VIII. THE FUNCTION OF THE FAMILY IN NATIONAL LIFE
Mrs. Bosanquet[105] has told us that the most important economic function of the family to-day is its direct control of the prosperity or ruin of 240 nations; for here alone are found in combination the forces which determine the quantity of the population with the forces which determine its quality. To control these forces offers, to say the least, a life-work for countless men and women. Both parents must safeguard the character of their children’s inherited nature; both sexes are more or less directly or remotely concerned in the provision of a suitable environment for human lives, infant or adult. Under the circumstances it may well be a matter for surprise that we have been so slow to perceive that the right performance of these duties demands a preliminary study of the art of preserving health and promoting progress, and we marvel at the placid spirit of content which has sanctioned the conversion into a stronghold of empiricism, the very place where a sound knowledge of progressive sanitary science is of primary importance.
In the book to which reference has been already made, Mrs. Bosanquet also enumerates the causes which in her opinion militate most actively against the continuance of family life at the present day. Among others she mentions evasion of responsibility, self-indulgence (with which we are very familiar), reliance upon external sources of maintenance, and the unequal distribution among the members of a family of the burden of support. Further, she refers to the unfortunate failure among parents to realise that the old Roman customs of parental possession and filial submission are out of date to-day, and calls upon the wise guardian to substitute others which lead to loyalty and love.
The new movement for a study of the characteristics of childhood and adolescence should materially contribute to the realisation that this parental attitude of dominant authority must be now associated with and modified by a more balanced understanding of the phases of youthful development and of the intricacies of individual temperament. Convenience has hitherto encouraged the customary regulation of a group of young lives as if they were one and the same individual, no allowance being made for variation in character or in age, in propensities or in health. Each nursery party or infant school serves to illustrate the point. Individual tendencies to cold or to fatigue, to nerve storms or to indolence; individual capacities in diet, occupation or exercise, must be intelligently respected if potentialities are to become actualities.
In the well-conducted home, for example, a study of individual character must in the future replace cast-iron discipline or easy-going, child-spoiling indulgence. The fact that the early cultivation of good habits makes for healthful happiness must be generally appreciated; and the duty of the home to provide opportunity for the exercise of personal tastes, the importance of training as a relief to nervous strain and as the best means to develop resource and skill, must be perceived. It will be by this constant understanding supervision in early years, and later by the cultivation of an intimate sympathetic comradeship with his children, that the modern parent will retain for his country the cementing force of family life.
IX. THE MEANING OF INFANCY
The great discovery of John Fiske as to the reasons for the long continuance of childhood in man must not be overlooked in this connection; it bears so directly on health and efficiency, and is closely associated with the importance of the family to the individual as well as to the nation. Why, it may be asked, is man’s period of helplessness so prolonged; why, when his brain development reaches so high a standard, is he for years in a position of entire dependence, whereas snakelet and chick are practically self-supporting from the hour of hatching? When the lower forms of animal life are compared with mankind, the non-existence in their case of any such stage as infancy is at once apparent. They are brought into the world able to take care of themselves and to live an independent individual existence. Young pigs run almost as soon as they are born, young swallows fly directly they are fledged.
Now, if the structure of lower animals be examined, it will be found that they have no central warehouse corresponding to the human brain for the storage of new sensations or for an elaborate and original response to them. Each such animal repeats the life of its parents; each responds in exactly the same way to the contact of air, of earth, of food, or of water. Their activities, it is true, are distinguished by accuracy and despatch, but the offspring of a hen of the twentieth century has no larger capacity for the variation of these 243 activities than has the chick which was hatched out six thousand years ago. The guinea-pig of to-day, for example, remains mentally at the level of his thousandth ancestor. Wherein then lies the difference between the pig and the baby?