THE PROBLEM OF THE FAMILY 719 



vocation, and the library, together with the school, make up the great 

 educational force of society and that a sound educational system 

 must give due place to all of them, carefully adjusting them to each 

 other, will soon make a careful study of all the field a necessity. 

 The growing conception of the interorganic nature of all social 

 problems will press this on us more and more. With it will, of course, 

 come a much greater attention to the home as .an educational factor 

 of the greatest importance, both in the work of the church and the 

 public school. The plea that the home is negligent or incompetent 

 and that for this reason the church and school must do its neglected 

 work, will be met under a sense of obligation to do something to 

 make it competent and get it to attend to its own part of the common 

 work. One of the greatest opportunities of the church and the 

 school lies just here. 



These are practical needs. But back of them all lies the need of 

 much scientific study. Anything like an adequate science of the 

 family is yet to be created, though considerable has been done in the 

 last twenty years. The early history of the family has been pretty 

 well explored in connection with the study of the evolution of society. 

 And the monumental work of Dr. Howard just published on the 

 History of Matrimonial Institutions, a work of wonderfully complete 

 survey and much of it a contribution in an unexplored field, has laid 

 every scholar under the greatest obligations. But there is a large 

 unoccupied territory remaining to be entered or more fully explored. 

 Dr. Howard's work, great as it is, concentrates attention on marriage 

 and divorce the beginning and the premature end of the family. 

 The history of the modern family as a whole, as he well knows, 

 remains to be written. Its place in the history of the Christian 

 Church needs to be studied. It is a singular fact that ecclesiastical 

 literature is singularly barren on this subject. All the great ques- 

 tions of the family marriage, divorce, chastity, celibacy, and the 

 like have been much discussed, but very seldom has the family as 

 a whole been distinctly taken into the consideration. These facts 

 need to be brought out and their reasons set forth. The story of the 

 family in the history of law, of politics, of education, of economics, 

 almost needs discovery and relation. The statistical study of mar- 

 riage and divorce, which was well begun in our Government Report of 

 1889, needs to be, and it is hoped will soon be brought down to date. 1 

 The number of American states and foreign countries that collect 

 annually their statistics of marriage and divorce should be increased, 

 so that this world-wide movement can be studied comparatively and 

 be treated intelligently. Special investigations should be made here 

 and there into the causes of the great increase of divorces, and perhaps 



1 Congress has since made provision for this and the supplementary report 

 ordered may be ready in 1907. 



