p. 124Unthriftiness, Untidiness, Unsociableness

The three obstacles to domestic union and well-being which I am now about to explain, have direct reference to the social, rather than to the religious, life of home. It may be thought, therefore, that they are out of place here; but a little reflection will show that they are not. Want of prudence and foresight in the management of family affairs, habits of slovenliness and disorder in family arrangements, estrangement of neighbouring families from each other—these, although social evils, have an influence on the religious and moral character of our homes that cannot be overlooked. A spendthrift father or husband who lives beyond his means is not only bringing those depending on him to social ruin; but he is exposing them and himself to the violation of all the duties of domestic life. A slovenly wife, too, who neglects the social duties of order, cleanliness, and regularity, is fast driving her husband to spend his time away from home and to break through the ties that bind him to it. A family, in fine, that maintains no friendly, social intercourse with its neighbours, will not supply of itself to its young members all that harmless relaxation and enjoyment for which they feel a natural want; and the consequence will be, that they will seek for it in places and in company more or less dangerous to the purity and innocence in which they had been trained. It will be seen, then, that the three obstacles of which I am now about to treat, unthriftiness, untidiness, and unsociableness, have a moral as well as a social aspect in their bearing on home life, and therefore, that they come naturally within the scope of the present work.

Young married people frequently begin life on a scale far beyond their means. The bride, in her inexperience of money matters, thinks her husband’s salary or income, like an elastic band, capable of covering over any number of bills. He, too, living wholly in the present, flatters himself that “it will be all right;” and gives her carte blanche to order what she pleases. Furniture, plate, china, pictures, books, &c., are bought in bewildering confusion, and a fairy castle in miniature is erected almost as quickly as fairies were believed to do those things; and all on the strength of poor John’s few hundred a-year. After three months, however, a great change has come over the castle. The walls are indeed there, and the furniture, and the plate, and all the rest; but the landlord is there too, pressing hard for his rent; and the tradespeople are making themselves troublesome about their bills; and the butcher has sent the servant back without the meat until his account is settled. How his or any other account is to be settled is just the question that brings such a cloud of perplexity on the brow of the husband as he sits at breakfast with his pile of bills beside him and his young wife opposite. It would be well if that cloud were like a shadow in springtime, passing over a smiling landscape; but more frequently it has its image rather in the long bank of dark, leaden vapour seen over the horizon in the early morning, telling of a rainy day to come in which there will be no gleam of warm sunshine. The proverbial first quarrel that arises between the married parties sooner or later has its source generally in a fault or mistake like this; and if the fault or mistake cannot or will not be repaired, the quarrel is very seldom healed, but goes on poisoning home-life to the end.

But it is not solely at the start that unthriftiness causes trouble and inconvenience and leads to disruption in married life. In the upper classes of society, Fashion has as many old and middle-aged, as youthful votaries in her train; and the first commandment in her Decalogue is, to keep up appearances at any cost. “Run your husband into debt; stretch your own and his credit to its utmost tension; screw money out of your starving tenants or employees if your income comes from them—even gamble, and play for high stakes, and go to the very verge of compromising your honour; but keep up your establishment and your style of living at any cost.”

There is no one that cannot see to what social and moral dangers life, regulated by these principles, naturally leads. There is no true peace or union or love in such a life; there is no faithful discharge of domestic duties in it; above all, there is no religion in it. Prayer and Sacraments are almost wholly given up; high Mass may be attended on Sundays for the music and singing, but for nothing else; and as for thought of eternity and of earnest preparation for it, it is put away as something intensely unpleasant, obtrusive, and unfashionable. Dinner-parties, balls, theatres, operas, &c., are the gilded covering of a discontented mind, of a remorseful conscience, of health impaired by dissipation, of embittered home relations, in a word, of all manner of secret misery and wretchedness. May God preserve all who will read these pages from any personal experience of such a wasted, useless life; for it is so unhappy that the meanest domestic drudge has no reason to envy it.

And the consequences to home-life are not much different when, as more generally happens, only one of the married parties lives beyond his income. A husband, for instance, has a mania for betting. He risks on a single chance a considerable part of his income; and whether he wins or loses, his family suffers. If he wins, he is drawn deeper and deeper into a set, the very existence of which depends on its members withdrawing themselves from home-ties. If he loses, social disgrace gathers round him, and all belonging to him. Perhaps, however, he is in a position of confidence and has the handling and management of other people’s money. His accounts are checked only at long intervals, and in the meantime, no one will know if he borrow for a few weeks a certain sum from his employer’s account to meet the deficit of his betting speculations. A temptation of this nature is sure to arise at one time or another out of the difficulties caused by betting or other reckless expenditure; and our law-courts and prisons reveal to us some of the cases in which it is successful. Yes; but they leave us to imagine the number of wives and mothers whose home-lives are for ever poisoned by it, the number of children reduced to penury by it, the bright prospects, the high hopes, the successful beginnings, brought to a sudden, fatal termination by it. Surely unthriftiness, in the form of gambling at least, may be fairly classed among the moral as well as the social stumbling-blocks of our homes.

But we have unthriftiness in other forms in the homes of our middle and working classes. I cannot undertake to speak of all those forms, and therefore I must confine myself to a few of the leading ones. The first is the expensive habit of imitating the wealthier classes in dress and general outfit. This is closely allied to an unthrifty habit already pointed out; but there is this difference, that in the former case, people live beyond their means in order to maintain their standing in the class to which they belong; while in this, unjustifiable expenditure is incurred to raise oneself or one’s family from one social level to another that is considered higher and more respectable. The vulgarity and the bad taste of this practice are perceived and despised by every one except by those who give way to it. A servant-maid will spend a quarter’s wages in trying to turn out like her mistress, a shop girl or milliner’s assistant will dress more showily than those she attends; an attorney’s clerk will have more jewellery about his person than his master’s client; and so on, all the way upwards in the social scale. But if vulgarity or bad taste were the only consequence of this custom, I would scarcely refer to it here. It has, however, a moral bearing on home that brings it directly within the scope of the present chapter. A young person who spends all his earnings or most of them on dress can scarcely be a dutiful, affectionate child. As a rule, his parents, if they live, require whatever help he can give them. Perhaps they are old and cannot procure for themselves those little comforts that old people value so very highly. Perhaps they are unable to work or are bed-ridden and depend to a great extent on him for the necessaries of life. Perhaps they expect from him merely some sign of his unchanged affection—some grateful recognition of their own past sacrifices for him. In all these cases, it seems cruel and unfeeling that a son or daughter should spend on himself or herself, foolishly and unnecessarily, earnings that would produce so much happiness if spent on home comforts.

I scarcely think, indeed, that young people who act so reflect seriously on what they do. If they were to see how ridiculous they make themselves in the eyes of others, and how disgusting their conduct towards their parents looks to all right-thinking persons who know them, they would be prevented by very shame from continuing it. They would also feel stung to the quick by the consciousness of their ingratitude, and their gayest and most extravagant pleasures would lose their zest and become insipid and nauseating. As long, in fact, as the memory of home continues fresh in those who are absent from it, so long will the ties and duties that still bind them to it exercise a salutary influence on their own lives as well as on the lives of those who were left behind. Filial piety and affection will not change into a mere transient sentiment, but will remain the same strong passion of their nature that it was in their childhood. Parents, then, ought to endeavour by every means in their power to maintain a close connexion between themselves and their absent children. They will thus contribute materially to their own happiness and they will prevent the absent ones from drifting into those reckless, unthrifty ways of which I have been speaking.

Another practice that I have known to bring ruin on more than one home is that of educating children for social positions far above the position held by the parents themselves. There are cases, I admit, in which this is not only allowable but praiseworthy. A child, for instance, shows a special aptitude for some calling or profession, and its parents, without injury to their other children, can assist it to follow the direction of its talents. If they do so, they co-operate in God’s work, and gain for themselves the merit of seconding His designs on their child’s future destiny. But how often do we see children spoiled for life by having an education or a profession for which they are not fitted forced on them, simply to gratify the vanity or ambition of their wealthy, purse-proud parents. “I am but a humble man myself,” I have sometimes heard a father saying. “I have got very little school education; I had to make my own way in the world, and I have succeeded. Well, I will have one gratification when I die, that my sons will be gentlemen and my daughters ladies. Money can do it, and I’ll take care that the money will not be wanting.” The sons accordingly are sent to the most fashionable high-toned colleges, and the daughters to the most aristocratic boarding schools. Time passes on; the process of transformation is completed, and the father looks eagerly for the result. He looks to see realized in his son his ideal of a finished gentleman; but to his disappointment he finds him only a finished rake. He finds him with an unlimited capacity for spending money, but with none whatever for earning it. He finds him, too, indolent in his demeanour, thankless for all that has been done for him—in fact, ashamed of his home and family and surroundings. The daughters, too, are another source of disappointment. They can, perhaps, speak French and German fluently; they can paint and draw; they can play sonatas of Beethoven and sing selections from “Il Trovatore;” but they are utterly ignorant of all useful domestic affairs. They cannot cook or superintend the cooking in the kitchen; they can neither make nor mend their own dresses; they cannot keep the weekly house accounts: in a word they can only dawdle over their toilets, read French novels, snub the servants, and spend the rest of their time in indulging silly day-dreams or in longing for somebody to call. As a rule, no one that they consider “somebody” does call, and so they become ill-tempered and unsocial, and they make their homes as unpleasant as can be, and their parents’ beautiful air castle turns out after all to be a miserable failure and mistake. I can well imagine the chagrin and disappointment of one of those parents who has spent his hard-earned cash in making his children ladies and gentlemen, and who finds after they have finished their boarding-school and college education that they entertain an ill-concealed contempt for their home and family, as well as for the business by which he made his money. But it is the after-fate of such children that generally brings the greatest pain to parents and the greatest desolation on homes. Their marriages are almost sure to be imprudent and unfortunate; for they will not be able to marry into the circle to which their ambition aspires, and they will not submit to marry into their own; and so an unsuitable alliance is most likely to be the consequence. I have seen in more than one case the hard-earned means of business people pass over by such alliances into the hands of penniless adventurers and spendthrifts; and it generally took only a year or two to squander to the last penny the savings of a father’s lifetime.

The second of the three stumbling-blocks mentioned at the beginning of this chapter is untidiness. A slovenly, lazy, unpunctual wife will never succeed in making her home what it ought to be, either socially, morally, or religiously. Husbands and grown-up children have strong temptations to spend their evenings away from their families. The public-house attracts the poor, the club and the theatre the rich. Other resorts, too, hold out their own characteristic allurements. No expense is spared by the caterers of popular amusement and of social enjoyment to draw away crowds, evening after evening, from home intercourse and home influences, until a distaste for domestic life is engendered, and the habit of disregarding domestic ties and duties has sapped the principles of morality and of religion in the soul. A wife can generally counteract these evils by keeping her home bright and cheerful and well-ordered. A husband who knows that loving hands are busy putting the family sitting-room to rights in order to give him pleasure, and that anxious loving eyes are looking out for his coming, and that a warm-hearted welcome awaits him on his return from his day’s work—such a husband is not likely to forego the genuine pleasure in store for him, and to give pain to one so intent on his comfort, for all the noisy, tinsel gaiety and excitement of clubs or theatres or drinking saloons.

A poet of the present day has told us, that “What the husband is the wife is;” or in other words, that the wife rises or falls to the moral level of the husband. I must say, I do not think so. My experience would rather lead me to believe that, as a rule, the husband is what the wife is; or to put it more accurately, the husband is what the wife makes him. She has his salvation and his ruin in her power; and she will effect either the one or the other directly or indirectly. I know there are many weak-minded women who exercise no influence on their husbands, but let them drift whithersoever their natural inclinations draw them. There are many drunkards’ wives, for instance, who never try to counteract the allurements of the public-house by the counter-allurements of home—who never have a warm, comfortable meal prepared for them, nor a bright, clean, well-ordered room before them, nor a cheerful, affectionate welcome with which to greet them. They sit idly all day, lamenting their hard fate. Everything around them is in confusion: the grate is without fire, the floor is unswept, the furniture is undusted. And when their husbands return at night, “the worse of drink” most likely, they are met with reproaches, and scolding, and nagging, and the unfortunate men are let go supperless to bed, and altogether treated as if they were children in disgrace. Now I am convinced that wives are in fault in treating their husbands so. Such conduct has never reformed a drunkard; but, on the contrary, it has confirmed many in a habit of intemperance. The fact then that a wife does not always reform her husband, in most cases simply proves that she does not always fulfil her duty to him. She does not try to make the best of her position; she does not use the means in her power to wean him from his evil courses; she does not, above all, lessen, as she can do, his temptations from the outside world, by making his home more bright and pleasant and attractive to him. I think it will be admitted, that she is bound to do all this, to save him from ruin; and with patience she will find it will save him in the end.

But the influence of a well-ordered, cheerful home on some natures does not manifest itself all at once. It works slowly, and, at first, imperceptibly, undermining old habits, cutting the roots of strong passions, dissipating the glamour of temptations hostile to home life. Occasionally, those on whom it is brought to bear will rebel against it and perhaps be made worse by it—for a time. But if the wife be patient, and prudent, and steady in carrying out her purpose of reformation, the time will not be long. The contrast between the solid joys of his home and the hollow, boisterous gaiety that would lure him away from it, is sure to strike the husband’s attention and make him reflect on the loss he sustains by a life of dissipation. Gratitude, too, for the love so unselfishly and uncomplainingly devoted to him will have its share in leading him into the path of domestic duty and helping him to walk in it to the end.

A woman, therefore, must wait patiently and hopefully for the result of her efforts to make her home what it should be. But there are many occasions in home-life in which human patience breaks down unless it be strengthened by divine help; and no one is more frequently placed in such circumstances than the mistress of a household. Hence it follows that she must have habitual recourse to prayer and to the Sacraments of Penance and the most holy Eucharist, if she wishes for strength to persevere in the faithful and cheerful discharge of her duties. I do not believe that so many wives and mothers die of broken hearts as are generally supposed; but of those who so die, the greater part, I am convinced, consists of those who have no faith in the efficacy of prayer and the Sacraments to sustain and console the wounded or overburdened spirit. They rely wholly on themselves, and they think that their human love of husband and children and their merely natural fidelity to the duties of their state will shield them from the deadly blight of brutality or ingratitude. But they find out how mistaken they were, when their shattered health, and their lost courage, and their hope turned to despair, and their love to bitterness, force the conviction on them that death is about to claim them for its own.

The case is wholly different with those who, recognizing their own moral weakness, put all their confidence in the strength to be gained by prayer and the Sacraments. You may sometimes have seen a woman, delicately organized and altogether unfitted for the rough ways of life, bearing up with patient courage under the harsh treatment or the harsher neglect of her husband; and you may have been puzzled to find out what secret power sustained her and counteracted the crushing influences of her daily surroundings. The apparent mystery would be solved if you saw her in prayer before her Crucifix or during her thanksgiving after Holy Communion. The light that kindles in her face, and makes her look so bright and happy, is but the reflection of the divine light beaming on her soul; and no human consolation, nor any human feeling, no matter how intense or highly strung, could ever produce the calm, settled resolve to suffer with which her intercourse with heaven inspires her. By suffering Jesus entered into His glory, and by suffering, too, we must enter into ours. Such is the dispensation under which we live; and when the truth is brought home by the habitual communion with God that is secured by prayer and the Blessed Eucharist, neither bodily suffering, nor coarse treatment, nor unrepaid conjugal love, nor even the grossest and most deliberate ingratitude of spouse or child will of itself be ever able to crush even the most sensitive spirit or the most delicately organized nature. In all human suffering, the bitterest element is the hopelessness of relief; and this is the very element that prayer most effectually destroys. Indeed, the very act of prayer is an implicit act of hope; and hence he who prays habitually acquires of necessity the virtue of hope by which the heaviest trial is lightened and made endurable, and the sharpest pain, whether physical or mental, is dulled to the senses or the soul, if not wholly deadened. A wife, then, who would keep her home well-ordered, bright and cheerful for the purpose of winning her husband from the haunts and companions and vices that draw him away from his own fireside—such a wife must wait patiently for the successful result of her efforts. She must not be discouraged by first failures, nor by the brutality that possibly may be provoked by her steady adherence to the one line of conduct. In every event and circumstance she must be patient and persevering; and in order to be so, she must constantly pray, and with great fervour, and she must have frequent recourse to the Sacraments of Penance and the most holy Eucharist. From these sources of spiritual strength she will derive in abundance that patient, cheerful courage that will bear her lightly over the most disheartening trials and difficulties of her married life.

Everything kept in its proper place, everything done at its proper time—these should be the two primary rules of a wife in the management of her domestic affairs, and if they be carefully observed, they will secure cleanliness, order, and punctuality in the home. They will thus attach all its members to it, and they will neutralise the counter-attractions that modern society patronises and supports with all its influence, although they tend directly to its own destruction.

I now come to the last of the three obstacles of home life that I have placed at the head of this chapter. I have called it unsociableness, as this word comes nearer to express the obstacle I am about to explain than any other I can bring to mind. And yet it is only to one special kind of unsociableness—namely, to that which keeps families from meeting and mixing in social intercourse, that I now wish to direct attention. I think, if we examine closely the relations existing between the families we are acquainted with, we shall find them, in many cases, characterised by much pride and uncharitableness. Hair-breadth lines of distinction in social status are magnified into walls of separation, over which there may be a nod of recognition or a greeting in monosyllables, but no cordial, friendly intercourse. The consequence is, that families thus cut off from each other are thrown in upon themselves and have to rely on their own resources for that supply of innocent, healthful amusement and recreation, so useful for young people. Now everyone knows that variety is a very necessary element in all provisions made to interest the young; and as there can be very little variety in a home in which a strange face is scarcely ever seen, in which the same familiar voices are always heard, and in which occurs, evening after evening, the same round of occupations or amusements, it follows that the young will not have all the relaxation to which they are reasonably entitled, if they are to depend for it exclusively on the resources of their homes. Moreover, the home-instinct (of which I spoke in the beginning of this book) which binds the child to its parents during the time of its mental and physical development, seems afterwards to yield precedence to another instinct, inclining the young man or woman to become the centre of a new home of his or her own formation. Of course, this is merely another way of saying that young people will get married and will look out for suitable partners, and, after finding them, will desire to live as much as they can in their society. Let parents be as strict and vigilant and exclusive as they may, and let them make their home as pleasant as home can be, still the young will seek out the society of the young, and if they cannot find it under the guidance and supervision of their parents, they will be strongly tempted to find it in stealthy and imprudent ways. Let them, then, find this society under the guidance and supervision of their parents. Let parents take a more enlightened view of the requirements of their children than they are in the habit of taking. Let there be more social union and intercourse between the families constituting each class of society than there is at present. Let no miserable punctilio, dictated by pride or envy or ambition, be permitted to expose the young to terrible temptation, and to stand as an obstacle in the way of their future happiness.

I know that there are other considerations besides those to which I have alluded, that keep homes separated from each other more than they ought to be. Two of these considerations may be mentioned here; namely, want of time and economy. Some families have to work from morning until night for their daily bread, and, in consequence, have no time for social intercourse with their neighbours. Others, whose living does not depend on the labour of their hands, have, nevertheless, a well-defined routine of duties arranged for each day; and, being of that serious, narrow-minded class who do not believe in recreation, for young or old, they make, of course, no provision in their cast-iron time-table for paying or receiving social visits, and, much less, for bringing young people together under the supervision of their parents. Here, then, are two cases in which families live isolated from each other, because their friendly intercourse is not believed to be of such importance as to require any fixed time to be especially set apart for it. Wrong convictions are not easily dislodged by mere reasoning: hence I can scarcely hope that the reasons I have given above for greater sociableness among families will, by themselves, produce any practical effect. I would appeal, then, to the experience of those parents who have brought up their children in strict seclusion from the society of other young people. What was the result of such training? I think it will be admitted to have been generally one or other of these two. Either those children became stupid and broken-hearted, holding distorted, unhealthy views of life and acting on them; or they broke through the unnatural restraint to which they were subjected and brought shame and sorrow on their families by the unequal and injudicious marriage alliances they privately contracted. Among the labouring classes, too, in which the young are usually allowed to associate with each other, at odds and ends of time, without any parental supervision, experience shows us not unfrequently the sad spectacle of innocence destroyed, and characters blighted, and stainless family names disgraced for generations—misfortunes that never would have happened, if parents had had the wisdom to promote social intercourse between their own and their neighbours’ homes.

The other consideration that sometimes prevents this social intercourse is that of the expense entailed by it. Family gatherings imply an outlay of money not always in keeping with limited incomes, and many persons are accordingly deterred by a motive of prudence from dispensing or accepting hospitality as much as they would wish. It must be admitted that this consideration has much weight; but it does not follow that it should prevent absolutely the adoption of the course I recommend. Families may be on very intimate terms with each other and may interchange visits very frequently without giving costly dinners, or, indeed, without incurring any expense worthy of notice. I am not at all inclined to think that the true interests of home-life are promoted by those formal social reunions that seem to be the chief glory and aim of the fashionable world. Such reunions create a distaste for ordinary domestic duties; they are often sources of danger to the young; and they generally entail a waste of time and money that is justified by no adequate motive. However the bulk of those for whom I write are not exposed to the temptation of spending either time or money on those frivolous entertainments, and therefore it is not necessary to say more about them.

There is one matter, however, intimately connected with the social relations of families, about which it is necessary to say a few words here. When young people meet together for amusement, they usually contrive to get up a dance. Now dancing, when conducted with modesty and propriety, is at least a harmless recreation; and I consider those persons very shortsighted and unwise who discountenance it in all forms and under every circumstances, and who use their authority to prevent it in families. The gaiety and mirthfulness, characteristic of youth, should not be repressed, but regulated and controlled. Divine Providence had a wise purpose in making children merry and light-hearted, and that purpose ought to be seconded by parents in giving those under their charge a certain latitude in the choice and enjoyment of their amusements. Prudence, however, has in this matter a very delicate office to discharge: for most amusements are apt to be abused and perverted into occasions of sin, and it is often extremely difficult to decide at what particular point such abuse and perversion begin. This is especially the case in dancing, on account of its many varieties, some of which bring young people into positions that must be pronounced unbecoming and indelicate, if not positively immodest, while others are distinguishable from these only by a faint colouring of propriety. Of course, parents should never allow their children to take any part in dances that are naturally and evidently suggestive of sin; and, I will add, they should also discountenance those that are probably suggestive of it. We make ourselves positively certain of the wholesomeness of the food we give children before giving it; and if we have reason to fear that it contains poison, we are careful to put the food away, lest their lives should be endangered by it. Surely, then, it is not from narrow-mindedness or undue severity, but from a feeling of conscientious duty, that prudent parents forbid their children to take part in dances that provoke to sin either openly or covertly. But unfortunately the spirit of the non-Catholic community in which we live has entered into many Catholic homes, with this lamentable consequence, that the warning, and, in some places, the prohibition, of the Church against “fast” dances are practically disregarded, in obedience to the tyranny of Fashion and the requirements of “respectable society.”

It is unnecessary to dwell on the evils arising from such insubordination. It weakens respect for the authority of the Church, as exercised not only in matters of discipline, but also in discharge of her teaching office; and it leads moreover to dangerous tampering with Sacraments, prejudicial, if not fatal, to the life of grace in the soul. Surely no good Catholic will ever expose himself or his children to such dangers as these. He can easily maintain social intercourse with his neighbours, and share in every advantage arising from such intercourse, without swerving in the least from the guidance of his Church, and without sacrificing the innocence, and perhaps the salvation of his children.

I have now said all that I think necessary on the three obstacles to home-life, mentioned at the head of the present chapter. I have still other obstacles of this class before my mind, about which it might be useful to say something; but I wish to keep this little book within the reach of the poor, and therefore I am anxious to exclude from it everything not directly connected with its scope and object. If, however, the recommendations already made be carefully observed, they will, I am confident, be a sufficient safeguard against most of the obstacles that affect the peace and well-being of home.