and weigh life by personal
qualities and worth. That is precisely what the home does. It prizes
most highly the helpless, economically worthless infant; it measures
every member by his personal character, his affectional worth. Its
riches do not depend on that which money can buy, but on the personal
qualities of love, goodness, kindness; on memories, associations,
affection. The true home gives to every child-life the power to choose
the things of the world on the basis of their worth in personality. Only
the mistaken judgments of later years, the short-minded wisdom of the
world, make youth gradually lose the habit of preferring the home's
spiritual benefits to the material rewards of the world of business. No
life can be furnished for the strain of our modern materialism that
lacks the basis of idealism furnished in the true family.

Sec. 3. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED--THE MORAL LIFE

Fourthly, the power of family living to develop love as loyalty is to be
noted. In this small group is laid the foundation of the moral life.
"The family is the primer in the moral education of the race."[6] Here
the new-born life begins to relate itself to other lives. Here it begins
life in an atmosphere saturated by love, the central principle of all
virtue, eventually loyalty to ideals in persons and devotion to them,
"the greatest of these," because it is the parent of all virtue. The
moral life, that life which is adjusted, capable, and adequately motived
for helpful, efficient, enriching living with all other lives, is not a
matter of rules, regulations, and restrictions. Neither is it a matter
of separate habits as to this or the other kind of behavior, though this
comes nearer to it than do rules and prescriptions. The character-life
which parents desire for their children is not that which will do the
right thing when it has discovered that right thing in some book of
rules, nor that life which will do the right thing because society
points that way, nor even that life which automatically does the right
thing, but it is the life which, constantly moved by some high inner
compulsion, some imperative of vision and ideal, moves to the highest
possible plane of action in every situation. This is the life of
loyalty. It begins with loyalty to persons, with that devotion which
begins with affection. In no other place is this so well developed as in
the relations of the family. This is the child's first and most
potential school. H