TENDENCIES OF INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 685 



tenement-houses, which may yet restore the home to the family from 

 the usurpations of trade; the almost unobserved, yet marvelous 

 development of the South Park system in Chicago, with its play- 

 grounds and rooms, its outdoor and indoor swimming-pools and 

 gymnasiums, and its park houses for neighborhood social centres; 

 the steady rise of a more scientific official and semi-official literature 

 reporting civic conditions and the ways of bettering them, such as 

 have been issued by the London County Council and the first com- 

 missioner of the New York City Tenement-House Department, 

 these public achievements, prompted or assisted by such voluntary 

 associated efforts as local improvement societies and social settle- 

 ments, are making possible the collective ownership and operation 

 of municipal enterprises to supplement or supersede inadequate 

 private initiative or management. 



Thus may be fulfilled the ideal of the " ancient city " which has 

 never been realized in fact, namely, a federation of families for the 

 uplift and unification of the common life, formed under the sanction 

 of a fundamentally religious faith in each other and in the obliga- 

 tions and privileges of the brotherhood of all men. 



Scarcely less pronounced, if of more gradual growth, are the 

 changes which are transforming the conditions of rural life. The 

 interurban electric railways for freight and passengers, the telephone 

 and rural mail service, the better roadways for bicycles and auto- 

 mobiles, the traveling libraries and permanent centres for educa- 

 tional and social interchange, are rapidly relieving the monotony of 

 country life, lightening some of its drudgery, furthering better edu- 

 cational privileges by the union of school districts, making accessible 

 the high school, college, and university centres, bringing farmers' 

 institutes and academic associations of economists together for 

 joint sessions, developing the extension work of agricultural col- 

 leges, rallying the grange movement, all these things combine to 

 hold out the first hope which has dawned upon the tendency to the 

 excessive density of the urban population, and that promises a re- 

 distribution of the people which will make possible more normal 

 life both in country and town. 



The family has suffered an invasion of its community of interests 

 from many directions. The unity of its kinship has been attenuated 

 by the prevailing influence of excessive individualism, from which 

 none of its relationships have wholly escaped. Among the disin- 

 tegrating forces directly and powerfully brought to bear against it 

 throughout this industrial age, the first to be reckoned with is the 

 changed economic status of women. Although the woman has al- 

 ways done her full share, if not more, of the world's work, upon which 

 the family has depended for its existence and well-being, it has been 

 hitherto for the most part done at the heart of the home and the 



