possible for the home to do the functions well of any of these agencies. Family solidarity must be maintained by both rich and poor alike, by an increased interest by parents in their children and in the training of the children. A very busy college man once told me that he had a schedule of one hour a day with his two boys which he always kept. "I want a chance at them" was his statement.

No definite solution to the question proposed is attempted here. All we can do is to state the present tendencies and to point out the good and bad features in the development of the modern family. Living in large numbers in cities is a comparatively recent phenomenon and adaptation to city living is one of the great problems of the present. In the changes taking place it is inevitable that the family must change.

Less attention to clubs and less interest in club life by parents, and more interest in their children should be a present-day demand. With the better education of both fathers and mothers, it will be easy for them to supplement the training of the school, the church, and the socialized agencies. The state may provide better educational facilities than can the family, but state education, with its system and methods, must be supplemented by individual education by the parent. The development of personality needs individual influence and training and no one can give these things better than the parent. Persuasion must displace coercive authority, and, upon the whole, we will have better-trained, more cultured, more responsible young men and young women.

ALBION W. SMALL, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

It

Professor Hagerty's valuable paper deserves thorough discussion. seems to me, however, that, in the brief time at my disposal, I can do a better service by applying my remarks to our whole programme.

As I review my own impressions from the discussions thus far. it seems to me that a stenographic report of everything that has been said would give the city editor of a yellow journal all the excuse such an imaginative gentleman usually requires in such cases for asserting that this Society regarded the American family as on trial, with the presumption rather strongly against it.

I have no right to speak for the Society, but my version will have at

least as much claim to a hearing as the city editor's. My dictum is that the thing on trial is not the American family, but every condition which interferes with general realization of the American family in full fruit of its spirit.

At all events I want to go on record in protest against everything in our proceedings which would tend to justify substitution of the yellow journal version for mine.

I do not believe I am phenomenally unsophisticated. It has been a good many years since I have heard of anything new in the way of sexual irregularity, except accidental variations of number and place. When I was a boy of ten, the nearest building to the school I attended was a brothel. More or less vitiated instruction about the meaning of the institution was the one thing I remember from the experiences of the school yard, and the stamp of those recollections is much more distinct on my mind than anything I heard from the teachers.

I cannot pose as a reclaimed rake. I am obliged to admit that my knowledge of sexual vice is entirely third personal. Unless that is a disqualification, I have had fairly liberal means of reaching informed judgments about the rôle which irregular relations of the sexes plays in our American society. From that tenth year I do not remember a time, till I was twenty-five or thirty years old, when additions to my knowledge of the subject were not accumulating. Fortunately or unfortunately, I had such progressive instruction, from my own observation with that of others, that I can recall only one or two instances in which variations of sexual depravity overtook me with surprise. It has been more than twenty years since anything reported from official or unofficial social clinics has added, except in quantity, to what I was already perfectly familiar with in principle about abnormal relations between men and women. I do not believe, therefore, that I am expressing the reaction of a recluse in a fool's paradise.

I do not deny the existence, in certain groups, of the prevalence of the evils that have been alleged or hinted at in some of the papers in our programme; I do deny most emphatically that those evils constitute in any considerable degree an indictment against the American family as an institution.

In the first place, the invidious inferences that have been suggested, more than uttered, by some of the essayists, get their supposed sanction from that delightfully simple mode of reasoning popularly known as putting the cart before the horse. It amounts to this: Because the family is sinned against, therefore the family is the sinner.

To this easy flippancy I would reply, Nothing that has been put in evidence proves anything very important against the American family. It merely proves that a large fraction of our population is more or less unfit for membership of a social group of that advanced type.

In other words, as a rough general proposition, all the disturbed or

destroyed families that we know anything about in the United States are effects of causes independent of the family type itself. Of course these disturbed or destroyed families become in turn aggravations of some of the evils from which they resulted, and breeders of other evils, but this is merely equivalent to saying that the family institution has not force enough to counterbalance all the demoralizing conditions of surrounding society, or to neutralize all the unsocial propensities of the undomesticated persons who compose it.

In the second place, most of the point to most of the smart flings at the family is gained by manipulations of the evidence that are either ignorant or disingenuous. What I mean by that is this: The American family is out of gear in two strata, in both of which pretty much everything else is out of gear. On the one hand is the stratum of the over-wealthed, overleisured, over-stimulated, under-worked, under-controlled. Nothing in their conditions is normal. Nothing is right. Only miracles could save this stratum from rot. Its families necessarily show the taint, and what else could be expected? On the other hand is the stratum of the over-worked, under-fed, under-housed, under-clothed, under-hygiened, physically and morally, underleisured, under-stimulated except by the elemental desires. Nothing in their lot is right. Nothing in their lot could be good enough to hold its own very securely against the swamping bad. The family suffers in the general evil. It is as absurd to accuse the family institution on that evidence as it would be to denounce the amosphere in general because the air this stratum has to breathe is foul.

If we deduct the collapsed families in these two strata, where they must be regarded more as effects than as causes, and confine ourselves to the families that are in relatively normal conditions, the great mass of families in the industrious middle stratum of our society, the family is not breaking down. It is probably working at least as well as any other organ in our social structure.

Not as proof, but as illustration, I may draw from my own experience. Five years excepted, I lived in the state of Maine until I was thirty-eight years old. The last eleven of those years I had to visit all parts of the state, and I had acquaintances, sometimes a considerable number, in nearly every town. During those thirty-eight years I knew by name only one family resident in the state that had been broken up by divorce. The state contained few people at that time rich enough to be outside the working class. It contained relatively few dependants who were not defectives. The great middle class contained here and there a divorcé, but so rarely that most of the people knew them only as the average New Yorker knows of Navajo Indians.

I do not mean to question the statistics of divorce. I mean first, that when we subtract the divorces that occur in the upper and lower non-social strata, and divide the number remaining by the number of families in the

substantial middle stratum, the percentage of divorces is higher than it ought to be, but far below the rate which decryers of the family would have us infer; and I mean, second, that the actual divorces in that stratum constitute no such case against the family institution as the same decryers want us to believe.

In the third place, I want to point out the hysterical character of another line of innuendo against the family. Because Frenchmen are supposed to treat conjugal fidelity as a joke, because English tradition places the wife among the husband's assets, because normal family relations are impossible in abnormal conditions of irresponsible wealth or insuperable poverty, because John Smith occasionally finds himself married to the impossible Jane Jones instead of the possible Hannah Johnson, and because an occasional couple, that could not live with anybody try to live with each other, therefore all the evils in all these conditions are counts against the normal American family! This sort of neurotics has not been silent in these sessions.

It is not an uncommon thing for railers against the family to talk as though "the position of woman" in the United States were not merely like that of the wife under the common law until recent decades, but substantially like that of the wife at Rome in the palmiest days of the patria potestas. On the other hand it is not uncommon for European visitors to speak out the impression that the American husband is simply the jaded beast of burden collecting the wherewithal for his wife and daughters to be physically, mentally, and morally dissipated. One of these exaggerations is as superficial as the other. The average animus of the American family is more nearly reflected by an incident that occurred at the University of Chicago the year of its foundation. Between the unreclaimed swamps and the temporary caravansaries crowding the available sites to shelter World's Fair visitors, the immigrant faculty families had a dismal outlook for abodes. Upon their gloomy contemplation of the prospect there suddenly dawned a vision of relief. It was in the shape of plans and specifications for a block of model houses. An architect and his wife, the latter furnishing the ideas and the arguments, the former the drawings, were the messengers of hope. The wife called a meeting of the professors, and showed how an available block near the University might be converted into lots for forty-five houses, with a club house in the center, to contain heating plant, laundry, servants' quarters, and restaurant, which the families could use at their pleasure, or the meals could be delivered by a miniature elevated electric railroad to each family which so preferred. There was a co-operative purchasing plan attached through which each family in the group could order supplies as liberally or frugally as it pleased, and pay for them at wholesale rates.

Every man at the meeting pronounced the scheme ideal; and I am unable to explain why they did not then and there put their signatures to contracts,

r

and order building to begin next day—or at least the first forty-five of them to crowd their way to the front. For some unrecorded reason it was decided to go through the formality of showing the plans to the wives of these exultant professors, before actually breaking ground. These supposed silent partners in those families assembled next day. They examined the plans. They listened to the eloquence of their authors. They thought again of their homeless condition, and then they-decided with one voice that they would remain homeless all their days sooner than consign their children to the unknown evils of a common community back yard. That settled it. Many of those families have remained wanderers on the face of the earth till the present hour, simply because in the American family man proposes but woman still disposes.

Seriously, it is worse than silly to talk as though the American family were a radically faulty institution. There will be a certain ratio of friction and frustration and waste, in every possible human association, so long as human beings lag this side of perfection. With our human nature as it is, there is no conceivable form of association in which men and women could be more helpful to each other and better placed to do their best for society, than in the form frankly filled by the spirit of the typical American family.

JAMES A. FIELD, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

The question which we have to discuss is a very large question, and a very vague one. I shall confine what I may say to an attempt to make it less indefinite by suggesting one or two distinctions-by pointing out not an answer but a more specific problem to be solved.

The original query which Professor Hagerty has considered in his paper-"How Far Should Members of the Family Be Individualized?”— includes within its scope at least two questions. If we assume the continued existence of the family substantially in its present form we may inquire how we should divide and adjust the functions of family life among the members of the family, and how far the members as individuals, and especially the man and the woman, should in their family relations be regarded as equal in responsibilities and rights and in all that they are to give and to gain. That is one of the questions, and that is the one which Professor Hagerty seems chiefly to have had in mind. The other, which challenges what was before assumed, is this: Is an increase of individualization consistent with the continued existence of present-day family life? Such an inquiry suggests Spencer's familiar antithesis of individuation and genesis. Briefly Professor Hagerty has alluded to this phase of the problem by mentioning the effect of the higher education of women upon marriage and the rearing of children-though it is by no means only through woman that the dictates of individual ambitions may disrupt the normal family