t be obvious to the student of our
Western civilisation that the cult of family life is on the decline.
The ties and obligations which hold children and parents together are
visibly slackening, and this is the more obvious amongst those nations
which have been taking the lead in the material progress of our time.

Take the United States, for instance. There, up to a certain point,
the father is regarded as the dollar-grinding machine. The tendency is
for both sons and daughters to cast themselves loose from parental
ties, and strike out afresh for themselves. And their parents are as
little responsible for them as they are for the maintenance or
happiness of their parents.

Any one who is familiar with life in the East End of London will
appreciate how little these worn-out toilers, when old age
incapacitates them from work, can rely on being kept out of the Union
by their children. With the experience of nearly two thousand years of
the progress of Christendom, it is not surprising that a short time
ago we should hear the present occupant of the Papal Throne raising
his aged voice to recall the attention of the West to how rapidly the
idea of the family was being lost, as Leo XIII. did in the Encyclical
Address to the Catholic Church on the subject of the Holy Family.

From the more important teaching as regards family life, these
Oriental missionaries might then endeavour to tell us something of the
Fine Arts in the East, and yet more of the spirit which animates their
artists. They would be able to show us that "art for art's sake" with
them is no empty phrase. It would doubtless surprise many Westerners
to know that a Chinese painter would not think of selling his pictures
for money, but paints them for his own pleasure, and gives his work as
presents to his friends, and would no more dream of selling a picture
than an English girl would of selling a kiss.

The Japanese would have a lot to tell us about bringing art, and that
their highest and best art, into the utensils of everyday life, and
that there is nothing demeaning in expending the best work on things
one handles and uses every day. What a lot they would have to tell us
of the cultivation and their love of flowers--a love which seems
instinct in the poorest peasant, and which in the more cultivated
classes is carried to an exquisite degree of refined development! And
again, a Japanese incense party, where different qualities of
delicately aromatic incen