Family argument

“ If the principle be a right one, of course it extends to all the immediate members of one's own family. We know that the brutal passions of some of the lowest order of mankind are capable of overleaping even the natural barriers which exist between parent and child, between brother and sister. ”

“ So let the father and mother treat each other and their children, and you will, my readers, obtain a noble reward in the increasing happiness and comfort of your family circles—in the manliness which will belong to the sons—in the mental and moral graces which will adorn the daughters. The family will thus become the school of virtue and the bulwark of society—the reciprocal influence of brothers and sisters thus trained will be of untold power on each other's character. ”

“ The family, which the fiercest blasts of the revolutionary tempest in the last century had left untouched, is, in our day, radically assailed in its two essential foundations, marriage and inheritance. ”

“ I must now return to the affairs of my wife’s family, and to my mother-in-law, who had become at length reconciled to me as a member of the family, and almost looked upon me as a son. It appears to be a kind of law in nature or society, that one individual of a family must be sacrificed, in one way or another, for the benefit of the rest. ”

“ Do you want your children to grow up inflamed by such examples of excess and wantonness? I know that all this is defended on the ground that something must be done for a great man’s family. Ay, that family! ”

“ So that we all confess, by calling them wise, how wise it is to help each other. Consider a family, again. In order that a family may be happy and prosperous, all the members of it must bear each other’s burdens. If the father only thought of himself, and the mother of herself, and each of the children did nothing but take care of themselves, would not that family come to misery and ruin? ”

“ My Connie, you must remember this—it's a cruel law in our social life—that parents care much for their children, but children less for their parents; that the family-bonds become still looser between brothers and sisters; and that those bonds gradually become wholly loosened between uncles and aunts and nephews and nieces and cousins. Family-life may have existed in the days of the old patriarchs, who went into the wilderness with sons and daughters and herds, but it has ceased to exist in our modern days. ”

“ Thirty years we have been beneath the opportunities and duties of free manhood, which is to say that for thirty years we have been associated with the family institution as husband, as wife, as parent, as sister, as brother, as son, and as daughter. ”

“ In the relations implied in the names husband and wife, [228] father and mother, parents and children, brothers and sisters, we have the truth of the family. We know the family and can only know the family through these relations. Take the relations away, and you take the family away. There cannot be a husband without a wife, a father without a mother, parents without children, and children without a father and a mother. Abiding in these relations, which make up the truth of the family, wrapt up with them and growing out of them, are the laws of right which the will is to obey. ”

“ It is as an outcome from these emotions that the family exists; it is through these emotions that the most deadly wounds may be inflicted upon her morality and self-respect. In the majority of cases, if through her error, or that of others, the family is a failure, the woman of the family is a failure also. ”

“ The result of this system of family life was that where the children of different mothers but of the same father discovered one another’s presence there were feuds and much fighting, especially as it was the children of the latest affection who were generally the recipients of his favour to the chagrin and anger of the less favoured children and families. ”

“ But from the point where we now stand we see clearly that there is a third factor to which these are altogether subordinate—I mean the family. For the family is the immediate agent in the production and rearing of children; and this, as we have seen, is the end of society. ”

“ It would lead us too far to insist on the enormous advantage of married life for public morality, for the prevention and repression of crime, and even for the welfare of the State, the soundest foundation of which is family life. Each family is a little community in itself, with the father at the head as king, and the mother as queen. ”

“ Each family's shaded world echoes its procreators' familial, psychosocialeconomic, religious and experiential breadth, closely resembled or distorted. Two persons, perhaps more, usually husband and wife, bring shaded views together in some combination or balance that becomes the "stuff," the authority, of {41} their children's worlds. ”

“ It may well be believed that the change from the mother family to the father family is the greatest and most revolutionary in the history of civilization. By changes in the life conditions it becomes possible for the man to get his wife to himself away from her kin, and to become the owner of his children. ”

“ The sons bred in such a family will be moral men, of steady habits; and the daughters, if the mother shall have performed the duties of a parent in the superintendence of their education, as faithfully as she has done those of a wife, will each be a treasure to her husband ”

“ The Moral Elite in the Modern Family.—Above all, we have to-day a growing number who live in the spirit of a true marriage and a noble cradle of infancy and show by actual example what the family is meant to be. These prophesy a marriage that 45demands each of the other that a perfect life shall perfect their love. These give a new pattern and type of parenthood, woven of the tears and joy, the aspiration and the service of those who call children from the storehouse of universal life, not in response to careless passion but in the solemn joy of creative purpose. ”

“ As a matter of fact, though, I believe that every failing of mind, body, temper, and what not, is a matter of inheritance, and that each parent’s particular business in life is to pass his family forward freed from that particular vicious tendency which has been his own bane—or hers, if you prefer it. ”

“ And those who maintain the sacredness of the family give this no absolute denial, but reply, first, that in the long run the true interests of one family, rightly understood, do not conflict with the true interests of other families, of the state, or the rest of mankind; and, second, that even before the true interests are rightly grasped, the family relation forms at least a stage in the process by which the individual learns to enlarge his self-interest, a preliminary stage but an inevitable stage, and still for the vast majority of men the stage of most practical importance. ”

“ It is hardly possible to be mistaken in taking this fight to be a ceremonial, if playful, assertion of the claim of the mother's kinsfolk to the child as one of themselves, and the father's payment to be the quieting of their claim and the securing of his own position as head of his own family. ”

“ For the family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities. He cannot, she cannot, be divorced from the life of the social group, and a life is beautiful and ideal, or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship. ”

“ One way of averting what I have called the irrepressible conflict is to insist that, in view of the fundamental change of attitude toward the whole problem, the family is doomed. Even if the family were doomed, some time would elapse before its doom would utterly have overtaken the home. In truth, the family is not doomed quite yet, though certain views with respect to the family are,—and long ought to have been,—extinct. ”

“ At any rate, just as many men "keep their religion in their wife's name," so, many fathers, although successfully appealed to as final authority in larger concerns of family order, leave the details of character-drill of all their younger children in the hands of the mother. ”

“ And no more than it belongs to the wife to make the home and the husband, does it belong to the mother to train up the children in the way they should go. The family is a joint-stock concern, so established both by nature and revelation. Where, in the Bible, do we find that the mother can make of her child what she will, or that God gave the making of the men of the world into her hand? ”

“ The family, however cruel and even foolish it may be, is in the
right against the Lovelaces. The family is Society. Believe me,
the glory of a young girl, of a woman, must always be that of
repressing her most ardent impulses within the narrow sphere of
conventions. ”

“ But the sphere of the family is not the sole sphere either of men or women. They are not only parents, they are human beings, with genius, talents, aspirations, ambition. They are also members of the State, and from the very equality of the parental function which perpetuates the State, they are equally interested in its welfare. ”

“ Even where they have a family, the feeling is apt to be less tender to the children, who were not the first thought in marriage, but only an inevitable incident, so to speak, than is the case in countries where the perpetuation of a family, the constitution of a home, have been the first thought. ”

“ Moreover, the sentiment which governs parents and grandparents in all that relates to matrimonial conventions is an imperishable sentiment, closely allied to the very existence of civilized societies and springing from the spirit of family. ”

“ In visiting the middle and higher classes of society, the same family compact is observable, and the mother of the family continues always the mother and the head; her gentle reign lasting with her valued life, and the love and respect of those around her increasing with her years. ”

“ At ten years of age the family began to feel the pangs of want, the sufferings of poverty and the gnawing of hunger. At twelve she began to be the family drudge, assisting her mother in such acts as she could perform. ”

“ It is evident, then, that the family life rests, not upon sex attraction, but upon the fact of the child and the corresponding psychological fact of parental instinct. The family, then, has been created by the very conditions of life itself and is not a man-made institution. ”

“ Just as many aunts and uncles, and some papas and mammas, too, are occasionally criticised by those younger members of the family who are prone to be very caustic as to the mode certain burdens are borne, the weight of which has never distressed their own shoulders. And this, not from any deficiency of affection, but simply through a habit which, in the levity of our day, has become popular, and taught us to think little of the ties of parentage, and call a father a Governor. ”

“ From these facts, it is readily understandable how important becomes the consideration of the marriage of relatives, such as cousins, [63] who are, of course, individuals of the same family line, whose mating brings together like groups of traits, thus strengthening the existence of these traits, whether desirable or undesirable. Cousin marriages, when the family possess traits of mental ability, may result in children who are geniuses; but cousin marriages, when the family line possesses traits of mental inability, may result disastrously with respect to offspring. ”

“ It is therefore not only necessary to the peace and tranquillity of the family that his duties should be defined as clearly as possible, but this assistance is due to him as a mark of that filial affection which should not be permitted entirely to die out, simply because the parent has voluntarily assumed a position of inferiority and subjection. ”

“ Here is the divine order which every family is called upon to fulfil; a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump, and, therefore, it matters infinitely that every family should realise the nature and the obligations of the family bond. ”

“ And for such a view there is this to be said: that our family system does unquestionably take the natural bond between members of the same family, which, like all natural bonds, is not too tight to be borne, and superimposes on it a painful burden of forced, inculcated, suggested, and altogether unnecessary affection and responsibility which we should do well to get rid of by making relatives as independent of one another as possible. ”

“ In a word, the little family is destined to be extinguished, and to resolve itself some day into several families of a similar nature; but the great family, being constituted to endure for ever in the same condition, need not, like the small one, increase for the purpose of multiplying, but need only maintain itself; and it can easily be proved that any increase does it more harm than good.
In the family, it is clear, for several reasons which lie in its very nature, that the father ought to command. ”

“ You've noticed, haven't you, that there's always one child in a family that'll get nearly everything belongin' to the family? They'll claim this and that and the other, and the rest o' the children will give in to 'em jest to keep from havin' a quarrel. Well, Mother was the claimin' one in our family, and whatever she claimed she got, and whatever she got she held on to it. If Mother'd been content with the things that her mother handed down to her, it wouldn't 'a' been so bad, but there never was a member o' the family died that Mother didn't manage to get hold o' some of the belongin's. ”