the claims of society in any such light, if its misery and need can be
made clear and urged as an explicit claim, as the state urges its claims
in the time of danger, then for the first time the daughter who desires
to minister to that need will be recognized as acting conscientiously.
This recognition may easily come first through the emotions, and may be
admitted as a response to pity and mercy long before it is formulated
and perceived by the intellect.

The family as well as the state we are all called upon to maintain as
the highest institutions which the race has evolved for its safeguard
and protection. But merely to preserve these institutions is not enough.
There come periods of reconstruction, during which the task is laid upon
a passing generation, to enlarge the function and carry forward the
ideal of a long-established institution. There is no doubt that many
women, consciously and unconsciously, are struggling with this task. The
family, like every other element of human life, is susceptible of
progress, and from epoch to epoch its tendencies and aspirations are
enlarged, although its duties can never be abrogated and its obligations
can never be cancelled. It is impossible to bring about the higher
development by any self-assertion or breaking away of the individual
will. The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at
the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type
of progress. The family in its entirety must be carried out into the
larger life. Its various members together must recognize and acknowledge
the validity of the social obligation. When this does not occur we have
a most flagrant example of the ill-adjustment and misery arising when an
ethical code is applied too rigorously and too conscientiously to
conditions which are no longer the same as when the code was instituted,
and for which it was never designed. We have all seen parental control
and the family claim assert their authority in fields of effort which