antism
draws it still closer by making the first cousin a marriageable
stranger; and the only reason for not drawing it at sisters and brothers
is that the institution of the family compels us to spend our
childhood with them, and thus imposes on us a curious relation in which
familiarity destroys romantic charm, and is yet expected to create a
specially warm affection. Such a relation is dangerously factitious and
unnatural; and the practical moral is that the less said at home about
specific family affection the better. Children, like grown-up people,
get on well enough together if they are not pushed down one another's
throats; and grown-up relatives will get on together in proportion
to their separation and their care not to presume on their blood
relationship. We should let children's feelings take their natural
course without prompting. I have seen a child scolded and called
unfeeling because it did not occur to it to make a theatrical
demonstration of affectionate delight when its mother returned after an
absence: a typical example of the way in which spurious family sentiment
is stoked up. We are, after all, sociable animals; and if we are let
alone in the matter of our affections, and well brought up otherwise,
we shall not get on any the worse with particular people because they
happen to be our brothers and sisters and cousins. The danger lies in
assuming that we shall get on any better.

The main point to grasp here is that families are not kept together at
present by family feeling but by human feeling. The family cultivates
sympathy and mutual help and consolation as any other form of kindly
association cultivates them; but the addition of a dictated compulsory
affection as an attribute of near kinship is not only unnecessary,
but positively detrimental; and the alleged tendency of modern social
development to break up the family need alarm nobody. We cannot break up
the facts of kinship nor eradicate its natural emotional consequences.
What we can do and ought to do is to set people free to behave naturally
and to change their behavior as circumstances change. To impose on
a citizen of London the family duties of a Highland cateran in the
eighteenth century is as absurd as to compel him to carry a claymore and
target instead of an umbrella. The civilized man has no special use
for cousins; and he may presently find that he has no special use for
brothers and sisters. The parent seems likely to remain indi