THE PRIMARY SOCIAL SETTLEMENT. 539 



And Eve responds: 



" I am renewed ; 



My eyes grow with the light which is in thine ; 

 Because I comprehend 



This human love, I shall not be afraid 

 Of any human death." 



Monogamous love marriages have not only improved the family 

 physically, psychically, and ethically, but society as well. The de- 

 cline and fall of Rome can be traced to her corrupt domestic life. 

 The moral progress of the nation ceased when sacred family life 

 ceased. The names Pompey, Caesar, Antony, Cicero, not only sug- 

 gest intellect, power, splendor, conquest, and oratory, but divorced 

 wives, paramours, unfathered and unmothered children, and marble 

 palaces that hadn't the faintest semblance of homelikeness. The high 

 civilization of Rome could not afford to throw off the family, which, 

 then and now, either as a blessing or curse, is the primary social group 

 from which evolves all society. The advancement of learning has 

 never yet been sufficient gain for the loss of domestic morality. But 

 even in the so-called morally pure Roman households, family right 

 swallowed up individual right as a larger fish swallows the smaller. 

 The 'paterfamilias was a tyrannical lord, who crushed any signs of 

 asserted individualism. Pride of ancestry and patrimony surpassed 

 natural affection. Occasionally there was a Catonic exception, who 

 believed that a good husband was more praiseworthy than a great 

 senator. We know that the elder Cato left urgent business to help 

 wash and dress a newborn son, that he taught the growing boy to 

 read, to use correct language, to box, to swim, to fight in armor, and 

 to endure hardships. He even wrote historical books with his own 

 hands and had them printed in big characters, that the boy at home 

 might read of the brave deeds of his countrymen and thus uncon- 

 sciously imbibe patriotism. It is significant that the dignified 

 Roman Portia boasted not only of being the wife of Brutus, but a 

 Cato's daughter. 



Homer looked upon domestic relations, in some sense, as divine 

 relations. Odysseus constantly had consideration for home and wife. 

 The sanctity of the marriage vow is noticed particularly in the Iliad, 

 a poem that does homage to hearth and home. And when conjugal 

 and parental relations in classical Greece were outraged, she too, like 

 Rome, felt the result in all her social fabric. At the time when her 

 children were looked upon chiefly as additions to the state and army, 

 we get a glimpse of a certain family relation not wholly unlike that 

 of to-day. Themistocles, when his son was making demands on 

 him by means of his mother, said : " O woman, the Athenians gov- 

 ern the Greeks, I govern the Athenians, but you govern me, and 



