The Home Is Everything
“The Home is everything.
“It is the foundation of the community, it is the essential cell of the world. You cannot injure the community without injuring the home, and you cannot injure the home without injuring the community. You cannot improve the condition of the community radically by pooling all the money and distributing it among the homes, or by pooling all the means of production and wealth creation and distributing work tickets to the Home-makers. Such a distribution of the means of living would leave utterly untouched the diseases that prey on the homes of the nation and would touch with a killing hand the vitality of the Home.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Its Construction
“Simply this. Every home is a tiny nation built exactly on the plan of the big nation, of which it forms a unit and which, in fact, is its counterpart in large.
“The home has its head, just as the nation has its head. Like the nation, it is bisexual; it has its exchequer, its fighting force, its ethical laws, its ambitions, its alliances, and its frontiers. It trades with other homes and combinations of homes just as the nation trades with other nations. It has its imports and its exports. It has its foreign loans and national credit. It has its internal and external politics. It has all these, whether it be a man and wife living in rooms or a family of twenty, and it is the facsimile of the nation simply because the nation is not a differentiation of it but an aggregation of it. What is done to the nation is done to the home.
Its Power
“A home, or a family, if you like the term better, is a ganglion of forces. Love and Pride, Economy (or the saving instinct) and Ambition, not to speak of Affection, are the best of these forces, just as the best forces in the nation are Love, Pride, Ambition, not to speak of Patriotism.
“Inseparably connected with these fine forces are other most powerful forces: Greed, Ostentation, Chauvinism (for a family can be Chauvinistic as well as a nation), Love of Domination, etc.