The Father and the Mother State : Part 5

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 20 of 23)

Largely owing to such efforts, fewer babies die during the first year of life now in any listed one hundred thousand, than ever before in our American history. If we find that many people are living without the comforts they need and in conditions inimical to health and morality, we can at least take comfort in the fact that fewer go to the "poorhouse" than used to be found there when all sorts of dependents were sent to that one institution. With the state's new discrimination and graded assorting of young and old and sick and well and sane and insane and normal and subnormal, the state care is on lines at once more humane to the individual and more helpful to social organization.

The state is indeed turning father and mother in its newer agencies for social conservation and social aid to the distressed and miserable. And as the state thus does the work that once was attempted and poorly done by the collective family, it must more and more call to its service the men and women of parental quality and of fit and devoted expression of the protective and the nurturing elements of human nature.

Social Service in Peace. - The state has always called for sacrificial service from its members. It has called most of all for such sacrificial service when danger seemed to threaten the national existence, or enemies of the government lifted treasonable intent against the peace and order to which the majority of citizens were devoted. Now we are called upon, if only we can realize the new claims upon the higher patriotism, to make the country we love what all countries should be, a home of freedom, of mutual helpfulness, of economic well-being and of incorrupt and progressive political order. It has been said and truly, "The ideas of great men are apprehended slowly, and a free and rational society must in part exist before the dream of such a society can be interpreted." We have a dream of a free, a noble, a competent, a happy people in our America. We must be careful at every point lest by carelessness of political forms or lack of understanding of what those forms should be, we hinder the development of that free and rational society in which the noblest thoughts and highest ideals of the best and finest of our leaders can alone find root and grow.

Problems Voters Must Solve. - Three special problems are before the voters of our country, problems commanding in importance and not easy of solution. They are, first, the problem which inheres in our union of States, with their wide divergence of climate, soil, industries, population, standards of action and ideals of national and local action. The problem is this: what shall we decide is the measure of wise and useful division between the laws and conditions we shall make national in extent of social control and in practical functioning of political administration, and those of smaller autonomous units? What shall belong to the Federal Government and make field for its activity? What shall belong to the various States and make up their separate systems of law and administration? And what shall be left to each locality, or each county of each State, for its own political activity? These are not easy questions to answer, and the constant movement toward centralization of power, not only of standardization but of control in the National Government (a movement which received such an immense impetus during the war), is likely to make this a movable problem of differing answers as our nation grows older. The division of States may give a geographical symbol of deep inherent differences of background of culture and even of race, or that division may mean only a superficial mark of geographic outline between two sets of communities alike in all their inheritance and tendency. In any case, how much weight shall still be attached to "States Rights," and how much shall we press for a uniform life throughout all the land?

What shall be the special duties of each local community toward its common needs of education, of recreation, of moral protection, and social order? How much in any given place shall the tendency of neighbors to be unwilling to testify against each other when wrong-doing is practised, and unable to withstand any evil influence when near the centre of its working, lead us to unite in demanding a larger unit for the Juvenile Court or the enforcement of laws against commercialized vice or any other social concern where justice demands a free hand and no favor to any group? These are questions with which some of our volunteer agencies of social work have wrestled. The answers that wise and good people have made to them should have weight in any decision we may make as to the right and effective divisions of law and its enforcement in our American system. This problem of division of authority has within it a puzzling counter-interpretation of our original Constitution and of our history up to date. The doctrine of "States Rights," it is said, received its death blow in the Civil War, but the equal political and civil rights of the negro, which that war was supposed to establish as a national concern, vary with the varying attitudes of people of the different states toward the enforcement of the Constitutional Amendments which were intended to secure those rights.

The Southern States, it is said, still stand for the dignity and autonomy of each Commonwealth in matters of restriction upon labor and of provision for tax-supported education, but the inner stronghold of the Federal Prohibition Amendment is the section of the country south of Mason and Dixon's line. The new States, again it is said, are more tenacious of national centralization of government because more evidently drawing their powers from the federal centre, but in the valley of the Mississippi from north to south, - that section which promises to have the determination of the course of American history in its hands for the next hundred years, - there are signs that the state autonomy and the state jealousy of invasion of local authority in the interest of national conformity to federal law are not by any means unknown. There should be some more carefully outlined and more commonly understood principles of judgment to lead us to decisions, when a thing we believe it good to do or a law we desire to set in place and in operation call upon us for support, as to the best way of using that support. Whether to try for a federal amendment or a national statute, whether to work wholly within each State, or whether it is matter which so depends upon local sentiment and local coöperation that each smallest community centre must work out its own salvation, or secure its own advance in independent work, - this is the problem.

Copyright, 1923 by J.B. Lippincott Company

About the Author

Anna Garlin Spencer (1851-1931) was an American educator, feminist, and Unitarian minister. Born in Attleboro, MA, she married the Rev. William H. Spencer in 1878. She was a leader in the women's suffrage and peace movements. In 1891 she became the first woman ordained as a minister in the state of Rhode Island.