Is the Family DOOMED? Part 4

The wonder of parents somehow rearing their children to all the graces of noble and selfless living takes the form of giving their best to their children. We may, however, make certain demands upon the privileged who reward themselves with leisure and all its pleasing tokens and symbols. For these at least have the external materials of home-building. Need I make clear that the homes of too much are as gravely imperilled as the homes of too little?


Many homes survive the lack of things. Many more languish and perish because of the superabundance to stifling of things, things, things. The very rich are ever in peril of losing what once were their homes, a tragedy almost deeper than that of the many poor who have no home to lose. The law takes cognizance in most one-sided fashion of the fact that a home may endure without moral foundations but that it cannot exist without material bases. Despite attempts on the part of the State or States to avert the breaking up of a home solely because of the poverty of the widowed mother, it still is true that many homes are broken up on the ground of poverty and on no other ground. Saddest of all, mothers take it for granted that such break-up is unavoidable.

Only two reasons justify the State's withdrawal of a child from its parental roof,—incurable physical and mental disability in a child, whose parents are unable to give it adequate care, or moral disability on the part of parents. If the latter ground be valid, material circumstances ought no more to hold parent and child together than the absence of them ought to drive parent and child apart. A child resident on Fifth Avenue in New York may be in greater moral peril than a little waif of Five Points. Societies for the prevention of cruelty to children ought to intervene as readily when moral leprosy notoriously pervades the home of the rich as the State intervenes when children's health is neglected or their moral well-being endangered in a home of poverty. I have sometimes thought that an orphan asylum ought to be erected for the benefit of the worse than orphaned children of some notoriously corrupt, even when not multi-divorced, heads of society. Such a protectory for the unorphaned, though not fatherless and motherless, might serve a more useful purpose than do such orphanages as, having captured a child, yield it up reluctantly even to the care of a normal home.