s whence emanates for each home an atmosphere in
miniature, and you dry up the sources of character, sap the strength of
public spirit.

It concerns the country that each home be a world, profound, respected,
communicating to its members an ineffaceable moral imprint. But before
pursuing the subject further, let us rid ourselves of a
misunderstanding. Family feeling, like all beautiful things, has its
caricature, which is family egoism. Some families are like barred and
bolted citadels, their members organized for the exploitation of the
whole world. Everything that does not directly concern them is
indifferent to them. They live like colonists, I had almost said
intruders, in the society around them. Their particularism is pushed to
such an excess that they make enemies of the whole human race. In their
small way they resemble those powerful societies, formed from time to
time through the ages, which possess themselves of universal rule, and
for which no one outside their own community counts. This is the spirit
that has sometimes made the family seem a retreat of egoism which it was
necessary to destroy for the public safety. But as patriotism and
jingoism are as far apart as the east from the west, so are family
feeling and clannishness.

* * * * *

Here we are talking of right family feeling, and nothing else in the
world can take its place; for in it lie in germ all those fine and
simple virtues which assure the strength and duration of social
institutions. And the very base of family feeling is respect for the
past; for the best possessions of a family are its common memories. An
intangible, indivisible and inalienable capital, these souvenirs
constitute a sacred fund that each member of a family ought to consider
more precious than anything else he possesses. They exist in a dual
form: in idea and in fact. They show themselves in language, habits of
thought, sentiments, even instincts, and one sees them materialized in
portraits, furniture, buildings, dress, songs. To profane eyes, they are
nothing; to the eyes of those who know how to appreciate the things of
the family, they are relics with which one should not part at any price.

But what generally happens in our day? Worldliness wars upon the
sentiment of family, and I know of no strife more impassioned. By great
means and small, by all sorts of new customs, requirements and
pretensions, the spirit of the world breaks into the dome