Nothing can be meaner than that “Misery should love company.”  But the proverb is founded on an original principle in human nature, which it is no use to deny and hard work to conquer.  I have been uneasily conscious of this sneaking sin in my own soul, as I have read article after article in the English newspapers and magazines on the “decadence of the home spirit in English family life, as seen in the large towns and the metropolis.”  It seems that the English are as badly off as we.  There, also, men are wide-awake and gay at clubs and races, and sleepy and morose in their own houses; “sons lead lives independent of their fathers and apart from their sisters and mothers;” “girls run about as they please, without care or guidance.”  This state of things is “a spreading social evil,” and men are at their wit’s end to know what is to be done about it.  They are ransacking “national character and customs, religion, and the particular tendency of the present literary and scientific thought, and the teaching and preaching of the public press,” to find out the root of the trouble.  One writer ascribes it to the “exceeding restlessness and the desire to be doing something which are predominant and indomitable in the Anglo-Saxon race;” another to the passion which almost all families have for seeming richer and more fashionable than their means will allow.  In these, and in most of their other theories, they are only working round and round, as doctors so often do, in the dreary circle of symptomatic results, without so much as touching or perhaps suspecting their real centre.  How many people are blistered for spinal disease, or blanketed for rheumatism, when the real trouble is a little fiery spot of inflammation in the lining of the stomach! and all these difficulties in the outworks are merely the creaking of the machinery, because the central engine does not work properly.  Blisters and blankets may go on for seventy years coddling the poor victim; but he will stay ill to the last if his stomach be not set right.

There is a close likeness between the doctor’s high-sounding list of remote symptoms, which he is treating as primary diseases, and the hue and outcry about the decadence of the home spirit, the prevalence of excessive and improper amusements, club-houses, billiard-rooms, theatres, and so forth, which are “the banes of homes.”

The trouble is in the homes.  Homes are stupid, homes are dreary, homes are insufferable.  If one can be pardoned for the Irishism of such a saying, homes are their own worst “banes.”  If homes were what they should be, nothing under heaven could be invented which could be bane to them, which would do more than serve as useful foil to set off their better cheer, their pleasanter ways, their wholesomer joys.