just as its average temperament shapes manners and bearing and its
moral tone begets moral predisposition. If the average sensual man of
our civilization is noisy and undignified in his bearing, disposed to
insult and despise those he believes to be his social inferiors,
competitive and disobliging to his equals; abject, servile, and
dishonest to those he regards as his betters; if his wife is a silly,
shallow, gossiping spendthrift, unfit to rear the children she
occasionally bears, perpetually snubbing social inferiors and
perpetually cringing to social superiors, it is probable that we have
to blame the home, not particularly any specific class of homes, but
our general home atmosphere, for the great part of these
characteristics. If we would make the average man of the coming years
gentler in manner, more deliberate in judgment, steadier in purpose,
upright, considerate, and free, we must look first to the possibility
of improving the tone and quality of the average home.

Now the substance and constitution of the home, the relations and order
of its various members, have been, and are, traditional. But it is a
tradition that has always been capable of modification in each
generation. In the unlettered, untravelling past, the factor of
tradition was altogether dominant. Sons and daughters married and set
up homes, morally, intellectually, economically, like those of their
parents. Over great areas homogeneous traditions held, and it needed
wars and conquests, or it needed missionaries and persecutors and
conflicts, or it needed many generations of intercourse and filtration
before a new tradition could replace or graft itself upon the old. But
in the past hundred years or so the home conditions of the children of
our English-speaking population have shown a disposition to break from
tradition under influences that are increasing, and to become much more
heterogeneous than were any home conditions before. The ways in which