The difficulty of inducing people to talk sensibly about the family is
the same as that which I pointed out in a previous volume as
confusing discussions of marriage. Marriage is not a single invariable
institution: it changes from civilization to civilization, from religion
to religion, from civil code to civil code, from frontier to frontier.
The family is still more variable, because the number of persons
constituting a family, unlike the number of persons constituting a
marriage, varies from one to twenty: indeed, when a widower with a
family marries a widow with a family, and the two produce a third
family, even that very high number may be surpassed. And the conditions
may vary between opposite extremes: for example, in a London or Paris
slum every child adds to the burden of poverty and helps to starve the
parents and all the other children, whereas in a settlement of pioneer
colonists every child, from the moment it is big enough to lend a hand
to the family industry, is an investment in which the only danger is
that of temporary over-capitalization. Then there are the variations
in family sentiment. Sometimes the family organization is as frankly
political as the organization of an army or an industry: fathers being
no more expected to be sentimental about their children than colonels
about soldiers, or factory owners about their employees, though the
mother may be allowed a little tenderness if her character is weak. The
Roman father was a despot: the Chinese father is an object of worship:
the sentimental modern western father is often a play-fellow looked to
for toys and pocket-money. The farmer sees his children constantly: the
squire sees them only during the holidays, and not then oftener than he
can help: the tram conductor, when employed by a joint stock company,
sometimes never sees them at all.
Under such circumstances phrases like The Influence of Home Life, The
Family, The Domestic Hearth, and so on, are no more specific than The
Mammals, or The Man In The Street; and the pious generalizations founded
so glibly on them by our sentimental moralists are unworkable.
When households average twelve persons with the sexes about equally
represented, the results may be fairly good. When they average three the
results may be very bad indeed; and to lump the two together under
the general term The Family is to confuse the question hopelessly. The
modern small family is much too stuffy: children "brought up at home"
in it are unfit for society. But here again circumstances differ. If the
parents live in what is called a garden suburb, where there is a good
deal of social intercourse, and the family, instead of keeping itself to
itself, as the evil old saying is, and glowering at the neighbors over
the blinds of the long street in which nobody knows his neighbor and
everyone wishes to deceive him as to his income and social importance,
is in effect broken up by school life, by out-of-door habits, and by
frank neighborly intercourse through dances and concerts and theatricals
and excursions and the like, families of four may turn out much less
barbarous citizens than families of ten which attain the Boer ideal of
being out of sight of one another's chimney smoke.
All one can say is, roughly, that the homelier the home, and the more
familiar the family, the worse for everybody concerned. The family ideal
is a humbug and a nuisance: one might as reasonably talk of the barrack
ideal, or the forecastle ideal, or any other substitution of the
machinery of social organization for the end of it, which must always
be the fullest and most capable life: in short, the most godly life. And
this significant word reminds us that though the popular conception of
heaven includes a Holy Family, it does not attach to that family
the notion of a separate home, or a private nursery or kitchen or
mother-in-law, or anything that constitutes the family as we know it.
Even blood relationship is miraculously abstracted from it; and the
Father is the father of all children, the mother the mother of all
mothers and babies, and the Son the Son of Man and the Savior of his
brothers: one whose chief utterance on the subject of the conventional
family was an invitation to all of us to leave our families and follow
him, and to leave the dead to bury the dead, and not debauch ourselves
at that gloomy festival the family funeral, with its sequel of hideous
mourning and grief which is either affected or morbid.