ine that they shall not
suffer from false conceptions, shall not bruise themselves in the blind
ignorance that compelled us to find our own way. We shall see that,
first, in the education of our children we can save the homes of
tomorrow by training the children of today to set first things first. If
family life has been neglected in America, it has been because we have
submerged its real values of character and affection in a flood of
things, of materialism.

Sec. 1. A CONSTRUCTIVE POLICY FOR CHARACTER

The future higher efficiency of the family depends on an extension of a
conscience for character through all our thinking on the family. We are
really half-ashamed to talk of character. We blush for ideals but we
have no shame in boasting of commerce and factories; we are ashamed of
the things of beauty and we love only the useful. So we have become
ashamed of the ideals of the home. Not only do we passively acquiesce in
the popular attitude of indifference or derision, but we voice it
ourselves. We join in the jest at marriage; we joke over marital
infelicities. We would be ashamed to be caught singing "Home, Sweet
Home." What is more important, we show that, as a people, we have less
and less the habit of regarding the home as any other than a commercial
affair. The tendency is to determine domestic living wholly by economic
factors. The literature on the "home" is overwhelmingly economic; its
heart is in the kitchen. High efficiency on the physiological, sanitary,
culinary, and mechanical sides makes the modern home so convenient that
you can lie on a folding bed, press a button to light the grate fire,
turn on the lights, start the toaster, and wake the children. Homes are
places to hide in at night, to feed the body, arrange the clothes, and
start out from for real living. They are private hotels.

If we would save the family we must save the child from losing sight of
the primacy of human values; we must strengthen his natural faith that
people are worth more than all besides, leading him into the faith that
moral integrity, truth, honor, righteousness, are the glory of a life.
More, these young lives must be trained to habitual and efficient
right-doing. In a word, the conservation of the home is simply a program
of beginning today ourselves to set first things first, to conserve the
human factors that will make homes, to make education everywhere in
school and church and home count first of all for character