One hears today many pessimistic utterances regarding the modern home.  Some even tell us that it is doomed to become extinct.  Without doubt great economic changes in society are producing profound changes in the organization and character of the home.  But the home has always been subject to such changes; the factor which we need to watch with greater care is the family; the former is but the shell of the latter.

The character of each home will depend largely on the economic condition of those who dwell in it.  The homes of every age will reflect the social conditions of that age.  The picture in historical romances of the home of the mediaeval period, where the factory, or shop, joined the dining-room, where the apprentices ate and roomed in the home, where one might be compelled to furnish and provision his home literally as his castle for defense, presents a marked difference to the home of this century tending to syndicate all its labors with all the other homes of the community.  Since the home is simply the organization and mechanism of the family life, it is most susceptible to material and social changes.  It varies as do the fashions of men.

Much that we assume to be detrimental to the life of the home is simply due to the fact that in the evolution of society the family, as it were, puts on a new suit of clothes, adopts new forms of organization to meet the changing external conditions.

Sec. 6.  THE HOME CHANGING; THE FAMILY ABIDING

The home is of importance only as a tool, a means to the final ends of the family life; the test of its efficiency is not whether it maintains traditional forms but whether it best serves the highest aims of family life.  We may abandon all the older customs; our regret for them, as we look back on the days of home cooking, cannot be any greater than the regrets of our parents or grandparents looking back on the spinning-wheel and the hand loom that cumbered the kitchen of their childhood.  Surely no one contends that family life has deteriorated, that human character is one whit the poorer, because we have discarded the family spinning-wheel.  Through the changes of a developing civilization, as man has moved from the time when each one built his own house, worked with his own tools to make all his supplies, to these days of specialized service in community living, the home has changed with each step of industrial progress, but the family has remained practically unchanged.

The family stands a practically unchanging factor of personal qualities at the center of our civilization; the family rather than the home determines the character of the coming days.  In its social relationships are rooted the things that are best in all our lives.  In its social training lie the solutions of more problems in social adjustment and development than we are willing to admit.  The family is the soil of society, central to all its problems and possibilities.