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
belong to the adult judgment of the child and pertain to activity quite
outside the family life. Probably the distinctively family tragedy of
which we all catch glimpses now and then, is the assertion of this
authority through all the entanglements of wounded affection and
misunderstanding. We see parents and children acting from conscientious
motives and with the tenderest affection, yet bringing about a misery
which can scarcely be hidden.

Such glimpses remind us of that tragedy enacted centuries ago in Assisi,
when the eager young noble cast his very clothing at his father's feet,
dramatically renouncing his filial allegiance, and formally subjecting
the narrow family claim to the wider and more universal duty. All the
conflict of tragedy ensued which might have been averted, had the father
recognized the higher claim, and had he been willing to subordinate and
adjust his own claim to it. The father considered his son disrespectful
and hard-hearted, yet we know St. Francis to have been the most tender
and loving of men, responsive to all possible ties, even to those of
inanimate nature. We know that by his affections he freed the frozen
life of his time. The elements of tragedy lay in the narrowness of the
f