when time has shown us to have no special sympathy 7 for them: not unreasonable too to look with some special sentiment on brothers and sisters, even when manhood has drifted them away from our lives and their aspirations, since in years past we were living with them in such familiarity when they and we were innocent and undeveloped. But what relation does this light and easy yoke of sentiment bear to the iron chain of conventional sham duty which all of us, even the boldest, are oppressed by so sorely: a chain too that is broken amidst various circumstances of real and conventional disgrace whenever necessity, as to-day understood, that is, commercial necessity, compels it? In short, the family professes to exist as affording us a haven of calm and restful affection and the humanising influences of mutual help and consideration, but it ignores quietly its real reason for existence, its real aim, namely, protection for individualist property by means of inheritance, and a nucleus for resistance to the outside world, whether that take the form of other families or the public weal, such as it may be.
But this shows after all but the best 8 side of the modern conventional family, as it works in the middle classes. In the lower classes, where the family of blood-relationship might afford some real protection and help to its members, it is completely broken up by the action of the factory system, under which father, mother, - brothers, sisters, husband, and wife, compete against each other in the labour market, the end of which is to provide a profit for the capitalist employer ; and this “family,” which as now constituted exists for middle-class needs, being useless to the working-classes, they have nothing to turn to to supply the lack of a true social unit.
To most men it will be more obvious that similar charges may be brought against the religion of modern society: most intelligent persons will allow that it means nothing more than mere sets of names and formulas, to one or other of . which every reputable man is supposed to be attached; in one or other of which he will be sure to find a