Self-obliteration robs the family of the best we have to give it.—The man who makes himself a slave; goes beyond his strength; denies himself needed rest and recreation; grows prematurely old, cuts himself off from intercourse with his fellow-men in order to secure for his family a position or a fortune: the woman who works early and late; forgets her music, and forsakes her favorite books; gives up friends and society; grows anxious and careworn in order to give her sons and daughters a better start in life than she had, are making a fatal mistake. In the effort to provide their children with material things and intellectual advantages they are depriving them of what even to the children is of far more consequence—healthy, happy, cheerful, interesting, enthusiastic parents. To their children as well as to themselves parents owe it to be the brightest, cheeriest, heartiest, wisest, completest persons that they are capable of being. Children also when they have reached maturity, although they owe to their parents a reverent regard for all reasonable desires and wishes, ought not to sacrifice opportunities for gaining a desired education or an advantageous start in business, merely to gratify a capricious whim or groundless foreboding of an arbitrary and unreasoning parent. Devotion to the family does not imply withdrawal from the world outside. The larger and fuller one's relations to the world without, the deeper and richer ought to be one's contribution to the family of which he is a member.
THE PENALTY.
To have no one for whom we supremely care, and no one who cares much for us; to have no place where we can shield ourselves from outward opposition and inward despair; to have no larger life in which we can merge the littleness of our solitary selves; to touch other lives only on the surface, and to take no one to our heart;—this is the sad estate of the man or woman who refuses to enter with whole-souled devotion into union with another in the building of a family and a home.—The sense that this loneliness is chosen in fidelity to duty makes it endurable for multitudes of noble men and women. But for the man or woman who chooses such a life in proud self-sufficiency, for the sake of fancied freedom and independence, it is hard to conceive what consolation can be found. Thomas Carlyle, speaking of the joys of living in close union with those who love us, and whom we love, says: "It is beautiful; it is human! Man lives not otherwise, nor can live contented, anywhere or anywhen. Isolation is the sum-total of wretchedness to man. To be cut off, to be left solitary; to have a world alien, not your world; all a hostile camp for you; not a home at all, of hearts and faces who are yours, whose you are! It is the frightfullest enchantment; too truly a work of the Evil One. To have neither superior, nor inferior, nor equal, united manlike to you. Without father, without child, without brother. Man knows no sadder destiny."
CHAPTER XIX.
The State.
Out of the family grew the state. The primitive state was an enlarged family, of which the father was the head. Citizenship meant kinship, real or fictitious. The house or gens was a composite family. Houses united into tribes, and the authority of the chieftain over his fellow-tribesmen was still based on the fact that they were, either by birthright or adoption, his children. The ancient state was the union of tribes under one priest and king who was regarded as the father of the whole people.
Disputes about the right of succession, and the disadvantage and danger of having a tyrant or a weakling rule, just because he happened to be the son of the previous ruler, led men to elect their rulers. There are to-day states like Russia where the hereditary monarch is the ruler: states like the United States where all rulers are elected by the people; and states like England where the nominal ruler is an hereditary monarch, and the real rulers are chosen by the people.
THE DUTY.