Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/557

Rh And Eve responds:

 I am renewed; My eyes grow with the light which is in thine; Because I comprehend This human love, I shall not be afraid Of any human death."

Monogamous love marriages have not only improved the family physically, psychically, and ethically, but society as well. The decline and fall of Rome can be traced to her corrupt domestic life. The moral progress of the nation ceased when sacred family life ceased. The names Pompey, Caesar, Antony, Cicero, not only suggest intellect, power, splendor, conquest, and oratory, but divorced wives, paramours, unfathered and unmothered children, and marble palaces that hadn't the faintest semblance of homelikeness. The high civilization of Rome could not afford to throw off the family, which, then and now, either as a blessing or curse, is the primary social group from which evolves all society. The advancement of learning has never yet been sufficient gain for the loss of domestic morality. But even in the so-called morally pure Roman households, family right swallowed up individual right as a larger fish swallows the smaller. The paterfamilias was a tyrannical lord, who crushed any signs of asserted individualism. Pride of ancestry and patrimony surpassed natural affection. Occasionally there was a Catonic exception, who believed that a good husband was more praiseworthy than a great senator. We know that the elder Cato left urgent business to help wash and dress a newborn son, that he taught the growing boy to read, to use correct language, to box, to swim, to fight in armor, and to endure hardships. He even wrote historical books with his own hands and had them printed in big characters, that the boy at home might read of the brave deeds of his countrymen and thus unconsciously imbibe patriotism. It is significant that the dignified Roman Portia boasted not only of being the wife of Brutus, but a Cato's daughter.

Homer looked upon domestic relations, in some sense, as divine relations. Odysseus constantly had consideration for home and wife. The sanctity of the marriage vow is noticed particularly in the Iliad, a poem that does homage to hearth and home. And when conjugal and parental relations in classical Greece were outraged, she too, like Rome, felt the result in all her social fabric. At the time when her children were looked upon chiefly as additions to the state and army, we get a glimpse of a certain family relation not wholly unlike that of to-day. Themistocles, when his son was making demands on him by means of his mother, said: "O woman, the Athenians govern the Greeks, I govern the Athenians, but you govern me, and