ts which say: Remember! they garnish them with
quite new furnishings that as yet have no meaning. Wait, I am wrong;
these things are often symbols, as it were, of a facile and superficial
existence. In their midst one breathes a certain heady vapor of
mundanity. They recall the life outside, the turmoil, the rush. And were
one sometimes disposed to forget this life, they would call back his
wandering thought and say: Remember!--in another sense: Do not forget
your appointment at the club, the play, the races! The home, then,
becomes a sort of half-way house where one comes to rest a little
between two prolonged absences; it isn't a good place to stay. As it has
no soul, it does not speak to yours. Time to eat and sleep, and then off
again! Otherwise you become as dull as a hermit.

We are all acquainted with people who have a rage for being abroad, who
think the world would no longer go round if they didn't figure on all
sides of it. To stay at home is penal; there they cease to be in view. A
horror of home life possesses them to such a degree that they would
rather pay to be bored outside than be amused gratuitously within.

In this way society slowly gravitates toward life in herds, which must
not be confounded with public life. The life in herds is somewhat like
that of swarms of flies in the sun. Nothing so much resembles the
worldly life of a man as the worldly life of another man. And this
universal banality destroys the very essence of public spirit. One need
not journey far to discover the ravages made in modern society by the
spirit of worldliness; and if we have so little foundation, so little
equilibrium, calm good sense and initiative, one of the chief reasons
lies in the undermining of the home life. The masses have timed their
pace by that of people of fashion. They too have become worldly. Nothing
can be more so than to quit one's own hearth for the life of saloons.
The squalor and misery of the homes is not enough to explain the current
which carries each man away from his own. Why does the peasant desert
for the inn the house that his father and grandfather found so
comfortable? It has remained the same. There is the same fire in the
same chimney. Whence comes it that it lights only an incomplete circle,
when in olden times young and old sat shoulder to shoulder? Something
has changed in the minds of men. Yielding to dangerous impulses, they
have broken with simplicity. The fathers have quitted their po