HOME-LIFE. 123 



throughout the length and breadth of Britain and 

 tlie States. No other nation, probably, except the 

 German, has anything like the same respect and 

 love for home as ours have. It is to us something 

 sacred, holy, almost invested with a religious sig- 

 nificance ; and anything that strikes at the sanctity 

 of home is to most Englishmen an utter abomina- 

 tion. That this should be so is, on the whole, we 

 do not hesiuite to believe, a great good to our 

 national existence. 



Still, no thoughtful observer can have failed to 

 notice of late years a growing sense of the narrow- 

 ness of home in a great many of our bigger over- 

 grown cities. Young men and young women in 

 particular are beginning to chafe somewhat at the 

 increasing monotony and dulness of much middle- 

 class home-life. Not indeed that home, as home, 

 is becoming any the less a sacred ideal with them, 

 — let us hope that that peculiarl}- deep Teutonic 

 feeling in its best forms may never lose its strength 

 among us, — but, as homes in our great cities have 

 grown to be something other than tliey once were, 

 a certain recognition of a social want outside the 

 home has developed slowly and half unconsciously 

 in the nunds of many among our young people. 

 Some of them are discontenteil and unliap])y, they 

 do not exactly know why ; but in reality because 

 the deeply seated social feelings of humanity find 

 no sufficient outlet for themselves beyond the small 



