marriage bed might be enjoyed. A like usage will be noted in the American colonies.

In a way children seem to have been esteemed in sixteenth century England. Bonfires were often built in celebration of a wife's pregnancy. Births were celebrated similarly and by other public rejoicing. But children among all classes were treated with severity. A Venetian noble who accompanied an ambassador from Venice to the English court in the sixteenth century wrote:

The want of affection in the English is strongly manifested toward their children [,] for having kept them at home till they arrive at the age of seven or nine years, they put them out, both males and females to hard service in the homes of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years. And these are called apprentices, and during that time they perform all the most menial offices; and few are born who are exempted from this fate, for every one, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the homes of others; whilst he in return receives those of strangers into his own.

This sounds like a rigid system yet we find children described as "most ongracious grafftes, ripe and ready in all lewd libertie" through the fault of the parents and schoolmasters "which do nother teach their children good, nother yet chasten them when they do evill." Between the Reformation and the Civil War lay a century of peace. Men had time to know their children. Little ones figure prettily in memoirs, letters, and art. These children seem to have led happy lives for the most part.

In the seventeenth century, people looking back regretted the passing of the time when daughters were obsequious and serviceable, when

There was no supposed humiliation in offices which are now accounted menial, but which the peer received as a matter of

course from the gentlemen of his household, and which were paid to the knights and gentlemen by domestics chosen in the families of their own most respectable tenants; whilst in the humbler ranks of middle life it was the uniform and recognized duty of the wife to wait on her husband, the child on his parents, the youngest of the family on his elder brothers and sisters.30

With the seventeenth century and the Puritan movement we come to the immediate sources of New England family institutions. It is particularly to the traditions and standards of the middle class, especially of the/ Puritan type, that we must look for the genesis of northern colonial life. Moreover in the southern colonies this class was stronger and the "cream of society" was weaker than southerners of aristocratic tastes like to admit. The New World environment, too, favored the standards of the middle class from which the immigrants came. This concurrence of geographic and social influences gives us our distinctive civilization. Our modern ideal of monogamy with equality and mutuality is not of aristocratic lineage. It comes up apparently from the "lower" classes where economic conditions forbade polygamic connections. Sumner says: "It is the system of the urban-middle-capitalist class.

99 31

In the old countries the mores of the middle class have come into conflict with the mores of peasants and nobles. The former have steadily won.' Naturally so inasmuch as this bourgeoisie, drawing into itself the more enterprising sons of the peasantry and grasping the power that economic change wrested from the nobility, has dominated modern society.

Puritanism was an economic phenomenon.32 The in30 Hill. Women in English Life, vol. i, 125.

31 Sumner. Folkways, 375-376.

32-Compare Parce, Economic Determinism, 98, 102, 110; Patten, Development of English Thought, 81-98, 124-134; Meily, Puritanism, chapter iii.

fluence of the Renaissance had spread a belief in the pleasures of this world and a regard for the life of the flesh as good in itself. Such a view is the spiritual reflection of the increased comfort and plenty arising from even the limited economic progress of the middle ages. The inventions and changes of the fifteenth century made indoor life less barren and more agreeable and a new type of man was the result- a man that disliked the open country and became attached to home. Elizabeth introduced many new food plants from Italy. Domestic comfort began to enter the homes of the poor. They began to provide their cottages with chimneys. The use of window glass spread and pillows appeared on the beds of the common people. The new conditions made real family life possible. The home became the center of pleasurable activities. To have a wife a homemaker-one that could change into comforts the necessities that man produced-was so much the more desirable.

Under earlier conditions enjoyment had been sought in group festivities, which were likely to be unrestrained and licentious. The development of the modern home caused a divide in social life and gave those that were so disposed a more refined way of satisfying their desire for pleasure. Those in whom the bonds of morality and the ties of family life were strongest gradually withdrew from the coarser community revelry. The Protestant Reformers extolled family life and denounced communal pleasures, attributing their moral degeneration to the Catholic church. New economic conditions with their numerous luxuries offered a strong temptation to depart from ancestral simplicity and brought about a market for indulgences among those that desired to reconcile their moral feelings with conflicting economic

tendencies. The bettering of economic conditions in the fifteenth century had, then, increased the evils of communal pleasures and also strengthened and intensified family life. Europe was at the parting of the ways. The "Puritan" was ready for a moral crusade against the growing dissipation and vice that threatened the family.

In the opening years of the seventeenth century refined English ladies preferred rural seclusion to the dissoluteness of the court of James I. Charles purified the court; yet the ladies stayed in the country.

It should be remembered that while Puritanism was of English growth the continent had a Puritanism of its own. The ordinary Dutchman of the seventeenth century stayed at home three hundred and sixty days in the year spending his time in the ancestral dwelling that his grandfather had built for him. In Germany, says Bebel,

The merry, life-loving townsman of the middle ages became a bigoted, austere, sombre Philistine. . The honorable citizen with his stiff cravat, his narrow intellectual horizon, his severe but hypocritical morality, became the prototype of society. Legitimate wives who had not favored the sensuality tolerated by the Catholicism of the middle ages, were generally better pleased by the Puritan spirit of Protestantism.

The Puritan emphasis on sexual restraint was of a piece with the general gospel of frugality so appropriate among a class of people trying to accumulate capital/ in an age of deficit. Urgent economic interests furthered the novel virtue of male chastity. The necessity of accumulation led the Puritan to reprobate all unprofitable forms of sin including markedly licentiousness, that prodigal waster. But male chastity, being less important than female in safeguarding legitimate

inheritance, never has attained the sanctity enforced upon females.

The Puritan concept of home was negative. A home was made mainly by abstaining from other social relations. As we have seen, communal pleasures were morally dangerous or at least were so considered. Thus the Maypole had been associated with sex excitement and indulgence. Accordingly in 1644 the Puritan parliament forbade Maypoles. The Puritans also condemned music as one of Satan's snares and ruled it out of the family. They were too short-sighted to glimpse the remoter connections between rhythm and efficiency. The Puritan Englishman was unsociable, independent, full of biblical traditions which cultivated reverence for paternal authority and a desire for abundant paternity. (English families were among the largest in the world. The manor house, the parsonage, the doctor's and the lawyer's homes were swarming with children. The women married young and very frequently died in their youth from sheer exhaustion by child-bearing. Second marriages and double sets of children were found everywhere. Infant mortality was high.

The later Puritanism distorted childhood. Milton's father, tho a strict Puritan, was not harsh to his children, but the poet was the embodiment of unreasonableness and cruelty. The seventeenth century in Europe was an age of precocity. The Puritans, as we shall see in the colonies, were ready to promote this tendency. The fear of infant damnation made necessary the earliest possible conversion of the child. In seventeenth century England it was in Puritan households that the rod was most favored; for were not the little ones until conversion children of wrath requiring to have the devil well whipped out of them? Calvinism retarded, thus,