ide-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.

Whose fault is it that they are not so? Fault is a heavy word. It
includes generations in its pitiless entail. Sufficient for the day is the
evil thereof is but one side of the truth. No day is