given up attempts to teach social duty in favor of the plan of undertaking specific pieces of social activity.  The home must adopt the laboratory method.  The important thing is, not what the father or mother may systematically teach about the social duties of the children, but what kinds of service, of ministry and normal activity they may lead the children to; that is, in what ways they may all together discharge their functions in society.

Sec. 5.  FAMILIES AS COMMUNITY FACTORS

Each family must clearly see its normal relations to its community, to the social whole; first, as an association of social beings having social duties, obligations, and privileges; then, to see that the ordering of the daily life is the largest single factor in determining the value of the family to the development of the community, fitting harmoniously into the larger community, and rendering its share of service.

The disorderly home spreads its immoral contagion beyond its walls, out into the front yard, out and up and down the street, and all through the village and city.  The City Beautiful cannot come until we have the Home Beautiful.  Training each one to play his part in keeping the house in order, picking up and setting in place his own tools and playthings, preventing and removing litter, scraps, and elements of disorder and discomfort, acquiring habits of neatness based on social motives—­these things make more for the city of beauty and health than all our lectures on clean cities.

No family lives to itself.  Young people need to see clearly how their homes and their habits in the home impinge on other homes and lives.  This is impressed upon us in an accentuated and acute degree in city living.  One can hardly imagine a finer discipline of grace than apartment living, though one may well question whether it is not morally and hygienically flying in the face of the natural order.  We may not have for a long time municipal ordinances forbidding boiled dinners, limburger, and phonographs in city apartments; but if, unfortunately, we are compelled to live in these modern abominations, we ought to cultivate a conscience that will not inflict our idiosyncrasies, either in culinary aromas or in musical taste, on our neighbors.  But there are matters greater than these by which the home trains for social thoughtfulness.  No man has a right to grow weeds at home, because the seeds never stay there.  A howling dog, a disease-breeding sty, a fly-harboring stable, must be viewed, not from the point of the family’s convenience, but from that of others’ welfare.

Sec. 6.  TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP

The family has a duty to train children for Christian citizenship.  No other institution can take its place even here.  Courses of lectures in churches and settlements effect excellent results, and the study of civics from the moral and ideal viewpoint should be encouraged in the schools; but the home is the place where, after all, citizens are trained and the value or menace of their citizenship determined.  If we stop long enough to get a clear understanding of what we mean by citizenship this will be the more evident.