ocial
compunction," who do not share the effort toward a higher social
morality, who are even unable to sympathetically interpret it. Some of
these have been shielded from the inevitable and salutary failures which
the trial of new powers involve, because they are content to attain
standards of virtue demanded by an easy public opinion, and others of
them have exhausted their moral energy in attaining to the current
standard of individual and family righteousness.

Such people, who form the bulk of contented society, demand that the
radical, the reformer, shall be without stain or question in his
personal and family relations, and judge most harshly any deviation
from the established standards. There is a certain justice in this: it
expresses the inherent conservatism of the mass of men, that none of the
established virtues which have been so slowly and hardly acquired shall
be sacrificed for the sake of making problematic advance; that the
individual, in his attempt to develop and use the new and exalted
virtue, shall not fall into the easy temptation of letting the ordinary
ones slip through his fingers.

This instinct to conserve the old standards, combined with a distrust of
the new standard, is a constant difficulty in the way of those
experiments and advances depending upon the initiative of women, both
because women are the more sensitive to the individual and family
claims, and because their training has tended to make them content with
the response to these claims alone.

There is no doubt that, in the effort to sustain the moral energy
necessary to work out a more satisfactory social relation, the
individual often sacrifices the energy which should legitimately go
into the fulfilment of personal and family claims, to what he considers
the higher claim.

In considering the changes which our increasing democracy is constantly
making upon various relationships, it is impossible to ignore the filial
relation. This chapter deals with the relation between parents and their
grown-up daughters, as affording an explicit illustration of the
perplexity and mal-adjustment brought about by the various attempts of
young women to secure a more active share in the community life. We
constantly see parents very much disconcerted and perplexed in regard to
their daughters when these daughters undertake work lying quite outside
of traditional and family interests. These parents insist that the girl
is carried away by a fool