t parent often makes the place-hunting citizen who becomes a tax
on the public.

The ideals of the family determine the needs of citizens. Its
conversation, its reading, its customs, set the standard of social
needs. Where the father laughs at the smartness of the artful dodge in
politics, where the mother sighs after the tinsel and toys that she
knows others have bought with corrupt cash, where the conversation at
the meal-table steadily, though often unconsciously, lifts up and lauds
those who are out after the "real thing," the eager ears about that
board drink it in and childish hearts resolve what they will do when
they have a chance. Where no voice speaks for high things, where no tide
of indignation against wrong sweeps into language, where the children
never feel that the parents have great moral convictions--where no
vision is, the people perish.

Yet to realize this civic responsibility of the home would be, in the
greater number of instances, to remedy it. In those other instances
where there are no civic ideals, where the domestic conscience is dead,
there rests upon the state, upon society, for its own sake, the
responsibility to train those children so that, at any rate, they will
not perpetuate homes of this type. We may do very much by the
stimulation and direction of parents. Men need but to be reminded of
their duty to make it a part of their business to train their children
in social duty.

I. References for Study

Taylor, _Religion in Social Action_, chaps. vii, viii. Dodd, Mead &
Co., $1.25.

E.J. Ward, _The Social Center_, chap. v. Appleton, $1.50.

II. Further Reading

Lofthouse, _Ethics in the Family_. Hodder & Stoughton, $1.50.

III. Topics for Discussion

1. What is the special social importance of the family?

2. How do children acquire their social ideals from the home?

3. What are the advantages which the home has as a school?

4. How do homes train for the responsibilities of citizenship?

5. Can you describe any plans of community councils in the home?

6. How would you promote community service in the family?

7. What are the dangers of unsocial and selfish lives growing in
the home?

FOOTNOTES:

[14] This chapter is, with the publisher's kind permission, taken, with
sundry minor changes, from the author's pamphlet, _The Home as a School
for Social Living_, published by the American Bapt