The moral responsibility of the father for his children, carrying with it as it did the liability of prison or even death for the misbehavior of sons, was governed by various statutes which show in the Middle Ages a growth toward freeing children from parental control and placing upon them when "of age" a definite and personal legal bond and penalty.

For example, we read that the Anglo-Saxon law held many children at the age of ten responsible for some acts which were forbidden, but that most youth were legally minors until the age of fifteen. Until the early period of the eighteenth century it was still possible for a parent to legally sell his children, "a girl up to fourteen, a boy under seven." And after that period a wayward or troublesome son or daughter, or any of the offspring, when the parents could be proved financially incapable of their care, could be sent to convent or monastery.

The ability to bear arms seems to have been the criterion for legal coming of age. The Romans, with their heavy weapons, held the son in tutelage until the age of fifteen. The Germans, with their use of light darts, gave their sons power of self-control at the age of twelve. In the heyday of feudalism "a knight's son became of age when he could swing his father's sword" and "a yeoman's son when he could swing his father's battle-axe," and by that process the fathers were released from liability to punishment for their sons' misdemeanors.

On the other hand, after the tenth century, no child under ten could be punished for his father's crimes unless it could be shown that he was a party to them, and the custom of carrying family autonomy so far as to wipe out innocent and guilty alike, when a treason or crime of any sort angered the powers in command, was practically ended.

When the beginnings of the modern industrial order appeared and burghers shared with knights and yeomen the social responsibility, "a burgher's son acquired freedom and legal responsibility when he could count and measure broadcloth." The wife gained a growing and perilous freedom from laws which increased her direct relationship to the state. She attained the power of being punished even by the death penalty for broken laws far earlier than she attained the slightest influence in the passage or enforcement of those laws. It was generally thought, however, until very recently, that if a wife "did not behave" it was the husband's fault and right that he should suffer the consequences.

The Responsibility of the Ancient Father Commensurate With His Power.—Again, it must be remembered that if the ancient father was by virtue of his military training and activities separated from the domestic interests which he so often and with full social permission sacrificed to war and preparation for war, he was at the same time under perpetual conscription by the community of which he was a part to serve as protector of his own family and the families of those of the same social group. The social pressure upon the father-head of the family was therefore severe and unremitting, since he was in so many ways responsible for, as truly as master of, his household. It was no light task to be a worthy head of a patriarchal family in all the ages when growing law was superseding custom and advancing civilization was increasing the complexity of social life. This task when well achieved gave to man a serious sense of his duty as well as a firm conviction of his power.

We see the fruits of that ethical training in family responsibility in many of man's noblest traits; preeminently in his recognition of the duty of protection of the weak and young, and in his devotion to his own, against the world if need be.

The vast outreach of man's intelligence toward the organization of the state, of the industrial order, of the church, of the formal educative process, of the means of transportation, of the systems of finance, of the development and application of scientific knowledge, and even of the arts and of literature, all reveal the effect of his early schooling in the representative responsibility of fatherhood to society.

We speak to-day of the "father of modern invention" in this or that particular. We have not ceased to praise the "good provider" or to esteem him highly who has a well-ordered home.

Moral Qualities in Women Developed by Masculine Selection.—Moreover, we are all now recognizing the fact that we owe to the ownership of woman by man a secondary sex-selection of inestimable value. It may be an extreme statement to say, with at least one sociologist, that the ages of woman's subjection to man was not too great a price to pay for the gift to the race of feminine beauty and charm. We can assert, however, that some moral values which men insisted upon in the women they chose for wives gave the race what at one time it needed most and still needs: namely, the habit of service to others, and the power of adaptability to changing and often difficult conditions.

Man's genius for organization institutionalizes every aspect of thought and activity he takes under his control. The institution, organized at first for the benefit of personal life and the life-process, tends invariably toward a fixity of method and hardness of substance that finally sacrifices life-growth to its iron pressure until a new form of institution makes its way through struggle and suffering.

The relation of women to men and of women to family life demanded of most women easy and rapid adjustment to the requirements of others and led to their mediation between every institution and the personal life. The household mastership of men, and the fact that they could choose for favor the sort of women most agreeable to them as masters, placed at the centre of the family, and therefore at the centre of the life-process itself, the type of womanhood that lent itself most easily to social adjustment. And it placed that type at the centre of the social order when the "cake of custom" most needed to be broken to allow of a more democratic association. The type of womanhood which masculine selection, working through long ages, has made the essentially "womanly" type, is one in which physical beauty, charm of manner, general rather than special ability, affectionate and competent response to family, easy adaptability to whatever social system her marriage might give entrance, and unswerving loyalty to the ethical traditions and religious sanctions of her day and generation, combine to attract the love of man and the devotion of children.

Some of these elements of character are especially needed to-day in order to make democracy work, and to secure against dangers incident to decay of autocratic control, and hence may later prove of great social use in the modern state.

The idealization of womanhood by man, which seems never to have made him uneasy in claiming control of her person or estate, has embodied itself in the artist's pictures of Truth and Justice, and Knowledge and Charity, in feminine forms. These bear witness to the fact that even when men were most insistent upon father-rights they were moulded by intimate companionship with women in the home to some appreciation of the value of feminine personality.

While, therefore, the moral discipline which came to the mother in the old order of the family, led her to understand the value of personality, and the need of ever-increasing effort to make the individual lives within the family circle comfortable, happy and good, the moral discipline of the patriarchal father led toward an increasing conquest of nature, of other men, and of all the social forces, in the interest of his own family group. This led at last to his impersonation of many ideals in the "eternal womanly that leads us on."

The Higher Ideal of Fatherhood.—Throughout this many-sided discipline of marriage and parenthood there has been growing an ideal of fatherhood so noble and so tender that it has easily become the central thought in many religions.

The "Heaven-father" is an old picture. The Father in Heaven persists in the effort to bring the Supreme near to the human heart. A law of obedience unquestioned, a rule of conduct making an actual Way of Life, a power unlimited and yet a loving-kindness that marks the sparrow's fall and has regard for the prodigal as for the upright son—surely there must have been uncounted fathers of goodness and wisdom passing praise to have made the name the easiest one by which to call the Divine!

Meanwhile, the average life has been working, often unconsciously, toward a condition in which the patriarchal father is out of drawing with his own industry, his own political system, and his own theology. To-day we give the wives and potential wives contract-power, private ownership of property, opportunity for economic independence, vocational training, entrance to all higher educational institutions, adult responsibility under the law, and the franchise on equal terms with men.

In the light of these accomplished facts vain is the effort of such writers as Devoe, in his Studies in Family Life, to show that "the Christian family" still makes women "subject" and holds "all goods in common" in the husband's name.

Incomplete Adjustment and Equality of Rights in the Family.—There is, however, great confusion of mind as to the extent of change in the father-office which the new independence of wives and mothers should effect. Take, for example, the matter of the financial responsibility of the husband and father. If a married woman has independent property, shall she not be liable as well as her husband for the support of the children? If so, what becomes of the suits at law against "Family Deserters" heretofore applied alone to husbands and fathers? A study of this class of offenders under the law, published in 1904, shows that in New York alone something over $100,000 was collected in one year in "alimony from men, two-thirds of whom were deserting husbands." In these cases the duty of providing financially for wife and child pursued the husbands and fathers after they had run away from home. In the 591 cases of "Family Deserters" especially studied two-thirds were men and one-third women, showing not only that the law deals more severely with men than with women, even when women are held to be responsible for any sort of family support, but that desertion is for the most part a masculine offense. If it can be shown that fathers are or should be relieved from the age-long financial responsibilities of family support, will the showing in "Family Desertion" be different?

There seems to be a consensus of opinion that in present conditions that family is likely to be in the best economic condition, in which the chief, if not the entire, income is supplied by the husband and father, leaving the wife and mother to be specially responsible for the translation of that income in terms of family comfort. That is admirably indicated in Mrs. Hinman Abel's book, Successful Family Life on the Moderate Income. Does that condition still carry with it the sole economic responsibility of the husband and father for the wife as well as for the children? Or shall the phrase now beginning to be used in laws passed against family desertion apply to the wife only when it is proved she is "in necessitous circumstances" without her husband's provision? For the children the newer laws say "him" or "her" when providing penalties for "any person," either father or mother, "who wilfully neglects or refuses to provide for the support and maintenance of minor children."

The claim, then, of the wife seems to be increasingly one of either invalid "conditions," or "necessitous circumstances," or "lack of other means of support," when defaulting husbands are brought to court; and the claim of children upon parents is increasingly extended from father to mother whenever there are means at hand from either to supply the children's needs.

In respect to the "choice of domicile," always the right of the husband and father, there is little change in law; but the strong movement to secure to women independent nationality, in place of automatic following of the nationality of their husbands, will, if carried out, make the supreme choice (that of the country to which one shall pledge allegiance) a legal right of women as of men. That in itself would make some confusion in cases where international marriages give separate national interest.

In respect to man's responsibility for national defense in the interest of home and native land, he is alone conscripted to-day, as of old, for fighting service on the battle-field, but all manner of social demands, almost as imperative as a governmental draft, now call women to special service in war time. In peace, the taxes know no sex, and the rules of the business game are not amenable to chivalry.

In the matter of professional and vocational training and opportunity, men and women are largely on an equal footing, in the United States, at least. And apparently for the first time in human history a man and a woman, both eminent in their line of work, may seriously ask which of the two earns the larger salary, and hence it may be which of the two can do more toward family support.

The full consequences of women's moral acts now fall wholly upon her in the case of disobedience to law. There is still, it is true, in some parts of the civilized world respect for "an unwritten law" that excuses a man for killing a rival in his wife's affections, but for the most part she stands on her own feet and he on his when there is question of crime or misdemeanor.

The Marriage Question To-day the "Husband-problem."—The whole situation is changing in so many ways as relates to the mutual obligation of men and women in family life that Havelock Ellis is right when he says "the marriage question to-day is much less the wife-problem than the husband-problem." That is to say, the single headship of the family is invaded and yet the methods of adjustment of two heads are not yet clear in either law or custom. As the Bishop of Hereford said at the meeting of his brother Bishops, in which the resolution to omit the word "obey" from the marriage service of the Church of England was withdrawn (on the ground that if presented it would be successfully opposed), "It is obvious to every one that it would not be convenient to have two heads to a family."[5] There are already two heads in every up-to-date family in the United States! The real difficulty now is to see how best to adjust mutual responsibilities toward each other and toward the children involved, and to write a consistent and uniform set of statutes into the law. That law respecting marriage and the family, partly inherited without change from the patriarchal order, partly altered in particulars in obedience to some popular demand based on cramping conditions made by the law whenever it was enforced, after it was already outgrown, needs careful revision. Ignored so often by the moral and intellectual elite, inconsistently set aside by new measures passed without regard to what is already established as precedent, all laws respecting marriage, the family, and the parental relation which have come down from the past, need thorough overhauling and the best wisdom should be exercised in full revision and codification.

The husband and father, meanwhile, many times holds firmly to his old-time fine chivalry and adds justice without spoiling his relationship to the family. The wife keeps her inherited aptitude for loving care of husband and children, and adds a new independence of thought and action without danger of confusion of ideal or function.

Can Women Have All the New Freedom and Also All the Old Privileges?—Some women, however, are trying the absurd and dangerous experiment of seeing how much they can take from men in the old lines of "support" and how little they can give in the old lines of service; how much they can gain in the new freedom and how little they can pay for it in individual work. These are the women who are willing that the family property shall be in their name for the purpose of cheating creditors, and at the same time acknowledge no obligation to support the children from a common family fund. These are the women who demand their liberty to achieve and deny their duty to help. These are the women who take "alimony" from a man with whom they will not live and have married for their own convenience. They are the women who have independent incomes from inheritance or from vocational success and yet excuse themselves from any responsibility toward even invalid husbands, and never see the parental bond as now binding both fathers and mothers alike.

Many men are struggling in some confusion of mind as to the outcome of this new tendency to equalize rights and opportunities, and to the credit of most of them, be it spoken, they want to do the right thing.

It is now for women to preserve the father, the best of him, and for men to still call for the mother, the noblest of her, in the new adjustments that wait for full realization of the new democracy in the family.

Here, again, we need not wait for perfect consistency in law, or full understanding of social tendencies and their outcome, to find our way in life. Love shows the way—love between intellectual and moral equals, who, in trying to adjust their own lives to a higher law in which "self-reverencing each and reverencing each," settle all problems on the higher levels of thought and feeling.

New Social Advantages for Fathers.—Meanwhile, again, the father-office stands out in actual living function as never before. The fathers that now show what fatherhood was meant to be—they are legion. Holding the wife and mother in her place of sacred honor, they are to their children the Supreme Court of appeal in grave questions of discipline, the highest functionary of the family in the distribution of honors and rewards, the best comrade in fun, the most delightful companion in games, the strongest challenger in effort, and the symbol of knowledge and power of the community life.

With the new partnership of men and women in the family the father has a chance to be a companion and friend as never before. He has an opportunity to show his children that side which the ancient father often failed to develop, the side of friendship and understanding. To the boy a clear picture of what he would be, to the girl a declaration of the kind of man she would marry, the modern father of the highest type makes possible a modern mother who shall show her son what womanhood may become in freedom, and who can lead her daughter to be, like herself, the flower of all the best of the past.

QUESTIONS ON THE FATHER

1. What, in general, have been the social demands upon husbands and fathers, and how have these been met in the past?

2. What effect has the new freedom of women had upon the autonomy of the family and the legal obligations of the husband and father?

3. Should the relation of men and women to family life be identical? If not, why not? If so, what new agencies can or should be developed to secure what husbands and fathers are now legally obligated to provide?

4. What ideal of fatherhood should we now secure and maintain?

5. In Minnesota, recent bills presented to the Legislature "relating to and regulating marriage" include among the items "prohibition of marriage within six months after a divorce has been granted from a former spouse; and forbidding of marriage between persons either one of whom is epileptic, imbecile, feeble-minded, insane, an habitual drunkard, affected with a venereal disease, or addicted to the use of opium, morphine, or cocaine." This indicates the trend of newer laws regulating marriage. Is this trend justified? If so, how do the laws of your own State compare with others in this particular?

6. Doctor Devine says, "Home is not a boarding-house, but a complex of relations, physical and spiritual, which were never more beautiful, more enduring or more ennobling than in the modern family." Is that true? If so, what contribution must the father continue to make to family success?

FOOTNOTES:

[4] See "Education of the Australian Boy," by A.W. Howitt, in his book, Native Tribes of Southeast Australia, showing the Initiation Ceremonies that separated the youth from family influence.

[5] Since that decision a General Convocation of the American Protestant Episcopal Church has voted to eliminate the word "obey" from its marriage service.



CHAPTER IV

THE GRANDPARENTS

"From my grandfather I learned good morals and the government of temper. From my great-grandfather to know that on education one should spend liberally. From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character. From my mother, piety and beneficence, and abstinence not only from evil deeds but from evil thoughts; and, further, simplicity in way of living. To the gods I am indebted for having good grandparents, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen and friends."—MARCUS AURELIUS.

"Honorable age is not that which standeth in length of years, nor that is measured by number of years; but wisdom is the grey hair unto men and an unspotted life is old age. The multitude of the wise is the welfare of the world; and the righteous live forevermore."—THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON.

"Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the springs of life.

"Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. We grow old only by deserting our ideals. In every heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from other men and women, and from the Infinite, so long is every one young."—SAMUEL ULMAN.

"Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made." —BROWNING.

Relative Increase of the Aged in Modern Life.—The outstanding fact concerning the aged is that they increase proportionately to population as civilization increases. Easier conditions of living make for longer life. Public sanitation, private hygiene, good heating arrangements in each house, good water and plenty of it, sidewalks and porches for easy airing, medical science and the art of nursing made more widely available even for the poor, more physical comforts of every sort, more widely distributed, all tend toward the preservation of life after middle age is reached. They also tend to keep alive many babies who would have died in harder conditions and prolong the life of many invalids who would have succumbed to hardships in early youth. Indeed, Doctor Holmes declared that "the best insurance of a long life was to acquire an incurable disease when young;" while the average of robust health in all modern communities is certainly lowered by the modern methods of preservation of the delicate and the aged.

Savage Treatment of the Old.—In the annals of savage life we find many gruesome tales of intentional disposal of the aged. The use of the old grandmother as a target for the training of young boys in the art of slaying one's enemy is an extreme example. The pathetic couple left behind when the tribe migrated, often with a small supply of food saved for them by some pitiful member of the family from the scanty hoard that must suffice until the next harvest or the next hunting, the neglect and the actual abuse that often made the last days quickly ended, all show that when life is too hard there is no room for the old.

The Relation of Ancestor-worship to Respect for Aged Men.—Two things, at least, helped to give the aged a better place in the social esteem and in the provision for necessities as primitive life developed toward civilization. One was ancestor-worship, which made the father and the grandfather a link, indispensable and therefore honored, in the chain of blood relationship which carried on the generations. This type of religious belief and practice did not, however, work to ease the lot of old women. If the young wife did not have a child, especially a son, she could be repudiated often, and lose her standing in the family relation and hence be subjected to hardships that made her early old and often ended her life while still in middle age. If she had a son and rose to be a grandmother she might attain a most honorable position, having her son's wife to be her servant and her son's son's wife to be her slave. Even with the best intentions, the patriarchal father could not attend to all the details of government within his usually extensive household, and no man has yet lived who could manage unassisted a group of women, such as legal polygamy and concubinage brings under one roof, each one determined to get from him the best possible conditions for her own life and that of her children.

The Position of Chief-mother in Ancient Family.—These facts often made the position of the chief-mother in a family one of such importance that they became her insurance against want and ill-treatment. The position of the chief-mother in the collective family is now one of the vital problems of Eastern nations trying to adjust the family system to modern ideas. The father's power is so much a delegated responsibility and the relationship between the lesser wives and the younger wives so much closer to the chief-mother than to the chief-father that the grandmother's position may be that of a tyrant. A series of questions which a group of Chinese students in an American university has drawn up include such as the following: "Where a young girl is brought into the home to be reared as the future bride of the boy in the family, is there any limit to the authority of the mother-in-law?" The mother-in-law in such cases being usually the older or chief-mother, she is really the grandmother-in-law.

Memory of the Aged Valued in Primitive Life.—The position of aged men in primitive life secured some advantages because of the dependence upon memory for the carrying on of continued and conscious social existence before literature was born. The aged man who had been an important member of some military order or "fraternity" and remembered the exact words and motions of a valued ritual could be sure of having his continued life provided for by all those who desired to learn and to retain the means of perpetuating the religious cult thus expressed. Also those who remembered vital tribal occurrences and dealings with other tribes and could rehearse the same with exactness must have been considered of social use, and the older they were the more their memory gathered and the more their recital seemed sacred and hence the more the reciter was cherished.

Nothing corresponding to this social value of the aged man, who could make permanent in ritual or in song or in story the experiences of the group, can be traced in the valuation of the experience of the aged woman in the periods before written literature. There were, however, as we can clearly see, traditions and customs, taboos and permitted familiarities so many and varied that old women with good memories and a personality that commanded attention must have had some accepted value within the inner circles of family experience. We get from folk-lore some clear intimations of this prestige and power of the ancient old woman in intimate social relationship.

The power of old men received a great accession when political and religious orders and legal rules began to make social organization more definite and precise. "Old men for council; young men for war" had an early meaning. "The venerable Senate" is not a modern phrase. The "reverend father of the church" is an ancient allusion to the respect for and leadership of the aged in religious circles. The Popes of to-day begin their high service at an age that is in many positions a "dead line." The hardening of the social arteries in religion, government, politics, and law, however, while making old men more sure of their place in life, made old women less valued and worse treated. The ages of mediaeval experience and of the feudal order, until chivalry began to affect the sex-relation, show almost unbelievable cruelty toward many aged women. The idea of the church fathers that women were, at best, a necessary evil and at worst the form most often assumed by the Devil of temptation, made it seem that all divergence from the purely domestic type was proof of collusion with evil powers. And all nervous ailments were once deemed a sign of the witches compact with Satan. Hence, since the unmitigated drudgery and the hard conditions of the lives of most women made them not only prematurely old but also given to nervous prostration (before that title appeared in the medical lists), the numbers of old women tortured, burned, drowned, beaten, and stoned to death, and otherwise destroyed, seems almost incredible to modern ideas, although so well authenticated in history.

Old Women and the Witchcraft Delusion.—The young woman, being necessary for the bearing and rearing of children and the carrying on of important, although despised, labors, might escape active ill treatment. The old woman, old at thirty-five or forty, often, was not only considered a useless burden but a positive nuisance if she were at all "highstrung" or "meddling." Hence the natural conception, in a time of superstitious fear of evil spirits, of her complicity with those spirits made her seem a danger to society. The history of the witchcraft delusion and the cruelties that were a part of that delusion show that aged women almost alone suffered from that nightmare of human ignorance.

Doubtless, however, there were even in those days grandmothers beloved and protected, busy even to the last with caretaking of childhood and the rites of hospitality; grandmothers whom their sons and even their sons-in-law revered for some quality of gentleness and sympathy found useful in family emergencies; grandmothers whose shrewd wisdom of experience and fine gift of understanding made them invaluable members of the family circle. Folk-lore and ancient song give hint of these.

The waste of old age in women, however, is, as has been indicated elsewhere by the writer, the greatest of all social wastes since time began. The idea that women were serviceable only for the procreative function and the hardest drudgery of family service, and that they lost all social value when they ceased to be attractive to the senses of men or ended their personal ministrations to their own little children, long obtained. This idea is responsible for the further conception of old women as not only useless but a disagreeable burden.

Hence, while old men rose during many ages in social regard and protection and care, old women became more and more miserable and ill-treated where the collective family was superseded by the newer type of individualistic bond between one man, one woman, and their children. In the ancient patriarchal and collective family the oldest mother might reign as queen. In the more modern type of family, made the social fashion by what is called Christian civilization, the aged woman, the grandmother, unless exceptionally attractive and sweet-tempered and exceptionally able to help in the household tasks, was the victim of the change from one system to the other. The fact that women, if well-developed and well-treated, are younger at seventy than are men and that more women than men live to be aged than when the conditions of living were less favorable to the weak and delicate, gave early in our civilization what must have seemed far too many old women.

While women had the constant burden of a "steady job" within the home, harder and more continuous than men had in their handicraft labor, yet men were killed in battle in large numbers, and were physically able to dangerously overdo in some labor "spurt" and hence more women than men lived to be old. Hence, again, there were far more grandmothers than grandfathers in the family in all mediaeval life. This led to many cruelties to old women who were deemed "superfluous." While, however, the actual experience of common people made conditions so hard for grandmothers, the idealism within the religious field was favorable to the mother of any age. The same church fathers who shunned marriage as a cowardly concession to the body, and who wrote flaming animadversions upon women in general, gave the Virgin and Child their adoration and made a place of honor and of comfort to those women who chose the religious vocation outside the home.

Older Women in Religious Vocations Honored in Middle Ages.—These women, the Ladies of the Abbeys and the special servitors of the Church, reached the first independent places of distinction which women in Christian civilization attained and to them, at least, age added power and veneration. Hence, even while they ignored their relationship to common womanhood, they often allayed superstitious cruelty toward other old women.

Whenever any subject class develops within it a genius or a quality of talent or a specialty of activity that gives personal prestige, that class as a whole gains recognition. The Carlisle Indian who beats at the game of football; the Afric-American artist whose works claim admiration; the representative of the backward nation who shows power of achievement formerly supposed to be the sole accomplishment of the conquering peoples, not only makes a place for himself, he opens the door to wider opportunity for his class. So the woman of the religious orders, when of scholarly achievement and of commanding intellect, showed these qualities in increasing example as she grew older and more experienced, and so worked to make a place for the older woman in every sphere of life.

Slowly it began to dawn upon the common consciousness that the individualistic family of one young couple and their children needed props from within if it had lost those from without—those ancient props which sustained as well as controlled young fathers and mothers in the collective family. Hence grandmothers, and grandfathers, as well, became of recognized use in the care and upbringing of children. The picture of the grandmother by the fireside holding the youngest baby and the grandfather coming in with a gift for the young mother, who is manifestly pleased, with the young father in the background delighted at the family welcome for his offspring, is not only old but the theme of many of the world's best-loved paintings and stories.

To-day Comparatively Few Really Old at Seventy.—To-day there has come about a wholly new condition in the most advanced centres of social life in respect to the aged. In the first place, there are few "old" grandmothers left. There are grandmothers, but they are sprightly and give little token of being passee or laid on the shelf. There are few old men left. There are those who have passed the allotted term of threescore years and ten, but they well know and make all others understand that this was a mistaken limit to human powers. They look forward to usefulness until eighty, at least, and now are encouraged to feel that one hundred years is the natural span of life. There are, it is true, few really important studies of how to keep people from growing senile and really old before the time now set for failure of powers. Such studies, however, are prophesied in a small "endowment for the study of diseases of the aged" already given, and more in the statement of appeals for increase of such endowment. The tendency now is setting strongly not only toward the lengthening of life but toward the lengthening of the mental and physical power that alone makes long life desirable.

We shall see more and more of this interest as medical science reaches out further and further toward lessening all the ills that flesh is heir to.

Meanwhile, what is the actual condition in the various strata of life, in our own country, for example, in respect to the protection, the care, the comfort, the happiness, and the general welfare of the aged? In the first place, the speeding up of machinery has made many manual workers prematurely old. The worst thing, perhaps, about child-labor has been that, owing to premature "laying off" of the fathers, the children have been set to earn money for family needs, and have acquired, with their pay envelope, a contempt or disrespect for the father in ways that have reversed the natural relationship and given society much use for the Children's Court. This disrespect shown the father, even when he is only of middle age, passes on in increased measure to the grandfather who has been pushed aside from self-support and family support while still comparatively young and has never been able to again catch on to the wheels of industry. The fact that he eats and does not work; that he takes space in the crowded tenement and does not aid in paying its rent; that he has no light employment that can give his fading mental powers an impulse toward ambition and energy, all make the position of the grandfather in many homes of struggling poverty a most unhappy one. In such homes the grandmother is often still seen to be really useful. She may make it possible for the young mother to earn outside the home. She may, if skilled in sewing, ease the expense of ready-made clothes. She may, at least, and usually does, relieve the mother of much care of the babies. There are several reasons why more aged men are sent to public institutions for final care than aged women of the same general type of family, but the most important reason is that most women have skill in domestic matters; and domestic service is needed everywhere, no matter how many unemployed walk the streets. Needed most in the poorest home, the help of the grandmother is often appreciated in inverse ratio to the income.

In the circles above the poverty line there is much variety in the estimation and in the treatment of grandfathers and grandmothers. The ideal picture of a family always has in its background, if not in the very front, an old man and an old woman, benevolent and sweet-natured, who can be depended upon to be more indulgent to the children than even the father or mother and who appear always in family emergencies to renew their youth of service in behalf of the younger generation.

What is thus ideally pictured is a fact in thousands of families. No one can say that it is always best to have three generations under one roof, but all who have had a happy family experience believe that the grandparents should be "handy by," to use the Scotch phrase. The grandparents' house in the country is best of all, where all family and national holidays can be celebrated with due form and in accordance with ancient tradition. The grandparents' house for the city children is next best, if in a suburb near by where more space and independence of movement are possible than in the city residence. The grandparents' house or apartment in the same or a near-by city is, however, not at all to be despised as a refuge when "Mother does not understand," or "Father is so particular."

Is Any House Large Enough for Two Families?—Although the proverb says, "No house was yet made large enough for two families," the residence of one grandparent (oftener the mother than the father) within the family circle has often proved highly successful if only a few rules have been observed. One of these rules is that each adult person shall have one place strictly his of her own. Another is a rule, so difficult for some aged persons of both sexes to obey, namely, that each person married is doubly entitled to individual choices in action without interference even from parents, since each such married person has to adjust his or her ideas to another person. To work out full agreement between themselves is all that any married couple should be expected to accomplish. Hence, in the nature of things, the grandparents who are so near the new family that they know and see everything have a far more difficult role to play than do the grandparents who have their own home and simply visit and are visited. It is, however, often a necessity of financial provision and often a choice of ease in ministration to the needs of the aged, that brings one grandparent or even two within the daughter's or son's household. The time-worn jokes about the "mother-in-law" are based upon the fact that it is more often the daughter than the son who is expected to or needs to personally care within her own home for the mother. The son is not so bound by social custom to take his mother in. Hence, more husbands than wives have trials with their parents-in-law.

Reasons Why Husbands Desert Their Families.—The statistics of deserting husbands, as compiled in a careful study made by Lillian Brandt and Roger Baldwin, show that among the chief causes of "leaving home" is "trouble with the wife's relations." In these cases it is not only the grandmother, although she is often a member of the disturbed family; it is also often other relatives—a sister, a brother, or a first husband's people—who cause trouble. The wife's mother is, however, often enough a member of the household the husband leaves behind to give some point to the coarse and often unjust jokes concerning the mother-in-law.

Where the feeling is right, and both generations reasonable and just, there are still many problems of adjustment arising from an attempt to bring either or both parents of the married couple into the same household. The first problem is that of the financial support. It ought not to be the case that any aged couple or any widowed father or mother should be left wholly dependent upon their children. The demand for better economic provision for the aged is one of the most vital and pressing of social needs. The difficulty of taking care of the father and mother when the children are coming on with pressing needs of their own is felt acutely in cases of narrow income. The call is almost universal to provide more adequately for grandparents. How can we meet this call?

The Financial Provision for Old Age.—In the case of those whose earning capacity is not equal to saving a sufficient old-age provision while at work the claim for an Old-age Pension is growing. This may be either a subsidy from the state, a joint pension from the state and the employing business in which the man or woman has worked, or it may be a threefold provision contributed to from the savings of the laborer, the quota from the employer, and the state subsidy. Since no insurance system that discourages thrift, or fails to encourage it, is socially sound, the latter seems the best ideal. There may be, in addition, or as a substitute, a family provision on the plan so well suggested by Mr. Taber in his book, The Business of the Household, a plan that calls for the definite setting apart of an "Old-age Fund," to which each child shall contribute in the years when he is earning most, not as a gift but as a "deferred payment," as it were, for all that the parents give in childhood. To this Old-age Fund any savings of the father and mother may be added until a sufficient sum is secured for comfortable care in old age. Mr. Taber indicates that at least five dollars out of every twenty-five saved should be thus assigned and invested only in the safest manner and held inviolate, no matter what the temporary needs of the family may be, until the work-time has passed. Whatever plan may be adopted, it is certain that family well-being and the happiness of the aged alike call for a better and more adequate old-age provision.

The laborers who earn less than the required sum for a decent standard of life for father, mother, and children cannot, of course, make any provision for their own old age or care for dependent parents. In such families the public institutions or privately endowed and managed "Homes for the Aged" offer the only and often a comfortable and sometimes a happy place for the grandparents. The movement for this social care of the aged has many phases. In some countries, as in The Danish Care of the Aged, so well described by Edith Sellers in her book of that name, there is a far more complete and generous use of public funds than we have in the United States, a possibility of careful grading of persons in appropriate groups, and a removal of the crushing sense of public charity which those of English ancestry so often feel when obliged "to go upon the town;" yet this leaves much to be desired.[6]

In the grade of economic condition above that in which it is a dire struggle to make both ends meet for the husband, wife, and their little children, there are to be considered five ways in which the care of the aged can be made adequate and not too great a burden upon those of young and those of middle life.

Needed Ways of Preparing for Old Age.—First: There must be devised, as indicated above, better and surer ways of insurance, savings, and pensions, by which the grandparents can be made more or less independent even in families of limited means.

Second: There must he measures established for the prevention of premature old age, measures operating in health and in labor-power to prolong self-dependence by means of individual earnings, to the fullest extent possible.

Third: There must be for men, as for women, provision in vocational training by which each person may have in reserve some light and interesting form of activity, possibly of earning value, which may serve as occupation when strenuous work is outgrown.

Fourth: There must be a clearer understanding of the mutual obligations of parents and children so that the care of the aged may seem more often, what it really is in most cases, not a charity from within the family circle, to be passed around with jealous eye for just distribution of family burdens within the group of children, but a family debt, for the payment of which early and constant provision must be made by all members of the family during the years of largest earning power. If the grandparents have had a chance to save enough to pay all their own share of the family expense to the end of life, well and good. If, on the contrary, as is so often the case (now that the social standard for child-care and child-education has risen to such heights of parental requirement), the parents, now old, have spent so lavishly on the schooling and marriage setting up of their sons and daughters that they have not been able to save for themselves, then the obligation of the children is clear and the grandparents should never feel themselves pensioners.

Fifth: Actual old age, senility, failure of physical and mental power, should be postponed in each case as long as possible by active measures of mental and moral discipline consciously undertaken by personal effort. "The making of mind" is not an art of youth alone. It is an art of middle age and of the older years. Says William James: "The man who daily inures himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition and self-denial in unnecessary things, will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast." Such a one also will resist the decay of powers and be able to keep young when the years tell of many birthdays.

To go over these points with greater detail: The first requirement, namely, to make sure that all possible financial provision is made for grandparents while they are yet young and capable enough in their work to save, is one that is more and more recognized. Moreover, the tendency in every country is increasingly toward state recognition of the duty of society toward its aged members. The proposition of Victor Berger, then the solitary socialistic member of the Congress of the United States, to pension every person over the age of sixty is one that will hardly be carried into effect. The objection, however, to much existing pensioning by the state which this blanket proposition was intended to offset is that its benefits are mostly for those near the poverty line or below it and hence may be and often is a discouragement to thrift and self-dependence rather than an aid to individual effort.

Pension Laws.—For example, in Great Britain, the pension law made all eligible to state aid who were over seventy years of age and whose personal income did not exceed one hundred and five dollars per year. Such were entitled to aid to the extent of $1.25 a week, and those having incomes above that sum were entitled to receive a graduated series of state benefits. This aid from the state has doubtless made the condition of many aged persons far more tolerable and even happy in families where, previous to the passage of that Act, the extra expense involved in caring for the grandparents was the last straw that broke the back of independency. In all cases where the addition of a few dollars weekly to the family income is an actual and obvious help to family comfort, state pensions for the aged have worked good results in family feeling and good-will and affection. Where, however, the state aid comes without any contributory savings from the individual or his employer and where to qualify for its benefit all must have an income of very small proportion, it is in effect a class measure and obviously for the relief of the very poor.

The higher family interest demands that every system of insurance or of subsidy, or of occasional aid to any member of the family, should tend directly and powerfully toward and not away from thrift, work capacity, and sound business principles. Society-at-large must now make good in some makeshift fashion for many social failures of the past, but its main currents of pressure upon the individual life should be in the production of a line of normal and successful men and women, rather than attempts to make all share alike, whatever their personal quality, when old age comes on. This principle makes it imperative that some larger and wiser plan than has as yet been attempted shall make all systems of financial care of the aged a positive aid toward self-dependence and social serviceability.

Old-age Home Insurance.—In this connection a radical suggestion is offered, namely, a scheme for Old-age Home Insurance. It is a well-known fact that the waiting list of most private Homes for the Aged is long, and that men and women wait piteously for the death of an "inmate" to give them entrance to the only place of comfort and security life can offer them. It is also well known that there are more aged persons who need the companionship of those of their own generation, who need quiet and relief from the noise and excitement of young children, than can now secure those requirements in the homes of their daughters or their sons. It is again true, although not so well recognized or understood, that most aged persons unable financially to retain a personal home would prefer a choice between residence in a child's family, however dutiful and generous that child might be, and residence elsewhere. It is also true that the care of aged parents in her own home is often too great a tax upon the time and strength of the housemother when there are many young children. Again, it is true that many aged people prefer a place they can call "home," even if it is only one room, to which they can invite their friends and from which they may pay visits to their relatives, even their nearest and dearest, and return to their own small quarters at will. It is also true that although most elderly persons live for years in quite good health and need little actual nursing, they do profit by occasional attentions which a nurse can give, and few such elderly people can afford or obtain this occasional service in either a home of their own or in one shared with a child.

These facts indicate a need for a larger and a more democratic provision of homes for the aged, a provision that can be more easily made by personal effort through the younger years of life, and one that can receive social aid at less cost to personal dignity and with less rigid rules of managing "Boards" than the present prevailing type of Homes for the Aged supply. The boarding house sought by many aged persons who prefer independence of life to living in the family of their children, and sought also by many well-to-do elderly widows and widowers who find that the personal home is too lonely or too expensive to keep up for one alone—the average boarding house is a sorry substitute for a home. For the young, who hope to escape it soon, it is tolerable. For the aged, who need to feel settled, it is often a most unhappy dwelling-place. Beside, any one who tries to find a place for the elderly boarder will find that prices are often prohibitive for all but the rich, and few boarding mistresses want old people.

A state pension has often, as has been said, been proposed for all aged people. Let us suppose that instead of this some scheme of State Insurance for Old-age Homes be devised; a scheme in which after the payment of a certain specified sum a share in a Boarding Home might be secured. If the state or if any private Agency or Foundation could provide the "plant," a suitable building and its repairs and fundamental expenses of upkeep, with one salaried superintendent whose character and ability could be guaranteed, the running expenses of a Boarding Home could be met easily by the limited means of many who now lack the security of an institutional provision and in consequence lack also many essentials of old-age comfort.

A skilled budget-maker could determine the numbers required in each household to make the board low and a sympathetic social worker could suggest the cooeperative features of management most likely to give successful results in the composite home. The entrance age in such a Boarding Home could be lower than that required in the usual type of privately endowed Home for the Aged and thus a felt need be met for a suitable home for those between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five. In these privately endowed Homes for the Aged the entrance fees range from $100 to $1,000, and beneficiaries are required to give up all the property of any kind of which they may be possessed when they enter this permanent residence. This is not unjust, but it is often an added trial to the independent nature. There is need of far larger provision for the old in Homes for Aged Men, Aged Women, and Aged Couples. No one can give anything but gratitude for the opportunities they now offer or fail to hope for their increase. There is, however, a special need for some social engineering which can initiate Boarding Homes for the Elderly. Many of these are still strong and well, but need special consideration in particular ways. Many others are not ill, but delicate, and in need not of full-time nursing care but of occasional good offices of trained helpers. One nurse, a "practical nurse" or a trained nurse past in age and strength full service of her profession, could easily give occasional service needed for twenty or more elderly persons in usual health or for ten or more aged, in greater need of care but not helpless, if all were under the same roof. The cooeperative plans that often fail in serving the family of father, mother, and children, may be found exactly suited to special classes, and among them the aged. The Social Settlements were started to serve and have served the neighborhood needs of the poor and the immigrant. They have also, incidentally, demonstrated the financial advantages of cooeperative housekeeping. A company of congenial people living together in groups of twenty to forty can secure the essentials of food, shelter, and necessary service at a cost per person far below the average expense for boarding or private housekeeping. This does not mean that families can combine easily in multiple households. The personal equation counts for its greatest influence in the real family group, of father, mother, and their children under eighteen years of age. Few, if any, schemes of cooeperative housekeeping have as yet worked well for the combination of such groups.

The aged, especially the aged widow or widower, are not in the direct family group. They belong to but they are not inside the inmost circle. If one alone is left the life of the personal home is broken for the elderly, however dear and kind the children may be. For such there surely needs something easier than the attempt to maintain a separate home with half its life gone. And also something more independent and more secure than either enforced residence with children or compulsory use of the ordinary commercialized boarding house.

To Prevent Premature Old Age.—The second social demand, that premature old age shall be more effectively prevented, is one that is pressed upon this generation with new and imperative considerations. A knowledge of health conditions shows that although infant mortality is greatly lessened and infectious and epidemic diseases greatly brought under control, the diseases of middle age, such as hardening of arteries and kidney and digestive disorders, have increased relatively, while insanity is much more frequent than of old. These facts give us all deep concern. From the failure of health in middle life comes the premature senility and the invalid weakness of old age. The cause of the increase of middle-life diseases, relatively to those of other periods of life, seems to be principally the pressure of business and industrial life upon the worker. The high speed of machinery, the extreme competition in business, the monotony of the specialized manufacturing groups, the weight of great financial enterprises and the struggle to make the family setting equal to the family desires or even the family needs, all tend to make men in middle life fail so often in health and so often leave behind their better sheltered and more tenderly cared-for wives. There is a new movement of great social importance, and one tending directly toward the saving of one-half of the family circle, which is now taking a front place in social interest; namely, the movement for annual medical examinations. The work of the Life Extension Institute leads toward this end and seeks the better adjustment of life and work in the interest of simplicity and mutual service in the family and the better health of all its members.

It is not, however, in the power of the wisest and most unselfish of individuals to so manage the work-power as to insure against premature old age from too great speeding and overstrain. There must be social movement of the most thorough-going sort to prevent the waste of the laborers in all fields. Social workers should remember that it is not alone important to try to safeguard the health and strength of mothers and of potential mothers by laws protecting women and girls in industry. It is as vital a need to safeguard the health and strength and perpetuate the work-power of fathers and potential fathers in order that old age may be not a terror but a blessing to the family. This is emphasized by recent indications that the increase of the diseases of middle age is already checked and that we are gaining ground in this particular.

A recent report of the Federal Department of Commerce through the Bureau of Census shows that there has been a decline in the death-rate for all age periods during the last decade. In the rate for infants under one year of age a decline of twenty-six per cent., or from 13,804 per 100,000 in 1910 to 9,660 per 100,000 in 1920. The death-rate for middle-aged and old people shows an encouraging decrease, that of twelve per cent., in the period above seventy-five years of age. This shows that we are gaining on disease and premature death with every new advance in preventive medicine and the crusade against bad living conditions. This, again, means that in the future we shall have more aged persons in ratio of population than we have had in the past, and indicates the great need of taking measures betimes to make old age not only more mentally strong but more happy and comfortable in condition.

Check Extreme Requirements for Youth in Labor.—There are many requirements for youth in offered opportunities of training and of work which are distinctly detrimental to respect for, and possibility of continued service of, the old. Take, for example, the age limit in many departments of business and manual labor. During the war we had in the countries most denuded of young men a new sort of trial of the middle-aged in positions where it had been thought youth was required. What was the result? The trial made in Chicago by fifteen large employers of labor under the leadership of Mr. Benjamin Rosenthal, was distinctly, to use his words, "to upset the fallacious theory that men between the ages of 45 and 65 are fit only for the scrap-heap." The result of this experiment showed that in some phases of work the older men did as much work in a given number of hours as the younger men; in other departments they did as much in the week or month, from their steadiness and devotion to their work, but not as much in any one day. That is, the older men were less quick, but more steady and, therefore, in the end accomplished as much. In some kinds of labor the older men did better than the younger because usually more patient of detail and less restive in monotonous toil. In the larger enterprises older men are proverbially less speculative, more conservative, less venturesome than the young. American business would, perhaps, not suffer if a larger admixture of these qualities were found in all the walks of commerce and business.

The fact that when a man is at the head of a concern, large or small, he is valued usually more at sixty-five than at thirty-five, and the further fact that thirty-five is often the dead-line for admission to the lower ranks of the same industry or commercial position, is a proof that this age-limit of the worker in lower position is not one of definite knowledge of actual incapacity after forty years of age but rather due to other conditions. Those conditions are, first and foremost, the easier management of younger than of older subordinates. It is hard for many men to "order about," in peremptory fashion, a man older than themselves, and few men can command without abruptness or sharp orders. It is still harder for most men to order about as office assistant or clerk or secretary a woman older than themselves. And fewer men can assume a respectful yet commanding attitude toward women than can do so toward men in their employ. Some embarrassment has yet to be worn off in business relations of the sexes. Moreover, the tendency toward upspeeding of all mechanical manufacture is a part of the rushing spirit of an age which has invented more fast-going things than it has as yet mental power to use wisely or with social safety, and it is true that fewer men over forty can rush in their work than can do so below that age.

Youth is nimble; youth can be snubbed for errors of accomplishment without hurt to a "gentleman's instincts;" youth, although so careless as to often get injured by the swift-going machines, can yet exult in their rapid swing; and, above all, youth is flexible and can be shaped to any form of business requirement decided upon by those higher up. Hence a fictitious value is assigned to youth in all departments of work to-day. Hence, again, a special movement for actual trial of the relative values of workers of different ages in special kinds of work is necessary if we would know whether or not it is possible to prevent that premature old age and tragical financial helplessness at fifty-five or sixty, which makes the workless man or woman a burden where many believe he or she might be still a help to the family income.

We have been a nation of the young. We shall more and more balance the different age-periods, as is already done in the older countries. We should prepare, betimes, for this new aspect of the future's census, by providing against preventable old age by the wiser use of all laborers as long as work-power can be made available for self-dependence.

Need of Experience in Many Fields of Work.—There are certain fields of work on the higher side of social ministration in which the more experienced are more needed than the young. Some one has said that "no man is fit to be a pastor of a church until he has been something else for several years and knows something of life." There is a very real demand for any one, man or woman, who ventures to deal with the spiritual life that he or she shall have more than youth can give of sympathy and understanding. There is need also for larger experience and greater breadth of view in professional social work of all sorts, more than the young man or woman can give who has had college, plus "School for Social Work," and nothing else; but who, because "trained," feels expert. There could not be a greater social mistake than is made by schools which attempt to train for child-care, family visiting, rehabilitation of the dependent, aid to the "down-and-out," succor to the tempted and help to the weak, and yet deny the opportunities of their classes to men and women over thirty-five. The giving of "auditors' privileges," or "special courses for volunteers," or like makeshifts for regular student privileges is not what is required; for such provisions carry with them the idea of less than professional standing and usefulness. The initiation and maintenance and increase of schools of training for social work is one of the great educational and social achievements of the past quarter-century, but the age-limit for entrance in many such schools is a huge mistake. The very essence of true social service to individuals is experience in life. The girl or boy who has had none or little may make a good technician in many departments and may make a fine showing in work that is not personal, and may collect material or knowledge about groups of persons who need help. But the man or woman who is able to be of great value as a "social doctor" is not only born to such service but also is one who has not begun a specialty of social technic too young to have learned something of the difficulty of living. Young students? Yes. But many more who have come later in life to a sense of their social responsibility and to a desire to learn how best to serve society with all that they have gained in rich experience. The psychology of social training must envisage a wider range of years to be most effective.

Prepare Vocationally for Old-age Needs.—The third demand, that every man and woman in early youth or in later youth shall be trained in some light and agreeable occupation that can be pursued, perhaps to economic return, in the days when strenuous labor can no longer be carried on, is one that has as yet received little attention but which should be a matter of deep concern. The fact that so many old women of little physical strength and who require much personal care can yet be useful and therefore actually wanted as helpers in many families is indicative of the fundamental fact in industrial life that a general training for general usefulness, such as the housewife has had through the ages, has some advantages still.

Before Mrs. Perkins Gilman gets all women into some specialty, alongside of the already highly specialized men workers, let us see to it that men get a chance for a more general training! The restless idleness of the man whose specialty of manual labor or definite type of business interest is now beyond his strength or opportunity is a sad thing to see. We have had to develop a special charity to furnish a work-interest to aged men in public institutions. They were so miserable and pathetic without that occupation. Women fare better in this, as in many other elements of labor, for they can do so many things, usually have to do so many things, most of them, in the family, that some one sort of work, at least, is left to them for special old age. "Mother's pies" or grandmother's cakes or needlework or knack at dusting or baby-tending or what not keeps her young and makes her actually a helper even when old. Grandfather's loss of his job, of his specialty of effort, of his hold on the great industrial machine, leaves him too often hopelessly at sea for the passing of time still left to him.

Well-to-do women in the United States, moreover, have acquired through the large leisure inherited wealth or their husband's means have supplied, a social business that has not only delayed old age but nearly obliterated its ancient signs and tokens. The Clubs, the Leagues, the Alliances, the charitable agencies, the institutions of care for the defective, the friendless, the infirm, the dependent children, the countless societies and cooeperative social organizations for social serviceableness, in which women are leaders and chief workers, bear witness that "grandmother" has found a place for her energies after the children have grown and set up households of their own.

If such a grandmother is a member of the daughter's family she is not half so objectionable to daughter's husband as when mother-in-law had a permanent place at the fireside, perhaps in the exact spot where he wanted to put his easy chair, and had to be "taken out" if she ever ventured into the great world. She now has her own interests, often so many and vital that her day is more completely filled than when she was younger. She has her own set of friends and her own use for the energy and power of direction that often in the old days made her a troublesome member of the family. If only she has a chance at her own little cooking, and her own individual sitting room, and has her own income, if ever so small, she may fit well into even a city apartment and no other member of the family be the worse. The thing required for old men and women alike is some work suited to slower motion and lessened strength and greater need for quiet and independent thought. This is a need which more women than men have met to-day, we repeat, but it is one that must be understood and effectively satisfied for men and women alike.

Edward Everett Hale said every man needed "both a vocation and an avocation"—something by which he earned his living and something by which he maintained his interest in activity. It is the avocation that must be planned for. The vocation is often thrust upon one by necessity or chance association. If every aged person had something to do that made each day short and each night a welcome rest much of the friction between the older and the younger members of families would be avoided and life would piece the generations together more perfectly.

The Attitude of Mind Toward Old Age.—Life calls upon us all to prepare while yet young for the lessened power of old age. The removal from the commanding place to the honorable but more difficult position of the ex-leader and the chief-emeritus is a step that requires care.

The attitude of mind that can keep in harmonious touch with the oncoming generation and yet not lose the value of its own day of contribution to the social inheritance is an art to be acquired only by effort and the exercise of moral and mental power. There was, perhaps, never in the history of our civilization so great a gap between the ideals and social practices of the grandparents and those of the third generation. The parents even are feeling themselves too far from the children; the grandparents often realize a vast distance between themselves and the rising generation. The distance is not always the measure of progress. It is not seldom the effect of rapid changes in mechanical appliances, in material agencies and economic conditions, in literary taste and in ideals of culture; an effect which has unsettled youth in the inherited ways and not yet settled them in well-considered new rules of living. The experience that might aid in easing the process of readjustment is not always at hand and not always used when it is attainable. The experience of age is too often shown in dogmatic rules. The inexperience of youth is too often the accompaniment of a childish conviction that everything that has been is wrong and everything that promises to be is best.

There is, therefore, greater need, perhaps, than ever before for wisdom and patience and sympathetic understanding of those from whom one differs within the family life. It is for the grandparents to set the fashion for these new adjustments. They have loved most because they have given most. They have learned most, or could have learned most, because longer in the school of life. And they have but a little way to travel on the long road their children and their children's children must go to meet their fate.

To the lasting credit of human nature be it said that the grandparents of to-day measure as well for the most part as do the parents in these difficult tasks of family adjustment to a rapidly changing social order. It is often the grandparent who sees what the different life of his or her children have meant to the still greater difference in the condition of the grandchild, and can interpret to the latter the reason for the restraint of the parent. It is often through the tenderness and devotion to the aged called out by the grandparents that the son and daughter learn the real depths of parental love. It is often the partial affection of the grandparent for the grandchild that makes a new tie in family love and enables that family love to grow wiser as well as stronger. It may be, as quoted before, that no house is large enough for two families. It surely is true that no family living room is spacious enough for the continuous use of three generations; but it is still more true that with new interests all around the circle of family membership a more varied family life can be managed without friction or loss of privacy for any member if only there is the right attitude of mind. To-day the ideal of the Heaven-father fastens itself as easily to the child's affection for grandpa as on his dependence upon his father. To-day the ideal of mother-love, never lessened even by wrong-doing of the child, is as securely fibred upon the picture of grandma, ever ready to heal and comfort, as upon that of the mother, whose daily ministrations make the child comfortable.

The Special Gifts of the Old to the Home and the World.—In some ways it is surely more easy to believe in goodness at the heart of things because some aged man or woman, closely related by blood and breeding, has been a living example of what must be revered. Moreover, to the family, as to the world-at-large, old age brings a special gift—if that old age is what it may be. Each period of life has its own gift to make. Age should make a precious contribution, even the central faith of life.

Youth, eager, responsive to all noble ambitions and touched by all noble dissatisfactions with what is, makes its plan for what should be on a strictly logical basis. His rejected Evil is wholly evil; his chosen Good without a flaw. Children are all Calvinists; and youth, for the most part, separates its ideas of good and bad as the sheep and goats within its mind. Well that it is so. The law of growth in life is so far from logical, so operative by inconsistent fluctuations, that it is of the greatest social use for each fresh generation of reformers to hew to the line and express that intolerance of compromise which helps the struggling moral sense to clarify the issues of each new day.

In middle life, if the individual worker for better things is not merely a prophesier but has become an actual agent for the realization of his ideal in practical achievement, he suffers many a disillusion, not in respect to his ideal, but in respect to the ease of working it into the body politic or into the compelling purpose of the social mind. That is the time of danger; and how many lose heart and hope and fall weakly by the way when they first learn that to state a truth with power is not enough to insure its acceptance! That one should set himself with courage and faith to the long, slow processes of actual change of the social order after he has learned how difficult that is, is to be indeed a hero—a hero of the actualization of the ideal, even though he dies with the promised land hardly in sight.

In later life comes to many, and should to all, another gift. Not alone the vision of youth, never lost and always dear; not only the strength of open-eyed effort to achieve so much of the ideal, even its very least atom, as the times and the conditions allow and not lose heart that it is so little, but also the interpretative and harmonizing spirit of those who see, beyond the personal ideal and vision and far beyond the personal achievement, the upward march of all mankind—not alone the leaders of that march; not alone those who will and know the upward way, but all who feel the under-current pressure "toward the better, ever onward toward the best," This pressure even those feel who fondly imagine they are holding all life to outgrown patterns, and they prove its power by their unconscious response.

Another gift of insight they may have who grow old in the spirit of youth. It is the gift of seeing in one picture those who have come a long way up the path of progress and those who have but just entered upon it. The harsh judgments of youth, so tonic and useful, that measure moral actions by their exact position in ethical perception (judgment so tonic and useful that youth without that element misses its own gift to human progress) cease to serve in old age for purposes of just discrimination. In later life may come the wisdom of understanding those from whom one differs, the gift of seeing the helpful interrelations of newer and older "mores" in normal human development and the glad recognition that even defective moral vision, though retarding needed changes, may be used by the powers that balance our complex life to hold, its course steady in chaos of change. These gifts may add patience and love, sweetness and light, to the zeal of the reformer and yet not dull his ardor for the next morning-hour of progress.

Not the old, then, because it is old, nor the new because it is new; not the few who will hold no parley with that which to them is evil, nor the many who cling to what they have inherited lest they lose life's best treasures; not to those who call aloud in the market place, "Behold the coming of the Lord!" nor to those who sit at the fireside and cherish their own only; not on or to any one manifestation of the life in which we have our being can the old, with the spirit of youth, fibre their faith and trust.

In all the struggling, mistaken, weary, selfish, cowardly, alike as in all the brave, heroic, unselfish and lovely, is manifestation that makes "no good thing a failure, no evil thing success." This is the testimony of a ripe and wise old age. In that they must trust who have tested the real things of life in the real world of effort, nor lost hope in the Onward Way for all.

QUESTIONS ON THE GRANDPARENTS

1. What have been the general tendencies in social treatment of the aged?

2. What are some of the social needs in respect to public and private health, vocational training, wages and standards of living, family and personal insurance and educational opportunities which must be met if old age is to be prolonged as far as possible and made happy and comfortable to the end of life?

3. What should be the aim of youth and middle life in respect to preparation for old age?

4. Read Old Age Support of Women Teachers, by Dr. Lucille Eaves, A Study in Economic Relations of Women, by the Department of Research of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, Mass., and read "The Trade Union and the Old Man," by John O'Grady, Catholic University of America, published in American Journal of Sociology of November, 1917. Are the suggestions in these articles along needed lines?

FOOTNOTES:

[6] See The State and Pensions in Old Age, by J.A. Spender.



CHAPTER V

BROTHERS, SISTERS, AND NEXT OF KIN

"The members of the ancient family were united by something more powerful than birth, affection, or physical strength; this was the religion of the sacred fire and of dead ancestors. This caused the ancient family to form a single body, both in this life and in the next,"—DE COULANGES, in The Ancient City.

"Land belonged to the clan and the clan was settled upon the land. A man was thus not a member of the clan because he lived upon or even owned the land, but he lived upon the land and had interest in it because he was a member of the clan."—HEARN, in The Aryan Household.

"Three things if possessed by a man make him fit to be a chief of kindred: that he should speak in behalf of his kin and be listened to; that he should fight in behalf of his kin and be feared; that he should be security on behalf of his kin and be accepted."—WELSH TRIADS (cited by Seebohm).

"I cannot choose but think upon the time When our two loves grew like two buds; School parted us; we never found again That childish world where our two spirits mingled Like scents from varying roses that remain one sweetness. Yet the twin habit of that earlier time Lingered for long about the heart and tongue. We had been natives of one happy clime And its dear accent to our utterance clung. And were another childhood world my share, I would be born a little sister there." —GEORGE ELIOT, in Brother and Sister.

"When love is strong it never tarries to take heed Or know if its return exceed Its gift; in its sweet haste no greed, No strife belong. It hardly asks if it be loved at all, to take So barren seems, when it can make Such bliss, for the beloved's sake, Of bitter tasks."—H.H.

Ancient Kinship Bond.—The relation of brothers and sisters in the family group has passed through many changes and must at times have caused much confusion and difficulty in the home. For example, in that state of familial association in which all the brothers of a certain relationship were considered as husbands of all sisters within a certain bond there must have been some heart-burnings and several kinds of family unpleasantness. We have some hints of these from many historical sources. In the era of complete subjection of the individual to the community such unpleasantness may have counted only for negligible unhappiness on the part of a few social rebels, but the custom alluded to did not prove to work well enough to become permanent.

Again, the form of family bond which demanded that a man take to wife the widow of his dead brother and "raise up children to the name" of the deceased had a long but not a permanent life. In the well-known passage from Deuteronomy, the 25th chapter, the faithful are commanded that "if brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no son, the wife of the dead shall not be married without unto a stranger: her husband's brother shall ... take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother unto her. And the first-born ... shall succeed in the name of his brother that is dead, that his name be not blotted out of Israel." The same passage shows that while it was doubtless at first an imperative social law, there came a time when the living brother had a choice as to whether or not he should take to wife the widow of one who had died. Perhaps there might have been an economic pressure that made it difficult to perform this ancient duty. Perhaps there might have been objection from the wife or wives already in command of the household matters. Perhaps the widow was sometimes of a type to make the brotherly and family duty seem very hard. At any rate, there came a time when, as the writer in Deuteronomy says, "If the man like not to take his brother's wife" he could refuse the family service. It cost him, however, in such cases a severe ordeal. He could be haled before the elders on the complaint that he "refused to raise up unto his brother a name in Israel." The widow "could loose his shoe from his feet and spit in his face" and say "so shall it be done unto the man that doth not build up his brother's house."

The large requirement for the brother, thus indicated, passed outward to the next of kin in certain circumstances. There are many deeply interesting accounts of readjustment of family life through the taking over by the living of duties once undertaken by the dead. The lovely idyl of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz, shows this widely spreading brother-duty. Here the mother-in-law, so sweet and so wise that her sons' wives loved her deeply, shrewdly manages a contact between Ruth and Boaz to the lasting service of her son's inheritance of name and land. The whole story is redolent of the finer side of ancient forms of familial duty, the man being rich and generous enough to take on his more remote relative's responsibilities, the young widow being sweet and charming enough to capture the interest of the rich man even before he knows who she is, and the mother-in-law showing statesmanship of the highest order in managing the affair, together with such fine character of her own that all respect and love her.

To-day we have left in law and custom but the shadow of these ancient demands upon brothers in the family. That shadow is limited to the purely economic aspect of brotherly responsibilities. The old law of inheritance made the sons the preferred heirs. Only when there was no son could the daughter inherit if at all. The responsibility of that heir, however, was often made commensurate with his inheritance. He must financially care for the near relatives—the father and mother first, the sister and brother next, the uncles and aunts and cousins not to be forgotten.

Present Demands of Kinship.—The existing statutes make it incumbent upon any man in receipt of income beyond his own immediate needs to do what is possible to prevent his near relatives from requiring aid from the general public. The custom of all charitable organizations when appealed to for aid for individuals, or for a family, is to ask, "What can your relatives do for you?" The pressure upon those connected even by marriage to help relatives privately, and so reduce public relief, is often very severe. In those of English ancestry the disgrace of having a near relative, even so distant as a great-uncle or great-aunt or sister-in-law, "come upon the town" is felt keenly. The sacrifices of many people of limited means to prevent such a catastrophe would make a long and heavy list of discomforts and privations. The duty of brothers, sisters, and next of kin to help provide for the poorer members of the family connection is thus still held firmly by social ideals. That all people, however, pay this debt of family responsibility or that as many struggle to do it as used to do so cannot be affirmed. On the contrary, many charitable societies make it a serious business to discover and hold to responsibility shirking members of families in which there is great discrepancy in financial condition.

There is now, however, no recognized social responsibility for giving support to poorer members of the family within one household. There is no pressure to bring those needing material relief tinder the roof of the well-to-do of the family circle. Even parents cannot claim residence with adult children, although they can claim by law some support commensurate with their children's income. It is seen now that the duty of aid does not carry with it the obligation for personal association. That is, on the whole, a gain, especially in cases where there is temperamental incompatibility.

The whole relationship of brothers, sisters, and next of kin is simplified and placed more securely on bases of affection and ethical ideal in modern life, and people are good brothers and sisters or good family relatives in proportion as they are unselfish and useful in all their other social relationships. There is a real family tie, however, which still holds. We see it in the Family Reunions, in the listing of relationships in those devoted to genealogy, and in the patriotic societies that indicate by membership what ancestors fought in the Revolution or held office in Colonial days. There is the permanent tie of blood that makes a peculiar bond unlike that of friendship and unlike that of marriage—a tie sometimes carried to extremes, as in the case of the woman who, angry with her husband for a breach of etiquette, declared she "was glad that he was no relation of hers!" On the whole, in reasonable moderation, one of the best ways we have to-day of helping a group is by means of the generosity of the more successful members of that group.

Special Burdens of Women in Family Obligations.—Brothers, usually, marry and have their own households to take care of. The unmarried sisters, coming from a long line of women who were supposed to work entirely for the family, with no commercial value placed upon their household service, feel a call to duty from ancient times to carry family burdens. The sons, however, do not escape the parental call for help and have often in the immediate past (when women ceased to have a large economic value in the home and had not yet acquired the capacity or desire for self-support) borne a heavy burden of financial aid for unmarried sisters. The tables are well-nigh turned now, however, and the number of self-supporting women who have relatives of varied nearness and ages dependent or partially dependent upon them, is much larger than that of spinsters care-free and independent. In all cases, however, whether of men or women, those who respond loyally to the needs of those kin to them are the unselfish and capable. The slogan of socialism, "To all in the measure of their need; from all in the measure of their capacity," may never be accepted by society in general, but it is now the rule in the family relation.

Disadvantages of the Only Child.—In the individualistic family of the modern monogamic type the chief need is for every child to have brothers and sisters or at least a brother or sister. The "one-child" plan, which places a solitary little creature as sole recipient of money, affection, and care of the household, is one that shows poverty of condition for the child concerned, no matter how rich the parents. Such a child lacks a chief aid in its development. Nature sometimes sends, even in a large family, all boys or all girls and makes coeducation at the start difficult. Usually, however, when there are two, three, four, or more children they are mixed in due and helpful proportion. When the family is too large, as it so often was in the older days, it must subdivide according to ages and tastes, and in many old-fashioned families some brothers and sisters were near in sympathy and love and others wide apart. In the moderate-size modern family, however, where there is enough companionship within the home for family good times and not enough to cause breakage into groups within the group, we have the ideal conditions for child development. For the only child there are happily some substitutes for this home companionship in the "residential school," or the school with long days of group relationship of like age and condition, but it is not the same and seldom as good as the home circle of the right size and variety.

The modern conditions make the old ties seem less important to many. In the United States, where people move about so freely across the vast spaces of our continent, and where in the large cities so many move each year to try vainly to better themselves in hired houses, the ties of family outside of the immediate circle seem remote and to be easily set aside. It is not, however, a sign of advanced social spirit which makes a young girl declare "she has no use for her relations; she cares only for her chosen friends," and it is often of the essence of social danger that a young man wants to give up all connection with his family. The fact is that one can understand better how one came to be what one is by knowing something of one's forbears and one's living relatives.

Permanent Value of the Family Bond.—The feeling that one belongs to a blood group, the feeling so old and so wonder-working in the past, gives at least one ideal of permanence in a world of affairs whirling in such rapid change that the common mind becomes dizzy and the common idealism confused. On the other hand, it is cause for gratitude unspeakable that the old bondage of the family life is relaxed, never to be tightened again to such oppression as once prevailed. The fact that inheritance is now seen to be so varied and so unpredictable that one child in a family may "take back" to one ancestor and another to a different one to ends of complete divergence of character and capacity, shows that the old attempt to keep them together, whether they could love each other or not, was a social mistake. To-day we are more reasonable. We even say that fathers and mothers may not be taken into the home of their children if it best serves the mutual happiness for them to have separate homes. We seldom now in enlightened families make the mistake of holding to "living together" when living apart is clearly the wiser thing.

The old sense of family responsibility is, however, happily not lost and in its new ways of working often gives a finer representation of mutual aid than was common of old. The will of one rich man which included many gifts to sisters, cousins, and nieces, and left directions to the principal heirs to find out if there were any relatives of the same nearness left out and if so to make them equal sharers, is but a type of many who, with or without large means, share generously with all their name and kin.

On the other hand, we have examples of those who, in the effort to leave a large fortune for some specific object of education or of public charity, wholly neglect, often with cruel indifference, the needs of some member or members of their own family. One man of conspicuous gift to education left a sister and her two daughters without means for comfortable living while piling up money for his pet scheme. Many men skimp themselves and also their wives, children, and still more their parents and more remote kin, to hoard a monster sum for some charity to be forever called by their name. These, however, are unusual examples of losing sight of the near in the remote. The average man and woman has in mind a series of concentric circles, those nearest to be helped first, those next beyond to share next, and the world outside to have what is left when these inner claims upon love and generosity are fully met.

If it were not for this general tendency society-at-large would have far more responsibility for all sorts of care of the aged, of the incapable, of the unsuccessful, of the invalid, of the defective, of the insane, of the "cranky" and of the lonely. Finally, without this innate tendency to feel a sense of responsibility for those nearest related by family ties much of the discipline toward social usefulness would be lacking in the lives of average people. We learn the larger duty through faithful response to the nearer and closer obligation. For this reason the family holidays and reunions, the family birthday celebrations which include all the relatives within reach, the pressure of the law and of custom upon those able to care for those less strong and competent within the kinship bond, are all socializing influences which it is well to keep warm and consciously active.

The lovely spirit of Mrs. Hodgson Burnett's "Tembarom" when he finds a "real relative" is duplicated by many immigrants who after years of loneliness greet one of the family on the shores of the new country; and the member of the eastern family "gone west" is the most hospitable of all relatives to the visitor from the old home who has the same family tree.

The gratitude of the ancient poet that "God has set the solitary in families" is not a sentiment to be outgrown. Those who feel that it is, lose something precious from the basis of human affection. The adjustment of this old bond to the new individualistic life is not yet made even in the Western world, while in the Eastern the vital problems of family adjustment press in supreme unrest. The one principle that should guide us in this as in all inheritance from the past is surely this, that while the sacredness of personality of any one member of any group, even of the family, shall not be wholly sacrificed to the needs and demands of any other member, yet "they that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak" in the old spirit of unselfish service.

QUESTIONS ON BROTHERS, SISTERS, AND NEXT OF KIN

1. In the monogamic system of the family what, in general, has been the legal responsibility toward blood kin?