union. The result is that individualistic sons and daughters plunge into their crazes and the search for excitement, and proudly jettison what they call intolerable repressions. The times demand “thrills,” and the home does not supply them. Does it ever occur to the thrill maniac that life’s main business is not feverishness, but duty and mutual helpfulness; that a sense of honour is a finer thing than an intense sensation; that seif respect, and self-control, and self-sacri-fice alone can build up a character and a nation? Some of the younger set are said to criticise their parents “with cheerful energy.” Supposing they end the criticism and try cooperation! Any fool can find fault. The demand of to-day is for constructive, active, sustained, cheerful and self-denying helpfulness at home.