ly unity and mutual aid while giving
freedom and opportunity for each of its members. The pressing
political duty is to use the new voters, the women recently
enfranchised, for needed emancipation from partisan and selfish
political despotism in the interest of effective choices for the
public good. The ever-growing demand of the school is for some
translation of freedom of self-development in terms of respect for
social order and in the spirit of social service. The family life, in
the United States, at least, stands not so much in need of manifestoes
of equality of rights between men and women as of delicate and
discriminating adjustments of that equality to the social demands upon
husbands and wives and upon fathers and mothers. This book aims to
suggest some of the changes in external customs and inherited ways of
living which may lead toward a firmer hold upon social idealism within
the family, as well as within all other inherited institutions, while
new bases of democratic freedom are being firmly installed.

=Coveted Uses of the Book.=--This volume is intended to meet the needs
of college and teacher-training school students; of university
extension classes; of study groups in Women's Clubs, Consumers'
Leagues, Leagues of Women Voters and Church Classes. It is also hoped
that it may form the basis for private study by groups within the
home.

The book is written with a poignant sense of the breaking up of old
social foundations in the agony and terror of the Great War. It is
sent forth with a keen understanding of the spirit of youth that
to-day challenges every inherited institution and ideal, even to the
bone and marrow of the church, the state, the industrial order, the
educative process, and even the family itself. It issues from an
abiding faith that "above all things Truth beareth away the victory"
and hence that no fearless inquiry can harm the essential values of
life. It confesses a clear trust in "the Spirit that led us hither and
is leading us onward." It would sound a call to hold all that has
dowered the race at the sources of life sacred and of worth. It would
echo all that bids us move onward to higher and better things.

The greatest ambition herein recorded is to serve as one who opens
doors of insight into the House of the Interpreter.

--THE AUTHOR.

JANUARY, 1923.

CONTENTS