702 THE FAMILY 



industrial systems, operating chiefly in great urban centres. With 

 the rise of corporate and associated industry comes a weakening of 

 family ties. Through the division of labor the family " hearthstone " 

 is fast becoming a mere temporary meeting-place of individual wage- 

 earners. The congestion of the population in cities is forcing into 

 being new and lower modes of life. The home is in peril. In the 

 vast hives of Paris, London, or New York the families even of the 

 relatively well-to-do have small opportunity to flourish for self- 

 culture and self-enjoyment. To the children of the slum the street 

 is a perilous nursery. For them squalor, disease, and sordid vice 

 have supplanted the traditional blessings of the family sanc- 

 tuary. 



Furthermore, the social trinity is seriously threatened by two 

 opposite tendencies, each of which is, in part, the product of present 

 urban and industrial conditions. On the one hand, marriage is 

 shunned and the home is ceasing to be attractive. For very many 

 club life has stronger allurements than the connubial partnership. 

 For the poor, sometimes for the rich, the great city has many interests 

 and many places more attractive than the home circle. The spirit 

 of commercial greed and the love of selfish ease, not less than grinding 

 penury, restrain men and women from wedlock. On the other hand, 

 the urban environment has the opposite effect. In the crowded, 

 heterogeneous, and shifting population of the great towns marriages 

 are often lightly made and as lightly dissolved. Indeed, the remark- 

 able mobility of the American people, the habit of frequent migration 

 in search of employment, under the powerful incentives of industrial 

 enterprise, gold-hunting, or other adventure, and under favor of the 

 marvelously developed means of transportation, will account in no 

 small degree for the laxity of matrimonial and family ties in the 

 United States. 



Yet these perils, although serious, need not become fatal. They 

 are inherent mainly in industrial institutions which may be scienti- 

 fically studied and intelligently brought into harmony with the 

 requirements of the social order. The problems of the family are 

 at once ethical, sociological, and economic. If the home is to be 

 rescued from the encroachments of the shop and the factory, it must 

 be earnestly studied in connection with the problems of organized 

 industry and with those of state or municipal control of the great 

 public utilities. Already through improved facilities for rapid 

 transit the evils resulting from dense population are being some- 

 what ameliorated. Of a truth every penny's reduction in street- 

 railway fares signifies to the family of small means a better chance for 

 pure air, sound health, and a separate home in the suburbs. The 

 dispersion of the city over a broader area at once cheapens and 

 raises the standard of living. Every hour's reduction in the period 



