way they treat their workers, the prices we pay for all goods
supplied us, the way we carry out our family undertakings and
engagements, the people we let our children know and visit, the
value we set on social position as distinguished from social
virtue. As a trust for the world, we believe that our homes
should produce men and women set free from racial antagonisms
and petty prejudices by the daily “rough and tumble” of
tolerated varieties of character and temperament. From the
Aundred and one gigantic problems which rack our brains
concerning international free trade, nationalization of armaments,
neutralization of the seas, democratic control and such like, we
can turn to our simple homes knowing that in them we have in
embryo these problems and their solutions, and behind our own
closed doors—for mercifully we still have doors to our homes—
we can patiently work out our share in the trust. And though
there is and ever must be a home sanctuary reserved to the
family only, yet the war has shown us that no longer are our
homes our own merely, in the beauty of individual love, but are
ours for others, for the Church, the nation, the world.
. The single aim of this paper is to stir thought and arouse
discussion. It does not venture to offer counsel nor advice.
Before anyone can do this we have got to arrive at our own
ideas of reconstruction through honest, painful efforts at
rethinking the whole situation. The worst thing that could
befall us would be to adopt the views of one which might have
the merit of novelty, or to adhere to the views of another which
had a time-honoured, traditional value. Placid satisfaction or
apathetic dissatisfaction must be abandoned for convictions which
we have made our very own, not sparing ourselves in so doing,
and ever having the future of our individual homes in mind
when we think of the homes of the land.
For purposes of discussion and thought I am treating the
subject according to four relationships, the values of which are
in the balances now. These are (1) marriage relationships,
(2) parental relationships, (3) master and servant relationships,
{4) hospitality relationships.
I. Marriage Relationships.—Here is our greatest anxiety,
for granted that these be right the rest we desire will follow.
The estimation in which true marriage relationships are held
is commonly sound, but there are a sufficient number of
violent exceptions, a sufficient number of reputable inadequate
exhibitions of marriage relationship, and a sufficient number
of insidious encroachments upon the marriage -bond and
evasions of its consequences in existence to make us
apprehensive. In days when the irksomeness of mere convention
has become intolerable to many of us, and when there is an
honest if often undisciplined attempt to arrive at truth, it is not