214 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
care, so they pass it on to a public institution where trained professionals are sure to do much better by it.
Is it not a curious and solemn Nemesis that has come upon We have housed the working people in tenements, worked them in factories, raised their children in institutions, and sent them to homes and almshouses to die. And of these ingredi- ents glorified the working classes have built their ideal of the New Jerusalem : a vast industrial army in ideal factories with plenty of wages promptly paid ; great asylums as educational institutions, splendid public pleasure resorts, and little dwarfed homes.
It is true that marriage is often an instrument of torture today. But the remedy does not lie in making marriage a pleasurable friendship to be dissolved at will, or a paedotrophic partnership ; that would twist the sexual relation into a scourge to lash us all. It lies rather in securing such a diffusion of fair prosperity and such a stability of economic conditions that the money motive will be practically eliminated from marriage, and that the worry and stress will be eased which now create nerv- ous exhaustion, irritability, and discord. It is true, also, that the exclusive love of family is a real hindrance to social progress. But here too the remedy does not lie in paring down the family, but in preaching the civic as well as the domestic virtues, the Kingdom of God as well as individual religion, and in getting women interested in something outside their own families and churches.
Let us ward off any social ideals that impair the stability and scope of the family and home. There is no need of impair- ing them. Even with a socialist system of industry there is ample room for a private home. If it were not so, if there were no place there whither a man could withdraw from the press of the world to the restful society of a beloved woman and his own children, it is a question if any gain in external comforts pur- chased by the change would be worth so great a price.
In the third place certain tendencies of social reformers contain a danger to national life. We have spoken of the inclina-
