These are the familiar and the constant manifestations of family affection which are so intimate a part of life that we scarcely observe them.

In addition to these we find peculiar manifestations of family devotion exemplifying that touching affection which rises to unusual sacrifice because it is close to pity and feebleness.  “My cousin and his family had to go back to Italy.  He got to Ellis Island with his wife and five children, but they wouldn’t let in the feeble-minded boy, so of course they all went back with him.  My cousin was fearful disappointed.”

Or, “These are the five children of my brother.  He and his wife, my father and mother, were all done for in the bad time at Kishinef.  It’s up to me all right to take care of the kids, and I’d no more go back on them than I would on my own.”  Or, again:  “Yes, I have seven children of my own.  My husband died when Tim was born.  The other three children belong to my sister, who died the year after my husband.  I get on pretty well.  I scrub in a factory every night from six to twelve, and I go out washing four days a week.  So far the children have all gone through the eighth grade before they quit school,” she concludes, beaming with pride and joy.

That wonderful devotion to the child seems at times, in the midst of our stupid social and industrial arrangements, all that keeps society human, the touch of nature which unites it, as it was that same devotion which first lifted it out of the swamp of bestiality.  The devotion to the child is “the inevitable conclusion of the two premises of the practical syllogism, the devotion of man to woman.”  It is, of course, this tremendous force which makes possible the family, that bond which holds society together and blends the experience of generations into a continuous story.  The family has been called “the fountain of morality,” “the source of law,” “the necessary prelude to the state” itself; but while it is continuous historically, this dual bond must be made anew a myriad times in each generation, and the forces upon which its formation depend must be powerful and unerring.  It would be too great a risk to leave it to a force whose manifestations are intermittent and uncertain.  The desired result is too grave and fundamental.

One Sunday evening an excited young man came to see me, saying that he must have advice; some one must tell him at once what to do, as his wife was in the state’s prison serving a sentence for a crime which he himself had committed.  He had seen her the day before, and though she had been there only a month he was convinced that she was developing consumption.  She was “only seventeen, and couldn’t stand the hard work and the ‘low down’ women” whom she had for companions.  My remark that a girl of seventeen was too young to be in the state penitentiary brought out the whole wretched story.