Home Privacy—See [Privacy, Lack of].

HOME, THE OLD AND NEW

The old home, with its family-room, evening-lamp, regular life, and community of interests, has given place to a home in which the family are all together for the first time in the day at the evening meal, and then only for a brief hour, after which they scatter to their several engagements. A little boy was asked by a neighbor, as his father was leaving the house one morning, who that gentleman was, and he replied: “Oh, I don’t know; he’s the man who stays here nights.” This might well be a leaf from the actual home life in our cities. In some cases fathers and mothers too seldom see their children. Business claims their daylight hours; committee, board, or lodge meetings claim their evenings; and so the fathers are unavoidably, as it would seem, away from home. The church and sundry organizations for social service or self-improvement leave the mothers little time for their own needy but uncomplaining households. The children have their own friends and social life, in which the parents have all too small a place and influence.—George B. Stewart, “Journal of the Religious Education Association,” 1903.

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HOME VALUES

“American art-students,” says Mr. L. Scott Dabo, a writer in The Arena, “make a mistake when they seek an ‘artistic atmosphere’ in Europe. To go abroad in search of beauty betrays soul poverty. The American who fails to find beauty in American landscape or artistic atmosphere among his fellow students, will never find either abroad, whatever he may induce himself to think. After the student has been thoroughly formed at home and merged into the artist, and not before, will he be capable of appreciating at its true value what the rest of the world has to offer.”

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HOME WHERE THE HEART IS

The following story is told of Hiram Powers, the sculptor:

Hiram Powers for thirty years wrought in Florence, Italy, away from his native land. Here he produced the “Liberty” which surmounts the Capitol at Washington, and such idealizations as “The Massachusetts Puritan,” and “The California Pioneer.” When asked once how he could keep so closely in touch with American life, tho he had been away from his native land so long, he replied, “I have never been out of touch with America itself. I have eaten and slept in Italy for thirty-odd years, but I have never lived anywhere but in the United States.”