THE INTEGRITY OF HOME. 



223 



woe, and longing for the rest of the grave, the rash hand of the 

 suicide in thought is paralyzed by the memories of home. Frantic 

 with rage or bitter with revenge, the thought of direful conse- 

 quences to those he loves curbs the wrath which might wreak itself 

 in blood. If he is a good citizen the conservator of those moral 

 influences which hold society within the bounds of order and 

 decorum all this is due to the domestic stake he must venture for 

 the gratification of an illegal avarice or illicit lust. In short, the 

 factors of every enduring social state and the constituents of every 

 permanent and advancing civilization, lie in the homes they 

 embrace and of whose tender energies they are the crystallized 

 expression. If there be virtue, honor, worth, purity and peace on 

 earth, they were born in its homes and will perish with their 

 extinction. 



THE INTEGRITY OF HOME THE SAFE- GUARD 

 OF NATIONAL STABILITY. 



The convulsions which occasionally shake society to its national 

 centres and threaten the overthrow of all the institutions which 

 Time has consecrated, issue from those apparently sudden and 

 cyclic changes which periodically occur in the domestic tempera- 

 ture of the world. When at any period in the history of a nation, 

 love becomes a jest, friendship a myth and honor a name ; when 

 the night of Despotism has settled down clear and cold and drear, 

 extinguishing those fires of purity and trust which burned upon 

 the hearth or home ; then the wild ruffianism of the individual man 

 breaks forth in anarchy and blood. As it was with France in '89, 

 so will it be with every nationality on the earth ; when the state, by 

 its arbitrary social distinctions and unequal laws, invades and 

 tramples upon the sacredness of home, it simply takes its own life ; 

 because the state is the product of its homes and has unnaturally 

 destroyed those factors of which its dignity, grandeur and authority 

 were the mere multiple. When the state becomes paternal in its 

 government ; when it undertakes to educate or to regulate, in any 

 other interest than the conservation of the public peace, the children 

 of its citizens, then it usurps the highest and dearest prerogative of 

 the royalty of home, and it will, in time, snatch all the others ; and 

 then, indeed, it will have committed national suicide, for societj r 

 will dissolve and go back to its original elements. The Spirit of 

 Progress, so-called, who now stands embracing the pillars of the 

 temple of our National Freedom, is the Blind Sampson, whose 

 strength is coming fast, and who will soon bow himself to bury all 

 in a common ruin. 



THE FIRST CONDITIONS OF HOME. 



Such, then, being the influence and effects of the home, it may 

 be well, if possible, that we should form some distinct conception of 

 its essential conditions. 



