Of your perilous pleasure!

What will it measure?

What will it garner of anguish for me

In the future to be?

Don't you see, don't you know

I must reap where you sow?
You may revel tonight;

But the poison, the blight,
The terrible sorrow

Are mine on the morrow."

The Cosmopolitan, January, 1915.

CHAPTER X

PARENTAL DELINQUENCY

"At night returning, every labour sped,
He sits him down, the monarch of a shed;
Smiles by his cheerful fire, and round surveys
His children's looks, that brighten at the blaze:
While his lov'd partner, boastful of her hoard,
Displays her cleanly platter on the board."

-GOLDSMITH-The Traveller 1. 191.

The ideals of the city, the state, the nation, the school, and the church will never rise higher than the ideals of the home, for the home is the foundation of society as well as the most ancient of all God-ordained institutions. "No creature is so gregarious as man, and we can hardly conceive him except as a member of the family. . . . One of the best measures of domestication in animals or of civilization in man is the intensity of love of home. This is a very complex feeling and made up of many ties, hard to dissect, or even to enumerate. Kline attempts to analyze the factors of love of home, in order of their intensity, as follows: love of parents, scenery, house, familiar ways, freedom of opinion and conduct, relatives and friends, animals, pleasant memories, sympathy,

etc. We also find specified the room, articles of furniture, the garden, hills, trees, rocks, meadow, streams, frankness of expression, leisure to do as one pleases, liberty to arrange things to one's taste. All these make up the content of that magic word, home, of which the hearth with its altar-fire is the heart. It inclines to settled habits of life, is the converse of the roving instinct, and is largely woman's creation."

The great problem demanding a satisfactory solution is the problem of maintaining the wholesome home ideals which make the American home the nation's bulwark. Life today is speeded to the eight-cylinder capacity, whether the scene of action be Fifth Avenue or the East Side. The ceaseless pursuit of wealth at the sacrifice of honesty, and at the expense of health and real happiness, the lowering of the morals of society through a double standard of morality, the false ambition of parents to force their children into maturity before the charm of childhood has even manifested itself, the struggle of poverty, overcrowded housing conditions in the modern cities, are all the evidences of a wrong standard of living and largely responsible for the spirit of unrest in human society.

"Parents control the bodies and minds, the hearts and souls of their children, not so much 1 Hall, "Adolescence," Vol. II, p. 375.

by what their ancestors were as by what they themselves do and think," says Oppenheim. Ancestor worship will not vitally affect the present or the future generation unless the spirit of the past remains alive and is a dominating influence in home making and character building. The spirit of the home maker who is conscious of responsibility will manifest itself in a kind of happiness and contentment found only in a real home, whether humble or pretentious.

Somebody has said that homes are workshops into which God sends little babies for parents to fashion into men and women fit for His service in the great world's work, and yet how many home methods invite fatal disaster, as the countless number of half-built human tabernacles testify. "The three 'Modern Furies' are insanity, suicide, and divorce," says John Horace Lockwood. "The appalling rapid rise of the divorce rate is due to faulty training of children, morbid and unnatural views and habits of life, and exaggerated sex-consciousness. This is clearly shown by the uniformity with which insanity and suicide keep pace with the divorce court. Here are the figures:

"The population of the United States in 1910 was 46.77 per cent greater than in 1890, but the divorce rate had increased 50 per cent, the suicide rate 258 per cent, and, while there is no means of knowing the increased insanity rate, the number of inmates of institutions for the insane had jumped up 152 per cent." According to recent statistics, fifty-one per cent of the boys in the reformatory schools of California have come there through the breaking up of homes by divorce. Many believe that this is due to the lack of fixed ideals and obedience in the bringing up of children, to fathers and mothers who have been delinquent in their responsibility, to a lack of "home" spirit, and the failure of parents to recognize the child of today as the home maker of tomorrow. Juvenile delinquency is a by-product of parental delinquency. Juvenile Courts would be unnecessary if parents would stop letting out the training of their children to others.

Parental delinquency does not always mean the failure to provide clothes, food, shelter, and an education, but rather the failure to recognize the rights of boyhood and girlhood as well as their potentialities; the failure to give sympathetic companionship; to give time to answering the serious questions; and to give love to heart

2 The Mothers' Magazine, May, 1914, p. 9.