ns civic and communal life. In view of
this it may be worth while to look a little more closely into the
relations of family life to this matter of the determination of the
character of our citizenship.

The family is an agency for religious training in citizenship. The
family is the first, smallest, and still the most common and potent
social group. It is the community in which we nearly all learn communal
living. At first it is a child's world, then comes his city, and then
his nation, but ere long again the family is his own kingdom. Its
ideals, constantly interpreted in action, determine our ideals. Where
the father is greedy, self-centered, regarding the home as solely for
his convenience as his private boarding-house, where he is a despotic
boss, why should not the son at least tolerate bossism in his city if he
does not himself pattern after his father on a wider scale and regard
the city or the state as his private boarding-house and the treasury as
his private manger? Where the mother is a petty parasite, what wonder
the children regard with indifference, if not even with admiration, the
whole system of civic and social barnacles, leeches, and other
parasites?

The very organization of the home must prepare for civic duty by laying
upon all appropriate duties and activities. It ought to be an ideal type
of community. But that can never be until we take the training of
parents seriously in hand; until we cease to delegate the pedagogy of
courtship, marriage, and home-founding to the comic supplements of the
Sunday papers and to the joke columns. Parents must themselves be
trained for the business of the organization of homes as educational
agencies.

The life and work of the home ought to train religiously for
citizenship, by causing each to bear his due share of the burdens of
all. Where the child has been forced to do the indolent parent's share,
to support the slothful father, he can only look forward to the time
when he will be free to support only himself, and have no other than
purely egoistic obligations; this is an utterly immoral conception, and
one squarely opposed to good citizenship. Where the boy or the girl has
been trained to regard all toil as dishonorable, where each has been
taught scrupulously to avoid every burden, they come into social living
with habits set against bearing their share and toward making others
carry them. The indolent parent makes the tax-dodging citizen, as the
indulgen