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Page 16
On the other hand, the young woman who has succeeded in expressing her
social compunction through charitable effort finds that the wider
social activity, and the contact with the larger experience, not only
increases her sense of social obligation but at the same time recasts
her social ideals. She is chagrined to discover that in the actual task
of reducing her social scruples to action, her humble beneficiaries are
far in advance of her, not in charity or singleness of purpose, but in
self-sacrificing action. She reaches the old-time virtue of humility by
a social process, not in the old way, as the man who sits by the side of
the road and puts dust upon his head, calling himself a contrite sinner,
but she gets the dust upon her head because she has stumbled and fallen
in the road through her efforts to push forward the mass, to march with
her fellows. She has socialized her virtues not only through a social
aim but by a social process.
The Hebrew prophet made three requirements from those who would join the
great forward-moving procession led by Jehovah. "To love mercy" and at
the same time "to do justly" is the difficult task; to fulfil the first
requirement alone is to fall into the error of indiscriminate giving
with all its disastrous results; to fulfil the second solely is to
obtain the stern policy of withholding, and it results in such a dreary
lack of sympathy and understanding that the establishment of justice is
impossible. It may be that the combination of the two can never be
attained save as we fulfil still the third requirement--"to walk humbly
with God," which may mean to walk for many dreary miles beside the
lowliest of His creatures, not even in that peace of mind which the
company of the humble is popularly supposed to afford, but rather with
the pangs and throes to which the poor human understanding is subjected
whenever it attempts to comprehend the meaning of life.
CHAPTER III
FILIAL RELATIONS
There are many people in every community who have not felt the "social
compunction," who do not share the effort toward a higher social
morality, who are even unable to sympathetically interpret it. Some of
these have been shielded from the inevitable and salutary failures which
the trial of new powers involve, because they are content to attain
standards of virtue demanded by an easy public opinion, and others of
them have exhausted their moral energy in attaining to the current
standard of individual and family righteousness.
Such people, who form the bulk of contented society, demand that the
radical, the reformer, shall be without stain or question in his
personal and family relations, and judge most harshly any deviation
from the established standards. There is a certain justice in this: it
expresses the inherent conservatism of the mass of men, that none of the
established virtues which have been so slowly and hardly acquired shall
be sacrificed for the sake of making problematic advance; that the
individual, in his attempt to develop and use the new and exalted
virtue, shall not fall into the easy temptation of letting the ordinary
ones slip through his fingers.
This instinct to conserve the old standards, combined with a distrust of
the new standard, is a constant difficulty in the way of those
experiments and advances depending upon the initiative of women, both
because women are the more sensitive to the individual and family
claims, and because their training has tended to make them content with
the response to these claims alone.
There is no doubt that, in the effort to sustain the moral energy
necessary to work out a more satisfactory social relation, the
individual often sacrifices the energy which should legitimately go
into the fulfilment of personal and family claims, to what he considers
the higher claim.
In considering the changes which our increasing democracy is constantly
making upon various relationships, it is impossible to ignore the filial
relation. This chapter deals with the relation between parents and their
grown-up daughters, as affording an explicit illustration of the
perplexity and mal-adjustment brought about by the various attempts of
young women to secure a more active share in the community life. We
constantly see parents very much disconcerted and perplexed in regard to
their daughters when these daughters undertake work lying quite outside
of traditional and family interests. These parents insist that the girl
is carried away by a foolish enthusiasm, that she is in search of a
career, that she is restless and does not know what she wants. They will
give any reason, almost, rather than the recognition of a genuine and
dignified claim. Possibly all this is due to the fact that for so many
hundreds of years women have had no larger interests, no participation
in the affairs lying quite outside personal and family claims. Any
attempt that the individual woman formerly made to subordinate or
renounce the family claim was inevitably construed to mean that she was
setting up her own will against that of her family's for selfish ends.
It was concluded that she could have no motive larger than a desire to
serve her family, and her attempt to break away must therefore be wilful
and self-indulgent.
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