CHAPTER XV.

THE NATION AND THE FAMILY.

THE nation and the family exist in a necessary and moral correlation. They do not exist in identity; the family has its own unity and order, and the nation has other powers and obligations, so that when society is constituted after a patriarchal type, and does not pass beyond that, there is no political life, nor the institution of an historical power.

The family is the natural and the normal condition of human existence. It is not the unit of society, that is, the ultimate and integral element, but it is the unitary form of society. In its beginning it is rude and imperfect in its structure, but with the progress of society it passes on to a higher development and a more perfect conformance to its type in the true and monogamic organization.

The family is of divine institution, and is constituted in and with the nation in the moral order of the world. It is a relationship, and there is thus in its growth the education of the individual and the formation of character.

It is as a moral order, and as constituted in moral relations, that the family has its origin and foundation, not in impulse and desire and transient choice; but it presumes in its beginning and its course the assertion and continuity of a moral determination, and therefore impulse and transient choice must be brought into subjection to it. It is as a moral order that it has its own law, and is to be formed after its own necessary conception. It is as a moral order that it is related to the whole order and organization of society, and therefore its violation affects not only the individual but the nation.

The family, in its divine origin and in its formation in the relations of a moral order, and in its consistence with the determination of personality, is a holy estate. It has its beginning in the "I will" of those who enter it; and it cannot therefore consist with the transient desire, nor the momentary act of the will, and these are excluded by its law, and the continuous character of the moral determination of the will is apprehended in it. It is in conformance to the relations of a moral order; and as these relations, while they consist with the moral determination, had not their origin in the transient volition of man, they cannot be made subject to it. Since man did not create this order, in the possibility of sin, he may interrupt or violate it, but he cannot change it. It is not therefore existent only in the momentary choice of separate parties, to be continued or dissolved, as the inclination of either or both may dictate. This would consist only with an arbitrary and unfree, and therefore an immoral, constitution of society.

The family is organic; it has not its origin in an enactment or a contract; it is not a construction in conformance to a speculative theory or scheme; it is not a formal relation, but an organic and moral relation; it is not a formal order, but the natural and normal order. This precludes its assumption by a certain section or a certain class as an exclusive or a proprietary right. This precludes also the representation of the origin of the family in a contract. The contract also could not become the ground of the unity involved in the family, since those who form a contract remain separate parties to it.

The necessary analogy of the family and the nation illustrates their necessary structure, and there is in it the avoidance of the error of many political abstractions and the infidelity of many political dogmas. The representation of the nation as only a formal organization, or as an external order, or as the exclusive possession of a few, or

as formed in a contract, or as the scheme and expedient of legislators, is inconsistent with the necessary analogy of the family and the nation.

In the organization of society the family is precedent to the nation, while in its continuance it is subordinate to it. It is through its precedence and through its necessary constitution in organic and moral relations, that it appears in an historical relation with the beginning of the nation, and subsists in a continuous relation with it. The nation has not its origin in the family, but it exists in a necessary correlation with it, and in the development of each this relation must always have a deeper recognition. The first indications thus of the organization of society, are in the family, the life of the patriarchs and the patricians; and the notions of a formal and conventional origin of society disappear in the study of the historical beginning of things.

There has been in no age the record of the foundation of the nation, but there has been coincident with it the witness to the sacredness of the family. In the ancient world, or rather in the beginnings of the historic world, this conception is central and prevails in its art and literature and laws. The book of the Genesis is mainly filled with the record of the foundation of the family, and the incident of its history; and with its close the transition is made to the nation. The Iliad, in which there is the deepest reflection of the spirit of archaic life, is the story of a war for the vindication of the purity of the marriage bond, and its heroes are those who go to battle to vindicate the sacredness of the family; the Eneid is the story of filial duty and reverence, and in each the spirit of the family blends with the nation, and in each there is the unfolding of a national life. In Judæa the family, in its primitive law, is declared to be holy, it is to be maintained as an institute of the nation in its order, and its violation is to be punished as a crime. In Greece, its earliest insti

tutions, the phratriæ and gentes, are the evidence of the power and the dignity of the family. In Rome the reverence for the family is reflected in all the observances of its religion, moulding all its institutions and its laws. The law has a universal attestation, that when the life of the nation has been the deeper, and its moral aim more clearly apprehended in the consciousness of men, there has been a clearer recognition of the sacredness of the family, and conversely when the family has been regarded as formed in a contractual law, or a momentary obligation, it has impaired the power and spirit of the nation. In its higher development, the people have apprehended in the nation the glory in the work of its ancestors, and in its future the enduring heritage of its children. It is thus that the symbols of the family have been inwrought with those of the nation, and its services have been recounted in the inscription of ancestral honors. Its glory has been in its devotion to the nation, and it has kept the names of those whom it has given for it in its holiest traditions. It is thus that reverence for the fathers and their work is involved with the continuity of the nation, and therefore the law which is so deep a revelation of the conditions of national life, "Thou shalt honour thy father and thy mother," is made the premise of the permanent possession of the land by the people.

It is thus that in the decadence of national life there is a loss of the consciousness of the sacredness of the family, and a consequent increase in the violation of its law. It is the degradation of the family, and the lower apprehension of its obligations, that is represented alike by all her annalists and her satirists, as the cause and circumstance of the ruin of Rome. When the sacredness of the family is not regarded, when it is no longer apprehended as a moral order, but as devised by men and shaped only by a law of expediency, and subject to caprice, the life of society is corrupted in its sources.

Thus also the system of slavery, in its antagonism to the nation, was in conflict with the law of the family; and among the slaves in certain commonwealths, family life was unknown, and many on emerging from slavery had no family name, but only the designation given to identify the individual.1

In the family a child is educated for the nation. It is a relation which has a moral content, and character is moulded in it; and the individual grows into the consciousness of a whole, in which he is borne beyond his own separate and selfish end. In the advance of childhood there is also the consciousness of a continuous relation, and in its obedience there is the education for government and for freedom. It has been truly said, that government so depends on the life of home, that for a homeless community, anarchy or despotism would be the alternative.2

The conception which prevails of the nation shapes the family also. When it has been regarded only as a formal relation, and its origin referred to a contract, the same law has been assumed as defining the family; when it has been apprehended in a mere individualism, the conception of the family as organic and as a divine institution, has also perished, and in this formalism and individualism, there is not only the rejection of the organic and moral being of the family, but its necessary relation to the nation.

The necessary relation of the nation to the family is the condition of the rights and obligations existent in that relation. The nation is to guard and maintain the family, in

1 Slavery, in its necessary antagonism to the organic being of society, destroyed the family before it sought to destroy the nation; and there is nothing in the reconstruction of society more important than the assertion of the sacredness of the family and the unity of the household. There might be the highest value in a homestead act of some sort, but no legislation can maintain an accumulation of property without a deep assertion of the family, and with it, in the ordinary administration of civil rights, nothing can prevent that accumulation. 2 Rousseau says, "The family is the primitive type of political society." "Prima societas in ipso conjugio est, proxima in liberis, deinde una domus communia oinnia. Id autem est principium urbis, et quasi Seminarium Reipublicæ." - Cicero, De Officiis, i. 17.