ve the
parents and all the other children, whereas in a settlement of pioneer
colonists every child, from the moment it is big enough to lend a hand
to the family industry, is an investment in which the only danger is
that of temporary over-capitalization. Then there are the variations
in family sentiment. Sometimes the family organization is as frankly
political as the organization of an army or an industry: fathers being
no more expected to be sentimental about their children than colonels
about soldiers, or factory owners about their employees, though the
mother may be allowed a little tenderness if her character is weak. The
Roman father was a despot: the Chinese father is an object of worship:
the sentimental modern western father is often a play-fellow looked to
for toys and pocket-money. The farmer sees his children constantly: the
squire sees them only during the holidays, and not then oftener than he
can help: the tram conductor, when employed by a joint stock company,
sometimes never sees them at all.

Under such circumstances phrases like The Influence of Home Life, The
Family, The Domestic Hearth, and so on, are no more specific than The
Mammals, or The Man In The Street; and the pious generalizations founded
so glibly on them by our sentimental moralists are unworkable.
When households average twelve persons with the sexes about equally
represented, the results may be fairly good. When they average three the
results may be very bad indeed; and to lump the two together under
the general term The Family is to confuse the question hopelessly. The
modern small family is much too stuffy: children "brought up at home"
in it are unfit for society. But here again circumstances differ. If the
parents live in what is called a garden suburb, where there is a good
deal of social intercourse, and the family, instead of keeping itself to
itself, as the evil old saying is, and glowering at the neighbors over
the blinds of the long street in which nobody knows his neighbor and
everyone wishes to deceive him as to his income and social importance,
is in effect broken up by school life, by out-of-door habits, and by
frank neighborly intercourse through dances and concerts and theatricals
and excursions and the like, families of four may turn out much less
barbarous citizens than families of ten which attain the Boer ideal of
being out of sight of one another's chimney smoke.

All one can say is, roughly, that the homelier t