ages, when once they have discovered one another.
It is difficulties of access, ignorance, and material confinement that
shut in the heart to its narrow loyalties; and perhaps greater mobility,
science, and the mingling of nations will one day reorganise the moral
world. It was a pure spokesman of the spirit who said that whosoever
should do the will of his _Father who was in heaven_, the same was his
brother and sister and mother.

[Sidenote: Family tyrannies.]

The family also perpetuates accidental social differences, exaggerating
and making them hereditary; it thus defeats that just moiety of the
democratic ideal which demands that all men should have equal
opportunities. In human society chance only decides what education a man
shall receive, what wealth and influence he shall enjoy, even what
religion and profession he shall adopt. People shudder at the system of
castes which prevails in India; but is not every family a little caste?
Was a man assigned to his family because he belonged to it in spirit, or
can he choose another? Half the potentialities in the human race are
thus stifled, half its incapacities fostered and made inveterate. The
family, too, is largely responsible for the fierce prejudices that
prevail about women, about religion, about seemly occupations, about
war, death, and honour. In all these matters men judge in a blind way,
inspired by a feminine passion that has no mercy for anything that
eludes the traditional household, not even for its members' souls.

[Sidenote: Difficulty in abstracting from the family.]

At the same time there are insuperable difficulties in proposing any
substitute for the family. In the first place, all society at present
rests on this institution, so that we cannot easily discern which of our
habits and sentiments are parcels of it, and which are attached to it
adventitiously and have an independent basis. A reformer hewing so near
to the tree's root never knows how much he may be felling. Possibly his
own ideal would lose its secret support if what it condemns had wholly
disappeared. For instance, it is conceivable that a communist,
abolishing the family in order to make opportunities equal and remove
the more cruel injustices of fortune, might be drying up that milk of
human kindness which had fed his own enthusiasm; for the foundlings
which he decreed were to people the earth might at once disown all
socialism and prove a brood of inhuman egoists. Or, as not w