ent. In the give and take of home life
a new world is created. When a father really looks into his child's
eye he is not as he was before.[17] Indispensable as is the State's
education of the young, there is an important part which the community
cannot undertake, and there is a danger in curbing individuality by a
stereotyped method of instruction. 'All social enactments,' says
Harnack, 'have a tendency to circumscribe the activities of the
individual. If we unduly fetter the free play of individual effort we
break the mainspring of progress and enterprise, and create a state of
social immobility which is the antecedent of national decay.'[18]
Youth ought to be taught self-reliance and strenuousness of will; and
this is a work which can only be done in the home by the firm yet
kindly influence of the parents. But there is another aspect of the
home problem not less pressing. The want of training in working-class
families is largely answerable for the waifs and strays with which our
cities team. Even in middle-class households there are indications of
a lack not only of discipline, but of {229} that kindly sympathy and
affectionate counsel on the part of parents, and of reverence and
frankness in the children; with the result that the young people,
missing the attachment and interest which the home should supply, seek
their satisfaction outside the domestic circle, often with the most
disastrous results. The problem of the family is thus the problem of
nurturing the very seeds of the moral life. Within the precincts of
the nation's homes the future of the commonwealth is being determined.

II

1. The _State_ is the supreme controller of social relationships. As
distinguished from the family and the Church, it is the realm of
organised force working for social ends. Its purpose is to secure the
conditions of life essential to order and progress, and it can fulfil
its function only as it is endowed with power to enforce its authority.
The interference of the State with the liberty of the individual has
created a reaction in two opposite quarters towards complete abrogation
of all State compulsion. On the one side Tolstoy pleads for the
removal of force, because it violates the principle of love and
subverts the teaching of Jesus--'Resist not evil.' Militant anarchism
as the other extreme demands the abrogation of authority, because it
believes that restraint hinders progress and happiness, and that if
go