The Value of Life and of Things. “The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are not seen are eternal.” Do not mistake the means for the end in housekeeping. Orderliness, immaculate linen, garnished rooms are means. Good cheer, patience, kindliness, reserve force, poise are of vastly greater value. Often it is necessary to choose between the two. Cherish simplicity, beauty, courtesy, rather than conventionality, aping of passing modes, vulgar show, and ostentation in the house, equipment, household service, the clothing of the family. Train every member of the family to be responsible for the care of his own belongings and to wait upon himself as his share in social coöperation.
Let the children from toddling time help in the household duties and chores. It will be for their guardians a good training in patience, adaptability, and sympathy. What if their work is crude, with many mistakes and mishaps? They are learning motor coördinations, manual dexterity, a knowledge of homely routine, the meaning of labor and service, the joy of workmanship and creation, the satisfaction of self-reliance, the happiness of intimate comradeship with mother and father. Their character development is the great consideration, not the materials they are handling or the petty work they are accomplishing.
CHAPTER IV
FOUNDING A FAMILY
“The business of life is the transmission of the sacred torch of heredity undimmed to future generations. This is the most precious of all worths and values in the world.”
—G. Stanley Hall.
“The young people of the next and all succeeding generations must be taught the supreme sanctity of parenthood—that the highest profession and privilege they can aspire to is responsible fatherhood and motherhood.”
—C. W. Saleeby.
Solicitude for the Child as a Factor in Social Progress. The eugenic education of children is the real beginning. Parents can give to the little children in the home true ideals of parenthood, wholesome respect for maternity and paternity, training in the control of desires and appetites, a controlling sense of their personal and social responsibility, and true instruction regarding the origin and creation of life.
So to live that their children shall be strong and happy is a motive that a child can appreciate, and it can become the most powerful incentive for hygienic living, for industry, education, for social purity that is positive—noble in thought as well as restrictive in action. Trained thus through childhood, boys and girls will be prepared to meet with high-mindedness and moral stamina the storm and stress of adolescence; their ideals of sweetheart and lover will have a wholesome eugenic prejudice, and they will be prepared to discuss with dignity, scientific spirit, and reverence this significant phase of their future home life.
There is no essential contradiction between romantic love and eugenics. Indeed, sincere, deep and enduring love of parents for each other and for their children is an essential in a eugenic ideal. A young woman knows a hundred young men, but is in love with only one (or possibly none) because the others do not embody the ideal that she has fashioned. Every young man and woman has such an ideal, perhaps only vaguely defined but certainly felt, with which they are in love, for which they search, and with which they sometimes invest an acquaintance only to discover later their illusion. This ideal is composed of the most alluring qualities and personalities they have known.