The Conservation of the American Home
The American home is rapidly becoming a failure. After countless ages of biological and social evolution, that marvelous process of change and growth which has produced us, we are committing suicide as a nation and as a people. A home without children is not, in a social sense, a home at all. It is only a place in which, and a condition under which, two persons of opposite sex live together more happily and comfortably, perhaps less so, than they could do apart.
The American home, the home in which healthy, intelligent and characterful children are bred and reared, both for their own sakes and the nation's service—this home is the veritable rockbottom of our national well-being. Let the home fail, and all our wealth and material achievement is naught but poverty and trash.
The millions of homes in which there are no children, or only one child, the birth of which was perhaps wholly unintentional, are so many millions of tombs in which the nation's hope and future lie buried. The millions of young unmarried Americans, between the ages of twenty-one and forty years, whatever be the cause of their unnatural and unsocial condition, are just so many millions of Americans who have rejected life. All of the unmarried, all of the married who do not reproduce themselves, are a crushing accusation against our national intelligence, our national morals, and our national social policy. What do these figures not mean in terms of disappointment and despair, of social purpose unfulfilled, of negative sorrow and anguish in the heart of the individual, of souls unfed in terms of every higher realization of life?
A people which can calmly behold a large per cent of its marriageable young people homeless and childless has confessed itself to be a broken and dissolving remnant among the nations. We, lords of the richest land in all the four quarters of the world, voluntarily place our national head upon the block and beckon to the executioner, axe in hand, to make haste.
Visualize this old-time American home—on the hillside, among the trees. For many generations it has stood foursquare against every blast of winter, every ugly aspect of circumstance. From its wide portals have gone forth a myriad of the young and gay, the hopeful and the brave. Its offspring peopled all our West. Its victories in the wilderness, through a hundred years, have no counterpart in all the history of humanity. The history of America has been the history of the American home—of what that home has accomplished for the citizens that were born and reared under its sheltering roof.
Open the door! Wait! You shall see none enter here. Only a going out—a funeral procession. A death march sounds forth, a mighty people, the hope of the world—such a people is borne to the grave. Where there is no laughter of children, there Death is King. And those that see make jest and frolic.
In the even scales of biological law and of mathematical calculation, our people are being weighed in the balance and found wanting. We Americans, all that we have been, and all that we are, are being borne to the grave in execution of the law. We have been tried and condemned by a just Judge.