mental maxim: Live for Others begins to take practical complement: Live without concealment, without which it would soon become inadequate, nay even too often illusory. No precautions suggested by the self-interest of metaphysical legislators will long bar the instinct of the Western nations from regarding full publicity of private conduct as the indispensable security of right civic action. The natural school for command and obedience, family life cannot answer its main purpose if withdrawn from the healthy influences of the judgment of the priesthood and even of the public. They who refuse to live openly will be justly liable to the suspicion of not really wishing to live for others. To judge of feelings we require acts; if so, the two virtues which are essential to civic life, selfdevotion and veneration, must be practised daily in family life if their existence is to be recognised, the practice of them there being easier and more open to all than in public life. We must not forget, however, when we sum up social morality in the obligation of living without concealment, that it must be in subordination to the precept of living for others, though it is only times of anarchy that allow a regular parade of vicious conduct. Quite apart from its power in this respect, domestic life is a direct support to public life, in that it gives the priesthood an enduring influence over the servant of Humanity. The education and the worship naturally give the priests access to the family, and they are often appealed to to soothe or remedy the collisions which, such is the imperfection of our nature, are inseparable from the highest ties. Their interference is the more effective, as they have a personal knowledge of all the members of the family, owing to the rule, the social value of which is on a par with the intellectual, that everyone during his years of encyclopædic training is under the same teacher. It was to give completeness to this personal relation, by making it common to husband and wife, that I fixed seven years as the most suitable difference in age for marriage. Allow this, and the two priests to whom the two couples owed their initiation and who consecrated their union, are the better qualified to restore harmony in the family and mutual agreement, as well as to replace on a right footing the relations with the children, by invoking the common belief. as the Ro A connection of this kind, at once particular and general, The women, ought, conversely, to be an assistance to the priesthood, by man ma have the trons, must ensuring it, in the bosom of each family, the support of the women Civic feeling. and of the old as against the industrial chiefs on whom the social action of the Priesthood is usually brought to bear. But to be effectual on extraordinary occasions, such aid must have been the object of habitual attention in the ordinary relations of life. Now, this implies that women encourage in themselves in due degree the true civic feeling, nobly therein imitating the Roman type, nay in the normal state surpassing it by its combination with the instinct of Chivalry. The natural tendency of the wife to absorption in the family may, not to speak of the influence of the mother, be generally overcome by an increased sense of the close connection which exists between self-devotion within the family circle and self-renunciation in public life. Even granting that the preference of Family to Country were not a mere cloak for selfishness, Positive education will predispose women to acknowledge the instability inherent in such conduct, the collective egoism impairing personal tenderness. The relations of one others at tach it to the City. By virtue of this predisposition family life, in its normal family with developement, will be in direct connection with public life, first through the relations between the members of each family, secondly, through its daily intercourse with others, whether related or not. In such a state of things the full value will be felt of the fraternal relation, the main source of noble friendships. The influence on society of such friendships should awake the sense how important it is for Positivism to re-establish, and even to extend, the wise prohibitions by which Catholicism completed_ the admirable discipline instituted by the Theocracy as regards incest. Although in the case of marriage the law of widowhood of itself meets the want, yet as a purely religious ordinance it does not exempt the civil legislation from the duty of including all fraternal connections without exception in the two prohibitions which are at present limited to fraternity by birth. But the largest developement of mutual relations between Positive families will be due to adoption and domesticity, neither of which institutions will be the incorporation of merely isolated individuals, but of families, the difference in position being compensated by the identity of education. Influence of the Salon. The family relations as a whole should offer a direct and powerful aid to public life, as an instrument constantly available for the formation of public opinion. In defiance of metaphysical anarchy, the Positive faith will soon have re generated the Western salon, the presidency in which invariably belongs to women, but to the mother rather than to the wife. Including all ranks, adopted by all nations, especially when the sacred language shall have come into general use, these meetings, traceable in their origin to feudalism, will everywhere display their capacity to form the habitual connection between private and public life. Under the joint authority of sex and age, they will assume a moral rather than a political direction, strengthening religious principles by an application of them in detail, and that a natural application, never degenerating into pedantry. These private assemblies in which women play the principal part, cannot, it is true, supersede the public meetings of men, but they will limit such meetings to the general and, above all, the local questions which directly concern industrial action. of public Such are the sources normally of public opinion, when the The organs milieu is no longer under the dominion of journalism, the opinion. peculiar feature of the latest revolutionary phase. Its weekly addresses offer the priesthood the best means for explaining in due season the less important applications of the principles of the doctrine. When a written explanation is necessary, it will issue special placards, similar to those of Catholicism, but not with a periodical character. Concentrated on their permanent functions, the theoricians will naturally set an example to all of the respect due to the institutions of writing and printing, by using them solely for important communications, such as are meant chiefly for posterity. Freed from the influence of the literary class, be it by its Positive education, or by the incorporation of the thinkers of that class into the priesthood, the public will imitate the reserve of its guides and will look with contempt on unnecessary publications, without any attack on the liberty of exposition and discussion. Under this regime the salons will put out their full power to prepare opinion, which again will be more easily judged than when its chief organ of expression was an unreliable press. In this way it is that women should indirectly share in the current judgment of acts and persons, without any detriment to their moral mission, the daily accomplishment of which can alone prevent men from being carried away by political feeling. of the The reaction of domestic on public life, common as it natu- The Salons rally is to all classes, should, like that of individual existence, Priesthood. Of the Of the Proletariate. be most powerful in the clergy. The freely accepted supremacy of the salon of the presbytery will imply to all, especially to women, the social precedence of the priesthood over the patriciate. Notwithstanding their greater power and wealth, the temporal chiefs will hold it an honour to be admitted to this distinguished society, the venerable president of which unites in her own person the dignity of age and sex with the consideration attaching to the office of her son. In the capital of Humanity, the Salon of the High Priest will thus initiate throughout the world conceptions well adapted to second his synthetic influence and capable of serving in lieu of more formal communications. Spreading from presbytery to presbytery, and radiating thence by a natural process, they will be equivalent to a systematic domestic organisation of public opinion, as they will stamp an unconstrained uniformity on all the salons of the globe, a process facilitated by the progressive acceleration of all the means of communication. As regards the patricians, the salon should strengthen their union as a hierarchy, and moderate their industrial rivalries. Its capabilities in these two respects will be most visibly shown in the salons of the bankers, the natural centres of meeting for all the industrial classes. There, each member of the supreme patriciate will create a truer appreciation of his class as the common regulator of human industry, by fraternising with dignity with all his clients, agriculturists, manufacturers, and merchants, to whom his weekly receptions will always be open. Whilst admirably calculated to prepare and facilitate particular operations, these meetings will not degenerate into mere professional meetings, the safeguard lying either in the diversity of their component elements, or still more in the presence habitually of the more eminent proletaries, who will give them a more general character. Not in immediate contact with the people, as banking, the most abstract form of industry, scarcely needs any workmen, bankers worthy of their position will be conscious of the value of this personal intercourse with the class which in the normal state will look to them as its natural temporal protectors. But, allowing its full efficacy for social purposes to the Positive salon in the case of the priest or the patrician, it is with the proletary class that the institution will habitually bear its best fruits. It supplies the plebeians the best means for preparing, and even extending their due control over all civic concerns, under the presidency of women, which by its mere acceptance recalls them to great principles, to the suppression of incidental passions. Indispensably requisite to complete the constitution of the Sociocracy, this function would alone suffice to justify my speaking, as above, of the salon as part of the working man's apartment. Thus become a regular institution, the private meetings of the proletariate will be superior in moral dignity and political value to its public meetings, which become of secondary importance, though immediately they are so important as to account for the attention paid them in the 'General View.' The tendency to disorder of these noisy discussions, in which pride and vanity soon get the upper hand even in the higher natures, must always be a source of alarm to the patrician class; but its only way of escape is the encouragement of the institution which rejects them and fills their place. To complete the general examination of the direct and persistent reaction of domestic on civic life, it remains for me to put forward a question of more special interest and greater importance than the preceding, the question namely of the propagation of the race. required. As the necessary seat of the highest form of production, the Regulation family by it is in most intimate connection with the whole system of industrial activity, for which it supplies the agents. The paramount importance however of this function is as yet masked by the difficulties of its regulation, owing to the nonexistence of right ideas on the subject and appropriate institutions. The real commencement of human education takes place in a state of brute passion with no sense of responsibility. Such being the case, it may be feared that human wisdom will never succeed in fully ordering an existence with such a beginning. Yet the success obtained in beings less modifiable than man allows the hope that the initial function may be as compatible with regular control as are its whole consequences. We need not be surprised at the existing contrast between the importance attached to the propagation of the inferior animals and the neglect of that of man. For the rough and violent methods adopted for the former are wholly inapplicable to the latter. It was a domain which, for two reasons, was closed till the advent of Positivism, the only system capable of supplying the appropriate theories and institutions, for it alone There are that Positive indications institutions will be equal to this diff cult task. |