Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/281

Rh ? Are we on our way to a condition like that reached by sundry communistic aggregates in America and elsewhere? In these, along with community of property, and along with something approaching to community of wives, there goes community in the care of offspring: the family is entirely disintegrated, and individuals are alone the units recognized. We have made sundry steps toward such an organization. Is the taking of those which remain only a matter of time?

To this question a distinct answer is furnished by those biological generalizations with which we set out. In Chapter II. were indicated the facts that, with advance toward the highest animal types, there goes increase of the period during which offspring are cared for by parents; that in the human race parental care, extending throughout infancy and childhood, becomes elaborate as well as prolonged; and that in the highest members of the highest races it continues into early manhood: providing numerous aids to material welfare, taking precautions for moral discipline, and employing complex agencies for intellectual culture. Moreover, we saw that, along with this lengthening and strengthening of the solicitude of parent for child, there grew up a reciprocal solicitude of child for parent. Among even the highest animals, of sub-human types, this aid and protection of parents by offspring is absolutely wanting. In the lower human races it is but feebly marked: aged fathers and mothers being here killed and there left to die of starvation; and it becomes gradually more marked as we advance to the highest civilized races. Are we in the course of further evolution to reverse all this? Have those parental and filial bonds, which have been growing closer and stronger during the latter stages of organic development, suddenly become untrustworthy? and is the social bond to be trusted in place of them? Are the intense feelings which have made the fulfillment of parental duties a source of high pleasure, to be now regarded as valueless? and is the sense of public duty to children at large to be cultivated by each man and woman as a sentiment better and more efficient than the parental instincts and sympathies? Possibly Father Noyes and his disciples, at Oneida Creek, will say Yes to each of these questions; but probably few others will join in the Yes—even of the many who are in consistency bound to join.

So far from expecting disintegration of the family to go further, we have reason to suspect that it has already gone too far. Probably the rhythm of change, conforming to the usual law, has carried us from the one extreme a long way toward the other extreme; and a return-movement is to be looked for. A suggestive parallel may be named. In early stages the only parental and filial kinship formally recognized was that of mother and child; after which, in the slow course of progress, was reached the doctrine of exclusive male kinship—the kinship of child to mother being ignored; after which there came in another long period the establishment of kinship to both.