Teapots and Toast
517 TEAPOTS AND TOAST " T 'LL give you kisses and a hearth-fire," was all X Leander could promise the princess in the play; and to judge by her subsequent actions, the offer was quite...
...Finally—and here is the heart of the problem—homelife can recover from the murderous disease of tenement corruption...
...The great endeavor of the present must be the conquest of industrialism—shaping it to the spiritual form of the human being, making it not a thing that kills but a condition that vitalizes...
...We do not mean so much the ruinous psychological ignorance of many who strike a matrimonial bargain with their eyes shut, and later seek refuge in the courts...
...But there is another and no less poignant problem...
...The Eucharist and the Christian Family will be no novel theme for the millions who come on pilgrimage...
...You cannot for any long time curb the creative self-expression of mankind...
...Models and philosophies may change, but not the longing of the human species for homes—homes that are as real as the one in the song, with a lilac bush at the back door and a babe or two within...
...Naturally it hinges to a large extent upon the promotion of a spirit of cooperation among the weavers, for the proper purchase of materials and marketing of produce...
...Towers and parliaments may fall...
...The Catholic Peasant League, already able to look back upon many progressive achievements, is now earnestly supporting the "Weavers' Home" movement...
...It is when we bewail the empty cradle and the mechanical means for keeping it empty...
...The poor mites jigged and shimmied amid the guffaws of spectators who tossed coins in return for the show, and they voted it an excellent business venture...
...when we deplore the lack of parental supervision over small boys and girls, now so manifest when we are more than a little shocked at the physical and moral status of growing America, that we are face to face with a social question more worthy of attention than anything else in the world...
...Yet how can anyone expect there should be homes where smudgy little apartments are bricked into acres of others just like them...
...Only the futile will now preach a retreat from industrialism in one form or another...
...Why should it not have been...
...New York women who send their million and more children to school and their men to work, know little about theatres and the lights of midnight...
...Of course the weavers' experiment may not suggest a great deal that is practical to us in the United States...
...It needs precisely what it is normally born into—the immemorial home...
...But all of us must believe that childhood needs a different environment from what public exhibitions of the Charleston suggest...
...One can get a little too excited about such things...
...These are the solace of that great itinerant throng which has somehow missed the joys of a fourwalled Arcady...
...The whole world awaits the restoration to the home of its proper hegemony in the conduct of life...
...You cannot urge a system against society...
...where there is necessarily so fearfully little of what can be called the life-atmosphere of the soul...
...but always and everywhere, for richer or for poorer, there will come to the surface a great, salutary, irrepressible longing for teapots and toast...
...For revolutions are powerful instruments in the hands of Providence, because, however muddled or poorly led they may be, they are defenses of eternal human instincts...
...and how the success of the small truck-farmer has practically doubled the agricultural population in some districts...
...What sanctity or what power attaches to a house which is only a place in which to sleep and read the Sunday paper ? How can children be welcome there, or cared for, when they do happen to get in...
...This spirit will have a great deal to do with making community life more agreeable and helpful...
...where both father and mother spend the day at work...
...men, as they think, may go astray and after a long time find their paths again...
...But though the saving instincts have survived well into this century of industrial uproar, there is little chance to miss noting how many dreams of home are wrecked by malignant social circumstances...
...It is a social question, we have said, rather than a matter of individual responsibility...
...When Judge Gary and other men of great wealth recommend the home to presentday America, they speak wisely but it is up to them to reinforce these words with deeds that may finally provide elbow-room for the oldest and most sacred congregation of the race...
...It is the 518 THE COMMONWEAL October 7, 1925 social condition of those whom circumstances prevent from building the home they need and staunchly desire...
...Perhaps something of the same sort may happen in industry...
...and to judge by her subsequent actions, the offer was quite acceptable...
...Love, as Coventry Patmore once said, is the finest fruit of culture and it will not grow where neither the body nor the soul is docile to the great laws and the greater charity of a sacrament...
...The movement, if it proceeds happily, will have brought machinery under the control of men instead of leaving men under the control of machinery...
...farmers who haul their wheat to market do not see the lure of the open road...
...Association among freemen is an entirely different matter from union against an employer, or against aggression...
...Later prophets have been found to bewail the centrifugal influence of modern inventions...
...Here, surely, is room for that charity which, as Cardinal Hayes declared in his splendid address before the National Conference of Catholic Charities, "is an essential element of a true and abiding democracy...
...Success is promised both by the traditional outlook of the Belgian workman—whose proverb says that "in his own home, the poor man is king"—and by the fact that similar ventures in the neighborhood of Lyons, France, have turned out very well...
...As time goes on, we may be driven to trust the cooperative principle in ways which at present seem remote...
...Harking back to the older days in the Lys valley, this movement aims to bring about, in so far as may be possible, three important reforms—to install in weavers' homes modern electrical equipment which will make it unnecessary for them to huddle in grimy towns and toil in the mills...
...to promote the ownership by the worker of his own house and of a small acreage for cultivation ; and to organize weavers' "home-shops," in which three or four spindles will provide work for even a very large family...
...But really, though the automobile may send mankind skidding round remote corners, it is modern lighting, decoration, musical instruments and their like which have brought into the home a myriad possible new charms that make for companionship and pleasant hours...
...And what is the home, but an instinct that is also a right...
...There were prophets, especially in those queer old days when people were excited about Olive Schreiner and the "new woman," who used to tell us that the world showed signs of growing away from all such glorious simplicities...
...And in this connection there comes from Belgium some account of a Catholic activity which offers much that is hopeful...
...Tomorrow, through some quiet or unquiet revolution, we shall discover once more that we have always been wanting our housetops and our gardens...
...They will find it a benignant old topic of conversation which can bring to the surface all that is dearest, best, and most unchanging in their lives...
...Therefore, it is really a steadfast and traditional subject which the Holy Father has proposed for consideration at the International Eucharistic Congress, to be held in Chicago next June...
...No matter how strongly we may feel the attractiveness of the "vernal wood," about which Wordsworth and the other romantics had so much to say, we are necessarily as far from it as we are from Jupiter...
...Recently metropolitan police in several parts of New York have been called upon to disperse gangs of children who danced the Charleston on busy sidewalks...
...But several well-informed writers have recently shown how the large farms—to which it was once thought we were drifting—have almost all been parceled out into smaller holdings...
...Probably they do not make certain the immediate downfall of the republic...
...Social conditions—the lure of an era of victory over nature— temporarily made a nomadic people of us...
Vol. 2 • October 1925 • No. 22
