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Blessed is the home where parents know how to encourage the highest qualities in each other and their children!

EVERYBODY agrees that the American home has changed, and is still changing. Pessimists with a reverence for tradition tell us it will not exist much longer. Optimists contemplate its disappearance with joy. People who have "golden mean" minds survey the changes and study statistics, but refuse to conjecture what developments ten years will bring.

Economic necessity has dictated many of the changes. The home is being ground between two millstones -- the tendency of the individual to assert himself and the counter-tendency of a machine society to shape the individual to the mass pattern.

Unless the women of today think deeply on the home problem, they will have a negligible part in the discipline and in forming the ideals that will develop the minds and characters of their children and preparing them for the duties of a changing world.

Modern conditions are generally detrimental to this great source of family happiness. It is for women to study the causes of home disintegration and use their votes and their influence to remove them. Woman must prepare herself for the most important work of life -- making a happy home. She must realize that the time to give her children a chance of happiness when they grow up is in their babyhood, in school days and in college years, from the moment the little girl or boy can understand words and transmute them into thoughts and action.

I do not think of the home as an economic unit, but as a place dear to our hearts. It may be only a small apartment or cottage, but those who can make it a real home are happy there. Home is a place where young married people begin their life together and share great moments and precious things -- the joy of planning for their children, the pleasure of books, the satisfaction of holidays, sympathy in difficulties and successes, in dark days and bright.

Home life brings every faculty and gift into play in degrees and proportions very different from public life or casual intercourse and relations. Blessed is the home where parents know how to soothe, to sympathize, to counsel and to encourage the highest qualities in each other and their children!

The nation which has the best homes will have the brightest future. Boys and girls are the men and women of tomorrow. When well brought up, they grow into men and women who believe in the right things -- in the importance of good schools, in the dignity of work with the hands as well as with the head, in the community spirit, in the joy of serving others -- in everything beneficial to home and civic life.