Page:Earth-Hunger and Other Essays.djvu/291

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THE FAMILY AND PROPERTY
265

ily is an affair of expense. As luxury grows, and the demands made on life by man on his own behalf, and on behalf of his wife and children, advance, the necessity for capital, and for exclusively appropriated capital, advances in a disproportionate ratio. Here, then, we have another series of facts bearing in the most important manner on the relations of family and property.

The monogamic family, with its legitimacy of descent, and the undivided devotion of the parents to a single group of offspring, has become the seat of family ambition and pride, reaching out in both directions. The parents have learned sacrifice for the children and pride in their success. The strain of the parents to provide education and preparation for success in life on the part of their children, and the happiness won by them from their children's success are as important as the more familiar form of family pride which is felt by children in a view back upon their ancestry. Every step in the achievement of family ambition requires property, and requires it in disproportionate measure as the expense of education and the whole standard of living rises. We hear constantly about the development of character, etc., in contrast with the accumulation of property; it is one of the crudest and most superficial of the commonplaces now in fashion; the accumulation of property is no guarantee of the development of character, but the development of character, or of any other good whatsoever, is impossible without property. It is only in transcendental visions that people use a jargon of culture in which they seem to cut loose from the limitations of fact; when they return to the level of facts it is always found that their speculations have not strengthened, but have weakened, human nature.

On the plain level of facts, then, it appears that the