self in a general medium and measures it
by a general law. Even the tenderer associations of home might, under
other circumstances, attach to other objects. Consensus of opinion has a
distorting effect, sometimes, on ideal values. A thing which almost
everyone agrees in prizing, because it has played some part in every
life, tends to be valued above more important elements in personal
happiness that may not have been shared. So wealth, religion, military
victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. The family might
well be, to some extent, a similar idol of the tribe. Everyone has had a
father and a mother; but how many have had a friend? Everyone likes to
remember many a joy and even sorrow of his youth which was linked with
family occasions; but to name a man's more private memories, attached to
special surroundings, would awaken no response in other minds. Yet these
other surroundings may have been no less stimulating to emotion, and if
familiar to all might be spoken of with as much conventional effect.
This appears so soon as any experience is diffused enough to enable a
tradition to arise, so that the sentiment involved can find a social
echo. Thus there is a loyalty, very powerful in certain quarters, toward
school, college, club, regiment, church, and country. Who shall say that
such associations, had they sprung up earlier and been more zealously
cultivated, or were they now reinforced by more general sympathy, would
not breed all the tenderness and infuse all the moral force which most
men now derive from the family?

[Sidenote: Plato's heroic communism.]

Nevertheless, no suggested substitute for the family is in the least
satisfactory. Plato's is the best grounded in reason; but to succeed it
would have to count on a degree of virtue absolutely unprecedented in
man. To be sure, the Platonic regimen, if it demands heroism for its
inception, provides in its scientific breeding and education a means of
making heroism perpetual. But to submit to such reforming regulations
men would first have to be reformed; it would not suffice, as Plato
suggested, merely to enslave them and to introduce scientific
institutions by despotic decrees. For in such a case there would be all
manner of evasions, rebellions, and corruptions. If marriage founded on
inclination and mutual consent is so often broken surreptitiously or by
open divorce, what should we expect amongst persons united and separated
by governmental pol