Thus the home is the backbone of conservatism, which is good, but it becomes also the basis of reactionary feeling.  It is the people that break away from home and home ties who do the great things.

When the home is quiet and harmonious it is the place where great virtues are developed.  But when it is noisy and disharmonious, then its very seclusiveness, its segregation, lends to the quarrels the bitterness of civil war.  The intensity of feeling aroused is proportional to the intimacy of the home and not to the importance of the thing quarreled about.  Good manners and that sign and symbol of largeness of spirit, tolerance for the opinions of others, rarely are born in the home.

It is hardly realized how much quarreling, how much of intense emotional violence goes on in many homes.  Its isolation and the absence of the restraining influence of formality and courtesy bring the wills of the family members into sharp conflict.  Words are used that elsewhere would bring the severest physical answer, or bring about the most complete disruption of friendly relations.  Love and anger, duty and self-interest bring about intense inner conflict in the home, and the struggle between the two generations, the rising and the receding, is here at its height.

That courtesy to each other might be taught the children, might be insisted on by the parents is my firm belief.  Love and intimacy need not exclude form.  Manners and morals are not exclusive of each other.  If the marriage ceremony included the vow to be polite, it might leave out almost everything else.  The home should be the place where tolerance, courtesy, and emotional control are taught both by precept and example.

Can the home be altered to bring in more of the social spirit and yet maintain its great virtues, its extraordinary attraction for the human heart?  It’s an old story that criticism, the pointing out of defect, is easy, while good suggestions are few and difficult to convert into programs for action.  In medicine diagnosis is far ahead of treatment,—­so in society at large.

Any plans that have for their end a sort of social barracks, with men and women and their children living in apartments, but eating and drinking in large groups, will meet the fiercest resistance from the sentiment of our times and cannot succeed, unless it is forced on us by some breakdown of the social structure.  Nevertheless a larger cooeperation, at least in the cities, will come.  Buildings must be built so that a deal of individual labor disappears.  Just as cooeperative stores are springing up, so cooeperative kitchens, community kitchens organized for service would be a great benefit.  Especially for the poor, without servants, where the woman is frequently forced to neglect her own rest and the children’s welfare because she must cook, would such a development be of great value.  Unfortunately the few community kitchens now operating have in mind only the middle-class housewife and not the housewife in most need,—­the poor housewife.  Here is a plan for real social service; cooking for the poor of the cities, scientific, nutritious, tasty, at cost.  Much of the work of medicine would be eliminated with one stroke; much of racial degeneracy and misery would disappear in a generation.