Domestic system

“ As observed on a former occasion, 'they are invested with the sole power to regulate domestic affairs of the highest moment to the prosperity and happiness of their people, affecting the acquisition, enjoyment, transfer, and descent of property ”

“ Thus, the most important social institutions—the family, the classes, the vocations, village settlements and cities, and also the relations of property, intercourse, and contract, which these involve—were already in existence before becoming constituent parts of a legal system. ”

“ They have turned the attention of their religious sympathies to the economic margin of the community. They have enforced the payment of debts, and they have governed and controlled marriage conditions. By subtle enforcement of custom having the power of laws, they have governed the community in its vital relations, and perfected the system by which the poorest man shall make his living and by which the richest man shall make his fortune. ”

“ Judging from facts of existing law, and analogies of other social movements, we may arrive at the conclusion that, just as in political control the overmastering impulse of growth is in the direction of the greatest possible freedom of the individual, consistent with social cohesion, so in domestic control the irresistible movement is in the direction of the most perfect legal equality of the married partners, consistent with family unity. ”

“ She has a husband, to whose peculiar tastes and habits she must accommodate herself; she has children whose health she must guard, whose physical constitutions she must study and develop, whose temper and habits she must regulate, whose principles she must form, whose pursuits she must guide. She has constantly changing domestics, with all varieties of temper and habits, whom she must govern, instruct, and direct; she is required to regulate the finances of the domestic state, and constantly to adapt expenditures to the means and to the relative claims of each department. ”

“ The limitation of these public resorts to such time and such place as may be most convenient for the neighbourhood forms a part of economics, or domestic polity, which, considering the kingdom as a large family, and the sovereign as the master of it, he clearly has a right to dispose and order as he pleases. ”

“ No one could make any of these objections, if he knew the nature, or saw anything of the utility and beauty of the science.
Half-civilized states were like the half-civilized household we have described, eight centuries ago. We wish we could go on to say that civilized states are managed like civilized households, that Political Economy was nearly as well understood by governments as domestic economy is by the heads of families. ”

“ What would societies, what would nations be, unless the members and citizens composing them had homes,—had each his dear and private home,—where are garnered up and cherished all the good affections, pure thoughts, and innocent delights, out of which, as from his storehouse, he brings his contribution of friendly regard, benevolent feeling, and true principle, to increase the common stock? As the private home is, such will be the public society, such will be the character of the nation itself. And what is the basis and the soul of home, but the pure conjugal bond and union? ”

“ Traditional ideas regarded the common wealth, or social organisation, as an association of families, each family being a community which was largely autonomous, and was self-contained for most of life’s purposes; hence the order and health of the commonwealth depended upon the order and efficiency of the families comprised within it. ”

“ It is difficult for us in America, who live under customs and laws in which the individual is the social unit and the family a union of individuals, to understand a system of society in which the individual is little or nothing and the family the social unit recognized both by law and custom. ”

“ If, as Lecky states, "pure domestic life" is amongst the 'strongest' of those forces that bear a nation onward to improvement, the private life of one that would mould the thoughts, guide the energies and thus shape the destinies of a nation is a public concern. ”

“ A society of seventy families, the number you name, may very possibly be governed as a single family, subsisting on their common industry, and holding all things in common. Some regulators of the family you still must have, and it remains to be seen at what period of your increasing population your simple regulations will cease to be sufficient to preserve order, peace, and justice. The experiment is interesting; I shall not live to see its issue, but I wish it success equal to your hopes, and to yourself and society prosperity and happiness. ”

“ Then, when the people had obtained possession of the government, reforms would begin: return to the primitive commune, substitution of an equal and free family for the moral and oppressive family; absolute equality, civil, political and economic; individual independence guaranteed, thanks to the possession and the integral product of the instruments of work ”

“ The need of domestic service will diminish in the same proportion, and the problem it presents will be solved by its diminution, or gradual disappearance; while domestic life will be more and more freed from the necessity of carrying on a variety of domestic work. ”

“ Society Now Based upon Man's Economic Leadership.—Any study of the needs of the family in relation to the school, especially in relation to the tax-supported, free, and compulsory educational system, must take account of two outstanding facts: namely, first, that the whole arrangement of society as we have inherited its condition is based upon the economic leadership of the husband and father in the home partnership. ”

“ The question how to improve the present condition of domestic service is, however, not a hopeless one, but the answer to it must be based on an examination of the historical and economic principles underlying the subject. ”

“ We are apt indeed to think of the state of things in which the members of a family or clan hold land and stock in common, as the antithesis of one in which rights of property exist. In truth it is the earliest stage of their existence, because the most primitive form of society in which the fruit of his labour is secured to the individual by the society, under the influence of the conception of a common well-being. ”

“ The government has been taken under the self-sufficient wing of a handful of families, that, having great property rights, hold themselves forth as heaven-anointed rulers of the land. The people are becoming aroused to both their powers and their rights. ”

“ But may we not blame law-makers, or, rather, our own social order, for measures more fatal in their results than either of these—for instance, the law which concentrates all property into the hands of a few owners? ”

“ In general, although the institution of the laws which regulate the power of individuals in the disposition of their own goods belongs only to the Sovereign, the spirit of these laws, which the government ought to follow in their application, is that, from father to son, and from relation to relation, the goods of a family should go as little out of it and be as little alienated as possible. ”

“ The nation has come to realize that the men and women who compose it are its largest wealth, and that this treasure must be guarded more sacredly than our mines, our forests, or our water power. We have seen, accordingly, a whole new body of legislation growing up, that would have made our fathers stand aghast, fixing the conditions of employment, the age of employees, the sanitary condition of homes and mills, the hours of work and the care of women. ”

“ In the third state, toward which society is trending, the concept of service will rule, and private property as a dominant concept will be compelled to take a thoroughly subordinate place in human activities. ”

“ The state expresses the cooperative or mutual-veto will of that part of society which is politically organized for this purpose. Private property expresses the individual will of the several private owners, or of the private chief, whether patriarch, pope, suzerain, boss, or industrial monopolist, who is at the head of the particular institution. The sociological view, being strictly inductive, does not impart to the theory of the state that which is potential and ideal, but only that which is actual and historical. ”

“ The social organization system and legal regime, ranging from ancestral family and community principles and ethical and moral standards, passing through production and trade relations, solidarity and social responsibility, forms of community and state administration; up to a very complex system of laws, rules, uses and customs that embodied free work by the community, the stewardships and charges system, which allowed the orderly and balanced community life as well as relationships and exchanges with other communities or states. ”

“ Other causes to which we may attribute a general want of courtesy in manners are certain incidental results of our domestic institutions. Our ancestors and their descendants have constantly been combating the aristocratic principle which would exalt one class of men at the expense of another. ”

“ And the prosperity of individuals, of families, and of nations, for this life and the life to come, depends more on the proper control and regulation of these principles than on any other social or moral duty. ”

“ But the modern civilized home is, as a rule, and to all intents and purposes, only the shell of what it was before that revolution in industrial methods which began about the middle of the eighteenth century. ”

“ Except incidentally, we shall not go into executive or political questions, but the sociological—I wish there were some simpler word for it—let us say, the human legislation; legislation that concerns not the government, the king, or the state, but each man in his relations to every other; that deals with property, marriage, divorce, private rights, labor, the corporations, combinations, trusts, taxation, rates, police power, and the other great questions of the day, and indeed of all time. ”

“ This dichotomy is perpetuated by agreements, laws and constitutions which guarantee the property rights and social privileges by which the rich and powerful safeguard and increase their wealth and power. ”

“ The family abandons one provisionally and temporarily maintained function after another and, inasmuch as it only filled out the gaps in social functions, it yields to the independent institutions of law, order, power, divine service, teaching, industry, etc., as soon as such institutions are developed. ”

“ All men must dwell in decent tenements, In towns there must be gardens for the people, Each child, no matter what its birth, shall learn To be a useful member of the state, By being taught a trade, of which it can 143 Make choice itself approved of by its parents. When work is scarce, the State must give employment, Not the nigh penal work of the Poor House, But work where work shall be Co-operative, Men reaping as they sow, their proper share. ”

“ The Earth shall be planted and the fruits reaped and carried into Storehouses by common assistance of every family: The Riches of the Storehouses shall be the common stock to every Family: There shall be no idle person nor beggar in the Land.”
Commonwealth Government and Kingly Government. ”

“ Combinations of classes in society, united by the bond of a corporate spirit, for the accumulation of power, influence, or wealth, by the control of intercourse or trade, or the spiritual or moral concerns of society, unquestionably desire limitations upon the sovereignty of the people, and the existence of an authority upon which they can repose in security and confidence. ”

“ The benevolence, charity, capacity and industry which exerted in private life would make a family, a parish or a town happy, employed upon a larger scale and in support of the great principles of virtue and freedom of political regulations, might secure whole nations and generations from misery, want and contempt. ”

“ In the present active state of the public mind on questions of the ownership of property and the socialistic reorganization of society, it is necessary to appeal to reason rather than to tradition, and show the rationale of the institutions that have come down to us from our forefathers. ”

“ All the various classes of American society were mingled together in terms of absolute equality. Bankers, farmers, sailors, cotton-planters, brokers, merchants, watermen, magistrates, elbowed each other in the most free-and-easy way. ”

“ The social institutions, under which the people of a certain historical period and of a certain country are living, are dependent on these two forms of production; partly on the development of labor, partly on that of the family. ”

“ That therefore societies should be formed upon the model of the family, having all interests and all property absolutely in common; all the members laboring faithfully for the general welfare and support, and drawing the means of living from the general treasury. ”

“ The civil government should guarantee the divine right of every laborer to the results of his toil, thus enabling the producers of wealth to provide themselves with the means for physical comfort, and facilities for mental, social, and moral culture ”

“ It is upon these two institutions that our civilization rests. The state is a third very important institution in society, but it exists largely for the sake of protecting the family and property.
Of the two institutions, the family and property, the family is without doubt prior in time and more fundamental,—more important in human association. We shall, therefore, study very briefly the origin and development of the family as a human institution in order to illustrate some of the principles of social evolution in general. ”

“ We may see the need of government in societies by what is visible in families, those lesser societies of which all public societies are constituted. How miserable would these little societies be, if all were left to themselves, without any authority or superiority in one above another or any head of union and influence among them? ”