Spencer family

“ Charles Spencer, a youth of extraordinary hopes, very learned for his age, and ingenious, and under a governor of great worth. Happy were it, could as much be said of the elder brother, the Lord Spencer, who, rambling about the world, dishonors both his name and his family, adding sorrow to sorrow to a mother, who has taken all imaginable care of his education. There is a daughter very young married to the Earl of Clancarty, who has a great and fair estate in Ireland, but who yet gives no great presage of worth,—so universally contaminated is the youth of this corrupt and abandoned age! ”

“ Vigoreux, Rector of Brington, sent in his resignation of the living to the Bishop towards the close of the year 1824. The letters which are found among Father Ignatius's papers show this transaction to have been very creditable to the Spencer family. The old rector was on the continent,—he seems to have been very much in debt to Lord Spencer, and upon his resigning his living, Lord Spencer not only cancelled the debt, but made him so far independent for life, that the old clergyman, in sheer gratitude, ordered £7. 10s. to be distributed every year among the poor of the parish, whilst he lived. ”

“ The old sense of family responsibility is, however, happily not lost and in its new ways of working often gives a finer representation of mutual aid than was common of old. The will of one rich man which included many gifts to sisters, cousins, and nieces, and left directions to the principal heirs to find out if there were any relatives of the same nearness left out and if so to make them equal sharers, is but a type of many who, with or without large means, share generously with all their name and kin. ”

“ I do love rushing through the air behind a horse like Firefly, and father is such an old love, and always understands how you feel. He is very quiet and shy, and when anyone else is there he hardly speaks a word, but we chatter like anything when we are together. I have a kind of idea that he likes me best, though Spencer and Vere are the show members of the family. Spencer is the heir, and is almost always away because he is a soldier, and Vere is away a lot too, because she hates the country, and likes visiting about and having a good time. ”

“ On the other hand, it is cause for gratitude unspeakable that the old bondage of the family life is relaxed, never to be tightened again to such oppression as once prevailed. The fact that inheritance is now seen to be so varied and so unpredictable that one child in a family may "take back" to one ancestor and another to a different one to ends of complete divergence of character and capacity, shows that the old attempt to keep them together, whether they could love each other or not, was a social mistake. To-day we are more reasonable. ”

“ All who believe that the family is an institution whose gift to the social order is not yet outgrown and whose possibilities of social value are not yet fully developed, must work to make the right marriages easier to secure, and the wrong ones less easy to be consummated, and to purge the ideals of home of selfishness and of superficiality by constant portrayal of the best in the married life.
The stage and the moving picture should more often portray the world's marriage successes rather than perpetual reproductions of the marriage failures. ”

“ The family preceded 42individualistic marriage as we know it and was developed for the purpose of giving to oncoming generations a share in the race-life, whatever the ideals concerning that race-life may have been at any period of social order. Even in its present undeveloped form, with its cramping limitations of past autocracy and with its crude attempts at an as yet half-understood democracy, we may well count the private monogamic family as a priceless inheritance and work toward its better organization and larger service to social life. ”

“ There is a general impression, perhaps speeded unduly by the war, that what is new must be good, and what is old must be, if not bad, at least not the best. The decay of family religion lessens respect for old sanctions. The fact that business and pleasure alike take the different members of each family on different ways all the week and Sunday, too, make each age represented in the household influenced chiefly by its own set of friends. ”

“ A man's infidelity to the marriage vow might seem to do no perceptible harm if practised outside the family circle, but woe to him if he trespassed upon the family ownership of another man.
There might be more than one wife acknowledged as secondary in status or a mere concubine slave to help in domestic duties while giving pleasure to the head of the family, but there was early a social demand for one chief wife whose offspring should inherit the family power. ”

“ If she had a son and rose to be a grandmother she might attain a most honorable position, having her son's wife to be her servant and her son's son's wife to be her slave. Even with the best intentions, the patriarchal father could not attend to all the details of government within his usually extensive household, and no man has yet lived who could manage unassisted a 92group of women, such as legal polygamy and concubinage brings under one roof, each one determined to get from him the best possible conditions for her own life and that of her children. ”

“ Needed most in the poorest home, the help of the grandmother is often appreciated in inverse ratio to the income.
In the circles above the poverty line there is much variety in the estimation and in the treatment of grandfathers and grandmothers. The ideal picture of a family always has in its background, if not in the very front, an old man and an old woman, benevolent and sweet-natured, who can be depended upon to be more indulgent to the children than even the father or mother and who appear always in family emergencies to renew their youth of service in behalf of the younger generation. ”

“ The Family as an Aid to Spiritual Democracy.—There seems to be no other inherited institution in which this spiritual essence of democracy can be so clearly and so well realized as it may be and to-day often is in the private monogamic family. The permanent and successful family offers a unique centre of personal development at the heart of all other social groups. Founded as it is in selective affection, and in aim at least permanently secure, it offers a refuge in every distress and a help in every trouble of each of its members. ”

“ No family autonomy is henceforth to be secured by fiat of law enthroning one "head" as the legal despot or economic ruler. The family must be democratized in that sense in which each individual within its bond shall be sustained in seeking and in maintaining the conditions of personality. No one human being to live solely for others' service or to have his or her value estimated in terms of contribution to other lives, but all to seek the utmost perfection of individual life as a contribution to the common life; this is the democratic ideal. ”

“ This visit {478} he looked back to with a great deal of satisfaction, and his joy was increased when Lord and Lady Sarah Spencer returned his visit in Highgate, when he happened to be there, the next year. The friendly relations between him and his family seemed, if possible, to become closer and more cordial towards the end of his life.
He told us one day in recreation, when some one asked what became of the lady he was disposed to be married to, once in his life: "I passed by her house a few days ago. I believe her husband is a very excellent man, and that she is happy." ”

“ It is a great gift of nature to be able to give happiness just by allowing people to look at one! The contour of the face, the turn of the head, the light in the eye, the freshness of the complexion, the grace of the movement, and the sweetness of the voice all go together, if the manner and the feeling only match the coloring and the form, to make it well worth while just to be alive.
And some flowers of the family are not beautiful but charming, those of tact and graciousness and understanding of others and consideration and unselfish behavior. ”

“ To divorce all the working-time, and all the work-tendency, and most of the work-training from home life is to weaken the hold of the family upon the average worker. Members of a family in which each has definite and firm relation to some different requirement and control connected with a daily task are likely to acquire an independent relation to society in general. ”

“ There are many conceivable limitations to parental functioning, even for those who are keenly aware of the social significance of parenthood, which do not apply to marriage of those truly mated in thought and purpose. It is, however, the height of irrationality, and will more and more be seen to be such, for men and women to enter a relation the natural result of which, in the vast majority of cases, is the bearing of children, with no idea on either side as to what is the ideal and the wish and the purpose of the other party in the marriage union. ”

“ What is that essence of democracy which must be applied as test within the family, as within the state and within the industrial order? It is the fundamental belief in the worth and dignity of every human being and the equal right of each and all to personality. No man, as in the older days, must be obliged to be husband and father, but may choose, if he deems it essential to his own being, to remain in a solitary path outside the current of the generations. ”

“ It must be remembered that in such cases it is the father's name by which the married daughter is called and the mother's maiden name is lost with all the rest of the silent majority of her sex. The fact that men have given the wedded name for ages, and that men are most often senior partners in the marriage firm, and the fact that any other suggested plan gives two names for one family instead of one seems to make that a part of the old inheritance that may not cause great uneasiness if one accepts it without revolt. ”

“ Some flowers of the family bloom late and come to their beauty only when some disaster threatens destruction of the home or some sorrow wrecks its happiness. Simple, plain, unassuming, neither very wise nor very strong in other matters, they have a heart that can love with such intensity that it warms the coldest spot and is the refuge most sought when misfortune appears. ”

“ He has taken into the home many things we want now to get rid of, as, for example, a social tendency toward masculine monopolies. His genius for organization in political and economic fields has in many ways worked against the right alignment of men and women in family relations. But can 32we do without the father altogether, save for a brief hour of service as a "biologic necessity"? Still more, can we have for mothers that "calm and repose" which Ellen Key bespeaks for them unless they have fathers of efficiency and character to help them in their peculiar task of life-creation? ”

“ No woman must be obliged to live solely to serve a family. She, 43too, has right to self-development in some chosen way. No married couple must be forced to add to the children already here; they may justly be protected in living and working together in some comradeship that has no family limitations save those of mutual loyalty and mutual service. No child is to be justly held so much under family control as to have his nature stifled or warped, and no child shall be made a pecuniary asset to the family regardless of his own needs. ”

“ The family, more than any other inherited institution, feels the oscillations between the individual demand for personal achievement and the response to the social need for large service within group relationships which now, for the first time, stir in the consciousness of average women.
The Family as We Know It Is the Central Nursery of Character.—The inevitable outcome of the new freedom, education and economic opportunity of women gives us the problem of the modern family. The ideal of the democracy we are trying to achieve is higher personality in all the mass of the people. ”

“ For want of agreement, or at least of understanding of disagreement before marriage, many unions are shipwrecked.
In the old days there were no questions of this nature. Every woman must have as many children as nature allowed, and when she could bear no more must give way to a new wife and a step-mother to carry on the family life; and if there were more children in a family than the father and family friends could support, they had to be cared for by the community. The modern condition is the same in the case of those below a certain grade of intelligence and self-control. ”

“ But it is often a great advantage if the parents, at least, have had a chance to make full acquaintance with each other's pet weaknesses and each other's best qualities before "the baldheaded tyrant from No Man's Land" makes his 157appearance. It is, therefore, clearly a matter of frank and full discussion and settlement before marriage not only as to the fundamental question of whether or not there shall be children, but also if, as is the case in the overwhelming majority of cases, the young people hope for offspring, when they shall begin to call them to the home. ”

“ The Headship of the Father.—During the middle ages of our civilization and for centuries of our later past the headship of the family rested securely in the father. Now the ideal of "Two heads in council; Two beside the hearth; Two in the tangled business of the world" is working toward democratization of the family. This leads toward a legal status and an economic adjustment in which the relation of husband and wife may be equalized toward each other and toward their children. ”