nter and
heart of social life. There were no men's clubs, no women's societies,
no theatres, no moving pictures, no suffrage meetings, none of the
hundred and one exterior activities that now call forth both father and
mother from the home circle. The home of pre-revolutionary days was far
more than a place where the family ate and slept. Its simplicity, its
confidence, its air of security and permanence, and its atmosphere of
refuge or haven of rest are characteristics to be grasped in their true
significance only through a thorough reading of the writings of those
early days. The colonial woman had never received a diploma in domestic
science or home economics; she had never heard of balanced diets; she
had never been taught the arrangement of color schemes; but she knew the
secret of making from four bare walls the sacred institution with all
its subtle meanings comprehended under the one word, home.

All home life, of course, was not ideal. There were idle, slovenly
women, misguided female fanatics, as there are to-day. Too often in
considering the men and women who made colonial history we are liable to
think that all were of the stamp of Winthrop, Bradford, Sewall, Adams,
and Washington. Instead, they were people like the readers of this book,
neither saints nor depraved sinners. In later chapters we shall see that
many broke the laws of man and God, enforced cruel penalties on their
brothers and sisters, frequently disobeyed the ten commandments, and
balanced their charity with malice. Then, too, there was an ungentle,
rough, coarse element in the under-strata of society--an element
accentuated under the uncouth pioneer conditions. But, in the main, we
may believe that the great majority of citizens of New England, the
substantial traders and merchants of the middle colonies, and the
planters of the South, were law-abiding, God-fearing people who believed
in the sanctity of their homes and cherished them. We shall see that
these homes were well worth cherishing.

_II. Domestic Love and Confidence_

In this discussion of the colonial home, as in previous discussions, we
must depend for information far more upon the writings by men than upon
those by women. Yet, here and there, in the diaries and letters of wives
and mothers we catch glimpses of what the institution meant to
women--glimpses of that deep, abiding love and faith that have made the
home a favorite theme of song and story. In the correspondence bet