Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/562

544 anarchy abroad. Individualism running riot is like a frenzied runaway horse that finally clears himself of every attachment. Before the individual thus runs away with himself, it might be a good thing in the United States, where there is such a general movement of liberation, to return to the family as the social unit. That the lack of individualism was the bane of the ancient family, and the excess of it is the bane of the modern family, shows that in both family and state "real liberty is neither found in despotism nor in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments."

There are those who think fewer marriages are due, among other things, to the fact that so many women are embracing the "higher education." It is true, such women are no longer satisfied with a husband who is merely a "good provider" of material things. But this is not ominous. Highly educated women crave companionship, but such as includes the intellectual and moral. Family life needs the leaven of a good intellectual heredity as well as physical. No amount of education will ever destroy maternal or wifely love in a true woman, illustrated in the case of George Eliot and our Margaret Fuller, who was never happy until she became the "mia cara" of Ossoli, and the mother of the blue-eyed Angelino. The man who, like Helmar in Ibsen's Doll's House, wants in a wife only a lark to sing for him, a doll in soft and silken gown to dress up his home with, will still frown on the higher education for women.

When one sees a bridegroom chewing gum during the entire marriage ceremony, and discovers six months later that the bride (the third wife) has secured a divorce, one concludes that quality of marriage is more essential than quantity. I heard a gentleman say, not long ago, that "one reason why more young men do not marry is because fathers do not set us an example in family happiness, nor look upon family happiness as a success to be won." False marriages, like those of Dorothea and Casaubon, Gwendolyn and Grand-court, Andrea del Sarto and Lucrezia, occur because the seriousness of the marriage relation is not understood.

When parents, by example and precept, teach their children the sacredness of marriage, when clergymen are not so fast to tie the knot, and lawyers to untie it, the foundation for the family will be stronger.

Arthur Fairbanks, in his recent book, reasons that the economic problem concerns the family even to a greater extent than the divorce problem. He thinks when a woman is obliged to go into the factory or shop to eke out a husband's earnings, which have become smaller and smaller because men have come into competition with women willing to receive lower wages for the same work, the effect is deleterious upon the family. It is still more alarming when women,