encies.

To-day men and women are confronted by two tempters which constantly
lure them away from the complete living of the family; one is work, and
the other is comfort. With the majority of people in our modern
industrial democracies work uses up the hours and the energy of life. We
have passed into a time when our habitual material needs are great, and
the products of work are shamelessly diverted to the excessive uses of
comparatively few individuals and groups. Hence millions of workers
march along the narrow dark roads that lead through factories and farms
to the grave. Only little patches of their nervous systems are ever
used, but all their energy flows through these sections day after day,
leaving their lives dull and empty.

Marriage for these workers means decreased earning power for the woman,
with increased needs for the family, especially when the children come.
As one watches the procession of young factory and shop women, with
Sunday finery and some leisure, passing over into draggled factory
mothers, with no finery and no leisure, one marvels at the strength of
the forces with which nature drives them to their destiny. And yet, even
with these hopeless workers, marriage and children mark the heights of
life.

With others, who are economically freer, work has become an obsession. A
Charles Darwin or a Herbert Spencer turns all of life's forces to
shaping facts into science; our industrial leaders mint their hours into
dollars; our reformers give up their lives that social conditions may be
changed; our society leaders trade life for triumphs. Meantime we all
know, or would know if we stopped to consider, that we are here to live
life fully and significantly day by day. But domesticity takes time and
effort, and so the hurrying specialist follows the narrow line of
success until he or she becomes a machine for manufacturing
generalizations, for painting pictures, for performing surgical
operations or for merely getting money. The richest woman in America
said with approval recently that her son was too busy to fall in love.

As industry drives the mass of workers and specialists away from life's
deepest realizations, so the desire to become comfortable, physically
and mentally, through avoiding the deeper experiences of life, robs many
of those who have a large measure of economic freedom. In all periods of
great wealth this disease of ease has afflicted mankind. Life more
abundantly comes only at th