Love and veneration for the family is with us not only a principle, but probably a prejudice and a weakness. We were never two weeks at a time from under the family roof, until we had passed middle life, and now that our years almost number half a century, we have never been from home for an interval of two months. And our historical reading, as well as our habits of life, may have unfitted us to appreciate the communist and fusion theories of Fanny Wright, Owen and Mr. Greely. In attempting to vindicate and justify the ways of God and Nature, against the progressiveness of Black Republicanism in America, and Red Republicanism in Europe, we would forewarn the reader that we are a prejudiced witness. We are the enthusiastic admirer of the social relations exhibited in the histories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The social relations established in Deuteronomy, and 25th chapter Leviticus, and as practiced by the Jews to this day, elicit our unfeigned admiration and approval. Moses is with us the Prince of Legislators, and the twenty-fifth Leviticus the best of political platforms. The purity of the family seems to be his paramount object.
Homer, too, especially in his Odyssey, charms and enchains us with his beautiful descriptions of family felicity and family purity. As conquest and commerce introduced wealth and corrupted morals and manners, the family was corrupted and disrupted, as it is now, at the most commercial points in the North. But we have only to pass over to Italy, and there, from the earliest days of tradition until the extinction of liberty, began by Sylla and Marius, and ended by Augustus, we find the family a pure, a holy and sacred thing. From that era till slavery arose in the South, the family never resumed its dignity and importance. Feudalism did something to correct the loose morality of the Augustan Age, but it adopted its colonial slavery, relaxed family ties, and never drew together in sufficiently close connection and subordination, the materials which nature dictates should form the human hive or social circle.
Aristotle understood this subject thoroughly; and it seems to have been generally so well comprehended in his day, that he takes little trouble to explain and expound it. He commences his treatise on Politics and Economics with the family, and discourses first of the slaves as a part of the family. He assumes that social life is as natural to man as to bees and herds; and that the family, including husband, wife, children, and slaves, is the first and most natural development of that social nature. As States are composed of families, and as a sound and healthy whole cannot be formed of rotten parts, he devotes much of his treatise to family education and government. Would that modern statesmen, philosophers and politicians, would become practical like Aristotle, and not attempt to build social and political edifices, until they were sure of the soundness of the materials of which they would construct them. As all human beings live for the greatest part of their lives in families, it is all important that they should look to the wise arrangement of this old and universal institution.