Whether we can remedy the ills of family living today or not, we can determine the character of the family life of the future.  The homes of tomorrow are being determined today.  The children who swing their feet in schoolrooms and play in our gardens will control family living very soon.  We can do little to reconstruct the old order; we can do everything to determine the new.  When the mountain sides have been made bare, forest conservation cannot save the old trees, but it can prepare for new growths.  Ours is the larger opportunity because we can determine the ideals of our children.  Today we can determine that they shall not suffer from false conceptions, shall not bruise themselves in the blind ignorance that compelled us to find our own way.  We shall see that, first, in the education of our children we can save the homes of tomorrow by training the children of today to set first things first.  If family life has been neglected in America, it has been because we have submerged its real values of character and affection in a flood of things, of materialism.

Sec. 1.  A CONSTRUCTIVE POLICY FOR CHARACTER

The future higher efficiency of the family depends on an extension of a conscience for character through all our thinking on the family.  We are really half-ashamed to talk of character.  We blush for ideals but we have no shame in boasting of commerce and factories; we are ashamed of the things of beauty and we love only the useful.  So we have become ashamed of the ideals of the home.  Not only do we passively acquiesce in the popular attitude of indifference or derision, but we voice it ourselves.  We join in the jest at marriage; we joke over marital infelicities.  We would be ashamed to be caught singing “Home, Sweet Home.”  What is more important, we show that, as a people, we have less and less the habit of regarding the home as any other than a commercial affair.  The tendency is to determine domestic living wholly by economic factors.  The literature on the “home” is overwhelmingly economic; its heart is in the kitchen.  High efficiency on the physiological, sanitary, culinary, and mechanical sides makes the modern home so convenient that you can lie on a folding bed, press a button to light the grate fire, turn on the lights, start the toaster, and wake the children.  Homes are places to hide in at night, to feed the body, arrange the clothes, and start out from for real living.  They are private hotels.

If we would save the family we must save the child from losing sight of the primacy of human values; we must strengthen his natural faith that people are worth more than all besides, leading him into the faith that moral integrity, truth, honor, righteousness, are the glory of a life.  More, these young lives must be trained to habitual and efficient right-doing.  In a word, the conservation of the home is simply a program of beginning today ourselves to set first