two standards of morals, both honestly held and
believed in, are brought sharply together. The awkwardness and
constraint we experience when two standards of conventions and manners
clash but feebly prefigure this deeper difference.

CHAPTER IV

HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT

If we could only be judged or judge other people by purity of motive,
life would be much simplified, but that would be to abandon the
contention made in the first chapter, that the processes of life are as
important as its aims. We can all recall acquaintances of whose
integrity of purpose we can have no doubt, but who cause much confusion
as they proceed to the accomplishment of that purpose, who indeed are
often insensible to their own mistakes and harsh in their judgments of
other people because they are so confident of their own inner integrity.

This tendency to be so sure of integrity of purpose as to be
unsympathetic and hardened to the means by which it is accomplished, is
perhaps nowhere so obvious as in the household itself. It nowhere
operates as so constant a force as in the minds of the women who in all
the perplexity of industrial transition are striving to administer
domestic affairs. The ethics held by them are for the most part the
individual and family codes, untouched by the larger social conceptions.

These women, rightly confident of their household and family integrity
and holding to their own code of morals, fail to see the household in
its social aspect. Possibly no relation has been so slow to respond to
the social ethics which we are now considering, as that between the
household employer and the household employee, or, as it is still
sometimes called, that between mistress and servant.

This persistence of the individual code in relation to the household may
be partly accounted for by the fact that orderly life and, in a sense,
civilization itself, grew from the concentration of interest in one
place, and that moral feeling first became centred in a limited number
of persons. From the familiar proposition that the home began because
the mother was obliged to stay in one spot in order to cherish the
child, we can see a foundation for the belief that if women are much
away from home, the home itself will be destroyed and all ethical
progress endangered.

We have further been told that the earliest dances and social gatherings
were most questionable in their purposes, and that it was, therefore,
the good and virtuous