That the intimate family life which sometimes resulted—­especially when, as frequently happened, the seeming mutual devotion was also real—­might often be regarded as beautiful and almost ideal, it has been customary to repeat with an emphasis that in the end has even become nauseous.  For it was usually overlooked that the self-centred and enclosed family, even when the mutual affection of its members was real enough to bear all examination, could scarcely be more than partially beautiful, and could never be ideal.  For the family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being’s functions and activities.  He cannot, she cannot, be divorced from the life of the social group, and a life is beautiful and ideal, or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship.  When the family claims to prevent the free association of an adult member of it with the larger social organisation, it is claiming that the part is greater than the whole, and such a claim cannot fail to be morbid and mischievous.

The old-world method of treating children, we know, has long ago been displaced as containing an element of harsh tyranny.  But it was not perceived, and it seems indeed not even yet to be generally recognised, that the system which replaced it, and is only now beginning to pass away, involved another and more subtle tyranny, the more potent because not seemingly harsh.  Parents no longer whipped their children even when grown up, or put them in seclusion, or exercised physical force upon them after they had passed childhood.  They felt that that would not be in harmony with the social customs of a world in which ancient feudal notions were dead.  But they merely replaced the external compulsion by an internal compulsion which was much more effective.  It was based on the moral assumption of claims and duties which were rarely formulated because parents found it quite easy and pleasant to avoid formulating them, and children, on the rare occasions when they formulated them, usually felt a sense of guilt in challenging their validity.  It was in the nineteenth century that this state of things reached its full development.  The sons of the family were usually able, as they grew up, to escape and elude it, although they thereby often created an undesirable divorce from the home, and often suffered, as well as inflicted, much pain in tearing themselves loose from the spiritual bonds—­especially perhaps in matters of religion—­woven by long tradition to bind them to their parents.  It was on the daughters that the chief stress fell.  For the working class, indeed, there was often the possibility of escape into hard labour, if only that of marriage.  But such escape was not possible, immediately or at all, for a large number.  During the nineteenth century many had been so carefully enclosed in invisible cages, they had been so well drilled in the reticences and the duties and the subserviences that their parents