Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

THE FAMILY

The American family is the scapegoat of the nations. Foreign critics visit us and report that children are forward and incorrigible, that wives are pampered and extravagant, and that husbands are henpecked and cultureless. Nor is this the worst. It only skims the surface by comparison with the strictures of home-grown criticism. Our domestic arbiters of every school have a deeper fault to find: they see the family as a crumbling institution, a swiftly falling bulwark. Catholic pulpits call upon St. Joseph to save the ruins and Puritan moralists invoke Will Carlton, believing in common with most of our public guardians that only saints and sentimentalism can help in such a crisis. Meanwhile the American family shows the usual tenacity of form, beneath much superficial change, uniting in various disguises the most ancient and the newest modes of living. In American family life, if anywhere, the Neolithic meets the modern and one needs to be very rash or very wise to undertake the nice job of finding out which is which. But one at least refuses to defeat one’s normal curiosity by joining in the game of blind-man’s buff, by means of which public opinion about the family secures a maximum of activity along with a minimum of knowledge.

A little science would be of great help. But popular opinion does not encourage scientific probing of the family. In this field, not honesty but evasion is held to be the best policy. Rather than venture where taboo is so rife and the material so sensitive, American science would much rather promote domestic dyes and seedless oranges. It is true that we have the Federal Census with its valuable though restrained statistics. But even the census has always taken less interest in family status and family composition, within the population, than in the classification of property and occupation and the fascinating game of “watching Tulsa grow.” In no country is the collection of vital statistics so neglected and sporadic and the total yield of grab-bag facts so unamenable to correlation. Through the persistent effort of the Children’s Bureau, this situation has been considerably improved during the past ten years; so that now there exist the so-called “registration areas” where births, marriages, and deaths are actually recorded. For the country as a whole, these vital facts still go unregistered. The prevailing sketchiness in the matter of vital statistics is in distinct contrast to the energy and thoroughness with which American political machinery manages to keep track of the individual who has passed the age of twenty-one.

One of the tendencies, statistically verified, of the native family is its reduction in size. In the first place the circumference of the family circle has grown definitely smaller through the loss of those adventitious members, the maiden aunt and the faithful servant. The average number of adult females in the typical household is nowadays just one. The odd women are out in the world on their own; they no longer live “under the roofs” of their brothers-in-law. Miss Lulu Bett is almost an anachronism in 1920. The faithful servant has been replaced by the faithless one, who never by any chance remains long enough to become a familial appendage, or else she has not been replaced at all. Even “Grandma” has begun to manifest symptoms of preferring to be on her own. Thus the glory of the patriarchal household has visibly departed, leaving only the biological minimum in its stead.

In the dwindling of this ultimate group lies the crux of the matter. The American grows less and less prolific, and panicky theorists can already foresee a possible day when the last 100 per cent. American Adam and the last 100 per cent. American Eve will take their departure from our immigrationized stage. It is providentially arranged—the maxim tells us—that the trees shall not grow and grow until they pierce the heavens; but is there any power on the job of preventing the progressive decline of the original Anglo-Saxon stock even to the point of final extinction? This is a poignant doubt in a country where the Anglo-Saxon strain enjoys a prestige out of all proportion to its population quota. The strain may derive what comfort it can from the reflection that the exit of the Indian was probably not due to birth control.

Still, birth control is not new. If it did not originate with the Indians, it did at least with the Puritans. As the census books and genealogy books show, every succeeding American generation has manifested a tendency to reduce the birth-rate. The new aspects of the situation are the acceleration of the tendency and the propaganda for family limitation by artificial methods. In the birth registration area, which includes twenty-three States, the number of births for the year 1919 compared with those for 1918 showed a slump of seven per cent. Also the current assumption that children are more numerous on farms, where they are an economic asset, than they are in cities, where they became an economic handicap, has recently received a startling correction through a survey made by the Department of Agriculture. Among the surprises of the study, says the report, was the small number of children in farm homes:—“Child life is at a premium in rural districts.” The farm is not the national child reserve it has been supposed to be. As far as the salaried class is concerned, it has stood out as the national pace-setter in family limitation. The editorial writer of the New York Times, who may be trusted for a fairly accurate statement of the standards of this group, justifies its conduct thus: “Unless the brain-worker is willing to disclass his children, to subject them to humiliation, he must be willing to feed, clothe, and educate them during many years. In such circumstances, to refuse parenthood is only human.” It therefore remains for the manual worker, who cannot obtain from his Church the same absolution that the suburban resident can obtain from his Times, to produce the bulk of the population. This, as a whole, is not yet stationary; the recent census estimates an annual excess of births over deaths throughout the United States amounting to about one per cent. What will the next decade do with it?

A peculiar feature of the American propaganda for birth control is its specific advocacy of artificial methods. The defenders of this cause have been compelled, it appears, to define a position which would be self-evident in any society not incorrigibly Puritan. People who regard celibacy as a state of grace and celibacy within marriage as a supreme moral victory are still growing, it would seem, on every bush. This unwholesome belief must have its effect upon the birth control methods of the married population. It is a matter of speculation how many marriages succumb to its influence, especially after the birth of a second or third child; but there is reason to believe that the ascetic method is by no means uncommon. You cannot hold up an ideal before people steadily for forty years without expecting some of them to try to follow it. This kind of rigorous negativism passes for morality in America and finds its strongest devotees among the middle-aged and the heads of families. Such people are greatly shocked at the wild conduct of the young who are certainly out of bounds since the war; but the most striking feature of the current wave of so-called immorality is the exposure of the bankruptcy of ideals among the older generation. There are thirty million families in the United States; presumably there are at least sixty million adults who have experimented with the sexual relationship with the sanction of society. But experience has taught them nothing if one may judge by the patented and soulless concepts which still pass for sexual morality among people who are surely old enough to have learned about life from living it.

The population policies of the government are confined to the supply through immigration. A few years ago, an American president enunciated population policies of his own and conducted an energetic though solitary campaign against “race suicide.” But no faction rallied to his standard, no organization rose up to speed his message. His bugle-call was politely disregarded as the personal idiosyncrasy of a popular president who happened to be the proud father of six children. Mr. Roosevelt was evidently out of tune with his own generation, as, no doubt, Mr. Washington was with his, for exactly the opposite reason. But the more retiring nature of our first president saved him from the egoistic error of regarding his own familial situation as the only proper and desirable example. The complete failure of Mr. Roosevelt’s crusade is significant. There are clerical influences in America which actively fight race suicide, but with these obscurantist allies the doughty son of a Dutch Reform family had too little else in common. Among the men of his own class he stirred not an echo. Is it because the American husband is too uxorious or too indifferent? I have heard a married man say, “It is too much to expert of any woman;” and still another one explain, “The Missis said it was my turn next and so we stopped with one.” Or is there any explanation in the fact that the American father tends more and more to spend his life in a salaried job and has little land or business to bequeath? Whatever the reason, the Business Man is in accord with the Club Woman on the subject of birth control, in practice if not in theory.

So far as relative distribution of income is concerned, the families of the United States fare much as those in the industrial countries of Europe. In 1910, the same relative inequality of wealth and income existed in feudal Prussia and democratic America. The richest fifth of the families in each country claimed about half the income while the poorest two-thirds of the families were thankful for about one-third. The same law of economic relativity falls alike on the just American and the unjust Prussian. But the American family, it appears, is in every case two or three times better off than the corresponding family in Prussia. You must multiply Herr Stinnes by two to get a Judge Gary and the wealth of a Silesian child labourer is only half that of a Georgia mill-child. This economic advantage of our American rich and poor alike is measured chiefly in dollars and marks and not in actual standards of living. It is apparently difficult to get real standards of living out into the open; otherwise the superior fortune of American families of every estate might be less evident. Some of us who may have visited middle-class Prussian people only half as well off as ourselves probably did not commiserate the poor things as they deserved. My hostess, I recall, had eight hundred dollars a year on which she maintained an apartment of two rooms, bath, and kitchen; kept a part-time maid; bought two new suits’ a year; drove out in a hired carriage on Sunday; and contributed generously to a society which stirred up women to call themselves Frau instead of Fräulein. Any “single woman” in an American city of equal size who could have managed as much in those days on fifteen hundred a year would certainly have deserved a thumping thrift-prize.... And then there were all those poor little children in a Black Forest village, who had to put up with rye bread six days in the week and white bread only on Sundays. Transported to America, they might have had package crackers every day and ice-cream sandwiches on Sunday. One wonders whether the larger income of the American family is not largely spent on things of doubtful value and pinchbeck quality.

According to theory, the income of the family normally belongs to the man of the house. According to theory, he has earned it or derived it from some lawful business enterprise. “The head of the family ordinarily divides income between himself and his various dependents in the proportion that he deems best,” says Mr. Willford King. The American husband has a peculiarly unblemished reputation as a provider—and probably deserves it. Certainly few husbands in the world are so thoughtful of their widows; they invest extensively in life insurance but rarely in annuities against a period of retirement. Trust Companies remind them through advertisements every day to make their wills, and cemetery corporations nag them incessantly to buy their graves. “Statistics show that women outlive men!” says the promoter of America’s Burial Park. “They show that the man who puts off the selection of a burial place leaves the task to the widow in her grief. For the man it is easy now—for the woman an ordeal then.” The chivalry of the business man leads him to contrive all sorts of financial mechanisms for his widow’s convenience and protection. His will, like his insurance policy, is in her favour. Unlike the European husband, he hates to leave the man’s world of business and to spend his declining years in the society of his wife. After he is dead, she is welcome to his all, but so long as he lives he keeps business between them.

Though in life and death a generous provider, he is not a systematic one. Financial arrangements between husband and wife are extremely casual. As the dowry hardly exists, so a regular cash allowance is very rare. He loves to hold the purse-strings and let her run the bills. This tendency is known in the outside business world, and the American wife, therefore, enjoys a command of credit which would amaze any solvent foreign housekeeper. She has accounts on every hand. She orders food by telephone or through the grocer’s boy and “charges it.” The department store expects her to have a charge account, and gives her better service if she does. For instance, the self-supporting woman who is, for obvious reasons, more inclined to pay as she goes, finds herself discriminated against in the matter of returning or exchanging goods. In numerous ways, the charge account has the inside track. This would not seem strange if credit were limited to the richest fraction. But that is not the case; almost every housewife in the country has credit, from the Newport ladies to the miners’ wives who “trade at the company store.” The only difference is that, in the case of these two extremes—Newport and the company store—longer credit than ususal seems to be the rule. In the meantime, the preaching of thrift to the American housewife goes on incessantly by apostles from a business world which is largely organized on the assumption that she does not possess it and which would be highly disconcerted if she actually developed it. American business loves the housewife for the same reason that it loves China—that is, for her economic backwardness.

The record of the American husband as a provider is not uniform for all classes. In Congress it is now and then asserted with appropriate oratory that there are no classes in America. This is more or less true from the point of view of a Cabin Creek vote-getter, who lives in a factitious political world, where economic realities fail to penetrate; to him middle-class and working-class are much the same since they have equal rights not to “scratch the ticket.” But the economist finds it convenient, as has been said, to classify the totality of American families in definite income-groups corresponding to the Prussian classes. As one descends the income scale one finds that the American husband no longer fulfils his reputation for being sole provider for his family. According to Edgar Sydenstricker, “less than half of the wage-earners’ families in the United States, whose heads are at work, have been found to be supported by the earnings of the husband or father.” The earnings of the mother and the children are a necessary supplement to bring the family income up to the subsistence level. Half the workingmen, who have dutifully “founded” families, cannot support them. According to the latest figures published, it costs $2,334 a year to keep a family of five in New York. Have the young Lochinvars of the tenements never heard of those appalling figures? Very likely they have a premonition, if not an actual picture of the digits. In any case they have their mothers to warn them. “Henry’s brought it on himself,” said the janitress. “He had a right not to get married. He had his mother to take care of him.” If he had only chosen bachelorhood, he might have lived at home in comfort and peace on his twenty-five a week. But having chosen, or been chosen by, Mrs. Henry instead, it is now up to the latter to go out office-cleaning or operating, which she very extensively does. It is estimated that since the war fully one-third of all American women in industry are married.

Going back up the scale to the middle-class wife, we find new influences at work upon her situation. Custom has relaxed its condemnation of the economically independent wife, and perhaps it is just as well that it has done so. For this is the class which has suffered the greatest comparative loss of fortune, during the last fifteen years. “If all estimates cited are correct,” writes Mr. Willford King, “it indicates that, since 1896, there has occurred a marked concentration of income in the hands of the very rich; that the poor have relatively lost but little; but that the middle class has been the principal sufferer.” It is, then, through the sacrifices of our middle-class families that our very richest families have been able to improve their standard of living. The poor, of course, have had no margin on which to practise such benevolence, but the generous middle-class has given till it hurts. The deficit had to be relieved, the only possible way being through the economic utilization of the women. At first daughters became self-supporting, while wives still tarried in the odour of domestic sanctity; then wives came to be sporadically self-supporting. The war, like peace still bearing hardest on the middle-class, enhanced all this. Nine months after the armistice, fifty per cent. more women were employed in industry than there were in the year before the war.

In America, we have no surplus women. The countries of western Europe are each encumbered with a million or two, and their existence is regarded as the source of acute social problems. What shall be done with them is a matter of earnest consideration and anxious statecraft. America has been spared all this. She has also no surplus men—or none that anybody has ever heard of. It is true that the population in 1910 consisted of ninety-one millions, of whom forty-seven millions were men and forty-four were women. There were three million more men than women, but for some reason they were not surplus or “odd” men and they have never been a “problem.” The population figures for 1920,—one hundred and five millions,—have not yet been divided by sexes, but the chances are that there is still a man for every woman in the country, and two men apiece for a great number of them. However, no one seems to fear polyandry for America as polygamy is now feared in Europe.

The situation is exceptional in New England where the typical European condition is duplicated. Beyond the Berkshire Hills, all the surplus women of America are concentrated. In the United States as a whole there are a hundred and five men for each one hundred women, but in New England the balance shifts suddenly to the other side. Within the present century, a gradual increase has taken place in the masculine contingent owing to immigration. But the chances of marriage have not correspondingly improved, for matches are rarely made between New England spinsters and Armenian weavers or Neapolitan bootblacks.

In America only the very rich and the very poor marry early. Factory girls and heiresses are, as a rule, the youngest brides. It is generally assumed that twenty-four for women and twenty-nine for men are the usual ages for marriage the country over. Custom varies enormously, of course, in so polyglot a population. Now and then an Italian daughter acquires a husband before the compulsory education law is through with her. In such cases, however, there is apparently a gentleman’s agreement between the truant officer and the lady’s husband which solves the dilemma. At the opposite extreme from these little working-class Juliets are the mature brides of Boston. As the result of a survey covering the last ten years, the registrar of marriage licenses discovered that the women married between twenty-seven and thirty-three and the men between thirty and forty. Boston’s average marriage age for both sexes is over thirty. This does not represent an inordinate advance upon the practice of the primitive Bostonians. According to certain American genealogists, the Puritans of the 17th century were in no great haste to wed—the average age of the bride being twenty-one and of the bridegroom twenty-five. The marriage age in the oldest American city has moved up about ten years in a couple of centuries. The change is usually ascribed to increasing economic obstacles, and nobody questions its desirability. Provided that celibacy is all that it seems to be, the public stands ready to admire every further postponement of the marriage age as evidence of an ever-growing self-control and the triumphant march of civilization.

In the majority of marriages, the American wife outlives her husband. This is partly because he is several years older than she and partly because she tends to be longer-lived than he. Americans of the second and third generation are characterized by great longevity,—the American woman of American descent being the longest-lived human being on earth. Consequently the survivors of marriage are more likely to be widows than widowers. In the census of 1910, there were about two million and a half widows of forty-five or over as compared with about one million widowers of corresponding age. Nor do they sit by the fire and knit as once upon a time; they too must “hustle.” Among the working women of the country are a million and a quarter who are more than forty-five and who are probably to a very large extent—though the census provides no data on the subject—economically independent widows. As was said before, “Grandma” too is on her own nowadays.

The widow enjoys great honour in American public life, although it usually turns out to be rather a spurious and sentimental homage. Political orators easily grow tearful over her misfortunes. For generations after the Civil War, the Republican Party throve on a pension-system which gathered in the youngest widow of the oldest veteran, and Tammany has always understood how to profit from its ostentatious alms-giving to widows and orphans. From my earliest childhood, I can recollect how the town-beautifiers, who wanted to take down the crazy board fences, were utterly routed by the aldermen who said the widow’s cow must range and people must therefore keep up their fences. Similarly, the Southern States have never been able to put through adequate child labour laws because the widow’s child had to be allowed to earn in order to support his mother. All this sentimentalism proved to be in time an excellent springboard for a genuine economic reform—the widow’s pension systems of the several states which would be more accurately described as children’s pensions. The legislatures were in no position to resist an appeal on behalf of the poor widow and so nicely narcotized were they by their traditional tender-heartedness that they failed to perceive the socialistic basis of this new kind of widow’s pensions. Consequently America has achieved the curious honour of leading in a socialistic innovation which European States are now only just beginning to copy. Maternity insurance, on the other hand, has made no headway in America although adopted years and even decades ago in European countries. With us the obstacle seems to be prudishness rather than capitalism—it makes a legislator blush to hear childbirth spoken of in public while it only makes him cry to hear of widowhood.

One aspect of widowhood is seldom touched upon and that is its prevention. Aged widows, on the whole, in spite of their soap-boxing and their wage-earning, are a very lonely race. Why must they bring it on themselves by marrying men whose expectation of life is so much less than theirs? And yet so anxious are the marrying people to observe this conventional disparity of age, that if the bride happens to be but by three months the senior of the bridegroom, they conceal it henceforth as a sort of family disgrace. Even if this convention should prove to be immutable, is there nothing to be done about the lesser longevity of the American male? There is a life extension institute with an ex-president at the head but, as far as I am aware, it has never enlisted the support of the millions reported by the census as widows, who surely, if anybody, should realize the importance of such a movement. It is commonly assumed that the earlier demise of husbands is due to the hazardous life they lead in business and in industry; but domestic life is not without its hazards, and child-bearing is an especially dangerous trade in the United States, which has the highest maternal death-rate of seventeen civilized countries. If American husbands were less philosophical about the hardships of child-bed—the judgment of Eve and all that sort of thing—and American wives were less philosophical about burying their husbands—the Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away and so on—it might result in greater health and happiness for all concerned.

But the main trouble with American marriage, as all the world knows, is that divorce so often separates the twain before death has any chance to discriminate between them. The growing prevalence of divorce is statistically set forth in a series of census investigations. In 1890, there was one divorce to every sixteen marriages; in 1900, there was one to every twelve marriages; and in 1916, there was one to every nine marriages. The number of marriages in proportion to the population has also increased during the same period, though not at a rate equal to that of divorce. But divorce, being so much younger than marriage, has had more room to grow from its first humble scared beginnings of fifty years ago. Queen Victoria’s frown had a very discouraging effect on divorce in America; and Mrs. Humphry Ward, studying the question among us in the early 20th century, lent her personal influence towards the arrest of the American evil. We also have raised up on this side of the water our own apostles against divorce, among whom Mr. Horace Greeley perhaps occupies the first and most distinguished place. But in spite of all heroic crusades, divorce has continued to grow. One even suspects that the marked increase in the marriage rate is partly—perhaps largely—due to the remarriage of the divorced. At any rate, they constitute new and eligible material for marriage which formerly was lacking.

The true cause of the increase of divorce in America is not easy to come by. Commissions and investigations have worried the question to no profitable end, and have triumphantly come out by the same door by which they went in. That seems to be the test of a successful divorce inquiry; and no wonder, for the real quest means a conflict with hypocrisy and prejudice, fear and taboo, which only the intrepid spirit of a John Milton or a Susan B. Anthony is able to sustain. The people who want divorces and who can pay for them seem to be able to get them nowadays, and since it is the truth only that suffers the situation has grown more tolerable.

In the meantime, there are popular impressions and assumptions which do not tally with the known facts. It is assumed that divorce is frequent in America because it is easy, and that the logical way to reduce it would be to make it difficult. Certain States of the West have lenient divorce laws but other States have stringent laws, while South Carolina abolished divorce entirely in 1878. On the whole, our laws are not so lenient as those of Scandinavia, whose divorce rate is still far behind that of the United States. Neither is divorce cheap in America; it is enormously expensive. Therefore for the poor it is practically inaccessible. The Domestic Relations Courts do not grant divorce and the Legal Aid Societies will not touch it. The wage-earning class, like the inhabitants of South Carolina, just have to learn to get along without it. Then there is another belief, hardly justified by the facts, that most divorced wives get alimony. Among all the divorces granted in 1916, alimony was not even asked for by 73 per cent. of the wives and it was received altogether by less than 20 per cent. of them. The statistics do not tell us whether the actual recipients of alimony were the mothers of young children or whether they were able-bodied ladies without offspring. The average American divorce court could not be trusted to see any difference between them.

The war has naturally multiplied the actions for divorce in every country. It was not for nothing that the British government called the stipends paid to soldiers’ wives “separation allowances.” The war-time conditions had a tendency to unmake marriages as well as to make them. The momentary spread of divorce has revived again the idea of a uniform divorce law embodied in an amendment to the Federal Constitution. As no reasonable law can possibly be hoped for, the present state of confusion is infinitely to be preferred as affording at least some choice of resources to the individual who is seeking relief. If there were any tendency to take divorce cases out of the hands of the lawyers, as has been done with industrial accidents, and to put it into domestic relations courts where it belongs; if there were the least possibility of curbing the vested interest of the newspapers in divorce news; if there were any dawning appreciation of the absurdity of penalizing as connivance the most unanswerable reason for divorce, that is, mutual consent; if there were any likelihood that the lying and spying upon which divorce action must usually depend for its success would be viewed as the grossest immorality in the whole situation; if there were any hope whatever that a statesman might rise up in Congress and, like Johan Castberg of Norway, defend a legal measure which would help ordinary men and women to speak the truth in their personal relationships—if there were any prospect that any of these influences would have any weight in the deliberations of Congress, one might regard the possibilities of Federal action with a gleam of hope. But since nothing of the kind can be expected, the best that can happen in regard to divorce in the near future is for Congress to leave it alone. There is a strong tradition in the historical suffrage movement of America which favours liberal divorce laws and which makes it improbable that a reactionary measure could gain sufficient support from the feminine electorate. Since the majority of those who seek divorce in this country are women, it seems to put them logically on the side of dissoluble marriage.

Though home is a sacred word in America, it is a portable affair. Migration is a national habit, handed down and still retained from the days when each generation went out to break new ground. The disasters of the Civil War sent Southern families and New England families scurrying to the far West. The development of the railway and express systems produced as a by-product a type of family life that was necessarily nomadic. The men of the railway “Brotherhoods” have always been marrying men, and their families acquired the art of living on wheels, as it were. Rich farmers of the Middle West retire to spend their old age in a California cottage surrounded by an orange grove—and the young farmers move to the city. The American family travels on any and every excuse. The neurotic pursuit of health has built up large communities in Colorado, Arizona, and other points West. Whole families “picked up,” as the saying goes, and set out for the miraculous climate that was to save one of its members from the dreaded tuberculosis—and then later had to move again because somebody’s heart couldn’t stand the “altitude.” The extreme examples of this nomadic habit are found among the families of the very poor and the very rich, who have regular seasonal migrations. The oyster canners and strawberry-pickers have a mobility which is only equalled by that of the Palm Beachers. And finally there is the curious practice of New England which keeps boarders in the summer-time in order that it may be boarded by Florida in the winter-time.

By contrast with all this geographical instability, the stable sway of convention and custom stands out impressively. With each change of environment, family tradition became more sacred. Unitarians who moved to Kansas were more zealous in the faith than ever, and F.F.V.’s who settled in Texas were fiercely and undyingly loyal to the memory of Pocahontas. Families that were always losing their background, tried to fixate in some form the ancestral prestige which threatened always to evaporate. Organizations composed of the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution, of the descendants of the Pilgrims, of Civil War Veterans, of the Scions of the Confederacy, and so on, sprang up and flourished on the abundant soil of family pride. All of which means that pioneering brought no spiritual independence or intellectual rebirth, and that new conditions were anxiously reformulated under the sanction of the old. Above all, sanction was important. That incredible institution, the “society column” of the local newspaper, took up the responsibility where the Past laid it down. Stereotyped values of yesterday gave way to stereotyped values of to-day. This was the commercial opportunity of a multitude of home journals and women’s magazines which undertook—by means of stories, pictures, and advertisements—to regiment the last detail of home life. But the perforated patterns, the foods “shot from guns,” and all the rest of the labour-saving ingenuities which came pouring into the home and which were supposed to mean emancipation for mothers and their families, brought little of the real spirit of freedom in their wake. Our materialistic civilization finds it hard to understand that liberty is not achieved through time-saving devices but only through the love of it.

But the notorious spoiling of the American child—some one says—is not that a proper cradle of liberty for the personality? A spoilt child may be a nuisance, but if he is on the way towards becoming a self-reliant, self-expressive adult, the “American way” of bringing up children may have its peculiar advantages. But a spoilt child is really a babyish child, and by that token he is on the way towards becoming a childish adult. Neither is his case disposed of simply by adjudging him a nuisance; the consequence of his spoiling carry much further than that. They are seen, for instance, in malnutrition of the children of the American rich—a fact which has but recently been discovered and which came as a great surprise to the experts. “In Chicago,” one of them tells us, “it was found that a group of foreign children near the stockyards were only 17 per cent. underweight, while in the all-American group near the University of Chicago they were 57 per cent. below normal.” The same condition of things was found in a select and expensive boarding school in the neighbourhood of Boston. A pathetic commentary—is it not?—on a country which leads the world in food-packing and food-profits, that it should contain so many parents who, with all the resources of the earth at their command, do not know how to feed their own children. Surely, the famous American spoiling has something to do with this. Whether it may not also be behind the vast amount of mental disturbance in the population may well be considered. The asylums are suddenly over-crowded. The National Committee for Mental Hygiene suggests for our consolation that this may be because the asylums are so much more humane than they used to be and the families of the sufferers are more willing than formerly to consign them to institutions.

It is the fashion to attribute all these mental tragedies to the strain of business life and industry, and more recently to war-shock. But if we are to accept the results of the latest psychological research, the family must receive the lion’s share of blame. The groundwork for fatal ruptures in the adult personality is laid in childhood and in the home which produced the victim. For many years the discussion of American nerves has hinged on the hectic haste of business and industrial life, on the noise and bustle and lack of repose in the national atmosphere. But we have neglected to accuse the family to its face of failing to protect the child against the cataclysms of the future while it had the chance.

The tremendous influence of the family on the individuals, old and young, composing it is not merely a pious belief. We are, alas, what our families make us. This is not a pleasant thought to many individuals who have learned through bitter experience to look on family relationships as a form of soul imprisonment. Yet it seems to be an incontestable fact that personality is first formed—or deformed—in the family constellation. The home really does the job for which the school, the press, the church, and the State later get the credit. It is a smoothly articulated course from the cradle onward, however, in which the subjugated parent produces a subjugated child, not so much by the rod of discipline—which figures very little in American family life—but by the more powerful and pervasive force of habit and attitude. Parents allow themselves to be a medium for transmitting the incessant pressure of standards which allow no room for impulse and initiative; they become the willing instrument of a public mania for standardization which tries to make every human soul into the image of a folded pattern. The babe is moulded in his cradle into the man who will drop a sentimental tear, wear a white carnation, and send a telegram on Mother’s Day—that travesty of a family festival which shames affection and puts spontaneous feeling to the blush.

As the family itself grows smaller, this pressure of mechanistic and conventional standards encroaches more closely upon the child. A sizeable group of brothers and sisters create for themselves a savage world which is their best protection against the civilization that awaits them. But with one or two children, or a widely scattered series, this natural protection is lost. The youngster is prematurely assimilated to the adult world of parents who are nowadays, owing to later marriage, not even quite so young as formerly they were. It is a peculiarity of parents, especially of mothers, that they never entertain a modest doubt as to whether they might be the best of all possible company for their children. And obviously the tired business man cannot properly substitute in the evenings for a roistering, shouting brother who never came into the world at all; nor can all the concentrated care of the most devoted mother take the place of the companionship and discipline which children get from other children. These considerations deserve more attention than they usually receive in connection with the falling birth-rate. The figures mean that the environment of the young child is being altered in a fundamental respect. Parents of small families need to take effective steps to counteract the loss. Practical things, like nursery schools, would be a help. But, chiefly, if parents will insist on being companions of their children, they need themselves to understand and practise the art of common joy and happiness.

Katharine Anthony