The Princess.—Tennyson.
CHAPTER II
DOMESTIC REFORM
The animating spring of all improvement in individuals and in societies is not the knowledge of the actual but the conception of the possible.—H. Martineau.
How shall the new era be inaugurated? By ceasing to strive for self and family; by thinking of both only as instruments of the common weal.—Prof. A. W. Bickerton.
The model family home of the British middle class half a century ago comprised a father and mother of sound constitution and domestic habits with a group of children of both sexes—a group large enough to supply companionship to one another, and a family income sufficient for comfortable maintenance and recreation, occasional travel and the free exercise of hospitality. If homes of this type were widely and firmly established throughout the land they might be competent to breed, nurture and send forth into the world a good average material of human life for repairing waste and building up the British nation. But in the present epoch such homes are exceedingly rare, and the trend of social forces and modern ideas alike make for their becoming still rarer.
To speak only of the more obvious factors of change, State action in reference to the education of the young lifts children of the masses at almost an infantile age out of the effective control of family life, and in our centres of national industry economic forces bring about a hasty pairing and breeding, with an abrupt scattering of the brood that resembles the nesting of birds rather than the home-making of rational beings; while so immature are the heads of these evanescent family homes that the break-up is by no means an unmitigated evil.
Among the classes, forces of a higher, more penetrative order are working similarly. Prudence is acting towards the restraint of population in a manner that narrows the basis of family groups and shortens the natural term of their existence; and under a new impulse of right reason and high resolve the educated section of the female sex is deliberately forsaking the domestic hearth to share the world’s labour with man. These concurrent movements in society are destroying family life on the old lines, and by the homes of the present, individual needs are met only temporarily and provisionally.
One conspicuous result is an ever-increasing discomfort to the aged. They are stranded in homes become empty, or wander abroad seeking touch with their kind. Distinctly are they shunted off the rails of busy life before a lowered vitality prompts to inertia. The British “Philistine” lacks sentiment. Old age makes no special appeal to him, and he is content to bestow on relatives no longer young a brief moment of his precious time, a fragment of his tenderness. At an earlier stage of our social evolution the mature in years were centres of a rich, full, domestic life, and pivots on which turned the wider social life encircling it. At the present stage of that evolution the young and the comparatively young focus and absorb the whole sunshine of life, while the guardians of their infancy pass into declining years enveloped in gloom.
This premature effacement entails on society a double loss—first, the loss interiorly of that individual happiness which intensifies and raises the tide of life; second, the loss of activities guided by and based upon mellow experience.
Society is too materialistic to recognize that human beings physically on the down-grade may be psychically on the up-grade, and pre-eminently fitted to inspire and promote progress. But in thinking of latent possibilities realizable in a better environment we are bound not to judge by average humanity, but by the superior types of the preceding generation. The old age of W. E. Gladstone, Harriet Martineau, Mary Somerville, and others was neither gloomy nor unproductive. The last-mentioned at the age of eighty-one turned her attention to writing a book on microscopic science. “I seemed,” she says, “to resume the perseverance and energy of my youth. I began it with courage, though I did not think I could live to finish it.” She did, however, finish it, and lived to the age of ninety-two, maintaining at all times her habits of study and a full social intercourse with many friends. (From Personal Recollections, by her Daughter.)