IDEALS OF SOCIAL REFORMERS 2 1 3
tion among social reformers to loosen the rigor of the family bond. The wrongs of women are preached to us by determined voices, voices that are often painfully vibrant with the memory of personal wrongs. And because to such the walls of the house were a fiery square of torture, they ask to see the walls torn down, forgetting that these same walls to innumerable others are the breakwaters of God's most blessed haven.
Socialists also frequently aim at an easing of the marriage bond, because they recognize in the family the great bulwark^of individualism. They see men absorbed in securing a compe- tence for their families, and in pushing their children one degree higher up in the social scale, and there is no interest left for the elevation of their city. Most men would sell out their interest in social questions to secure $5000 a year for their families. But how is the interest in the general welfare, which the socialist state will demand, ever to be secured if it has to work against this family selfishness ? So it is that in the socialist pictures of the future, the state is more and the family less ; the public buildings are opulent, but the family lives in narrow quarters ; the children are less the property of the parents and more the property of the state. I recently read a book by Solomon Shindler giving the autobiography of Young West, the son of Mr. Julian West and Edith Leete, of Looking Backward fame. Young West's earliest recollections are of the public kinder- garten in which he, like all other children, was brought up. He was very fond of one of his teachers. A lady came to see him once a week, and he was told that this was his mother, but he didn't know what that might mean. As he grows older he occa- sionally goes to see Dr. Leete and his mother and her second or third husband, but these visits are about as warm as if a boy of our times paid a visit of respect to his second cousin's uncle. Generally the boy and his companions act like young prigs and Philistines, which is no wonder, seeing they were brought up in a succession of model orphan asylums. Later, when Young West marries, he has a child and is very fond of it, but he and his wife love it too well to keep it long under their own ignorant
