es that like all great
forces this, too, has its weakness. Because a woman must be "more
deadly than the male" in watching her offspring is no reason she
should be so in guarding an opinion. Certainly if she is so,
conversation is cut off at the root.

Not infrequently she is loath to encourage free expression because it
seems to her to disturb the peace. Certainly it does disturb fixity of
views. It does prevent things becoming settled in the way that the
woman, as a rule, loves to have them, but this disturbance prevents
the rigid intellectual and spiritual atmosphere which often drives the
young from home. Peace which comes from submission and restraint is a
poor thing. In the long run it turns to revolt. The woman, if she
examines her own soul, knows the effect upon it of habitual submission
to a husband's opinion. She knows it is a habit fatal to her own
development. While at the beginning she may have been willing enough
to sacrifice her ideas, later she makes the painful discovery that
this hostage to love, as she considered it, has only made her less
interesting, less important, both to herself and to him. It has made
it the more difficult, also, to work out that socialization of her
home which, as her children grow older, she realizes, if she thinks,
is one of her most imperative duties.

A woman is very prone to look on marriage as a merger of
personalities, but there can be no great union where an individuality
permits itself to be ruined. The notion that a woman's happiness
depends on the man--that he must "make her happy"--is a basic untruth.
Life is an individual problem, and consequently happiness must be.
Others may hamper it, but in the final summing up it is you, not
another, who gives or takes it--no two people can work out a high
relation if the precious inner self of either is sacrificed.

Emerson has said the great word:--

Leave all for love;
_Yet, hear me, yet,
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, forever,
Free as an Arab!
Of thy beloved_.

The "open house," that is, the socialized house, depends upon this
free mind to a degree only second to that spirit of "good will to
man," upon which it certainly must, like all institutions in a
democratic Christian nation, be based. This good will is only another
name for neighborliness--the spirit of friendly recognition of all
those who come within one's radius. Neighborliness is based upon the
Christian and democratic proposition