selves with the "improvement of the humbler and more exposed portions of society, the perishing and dangerous classes thereof." The voluntary associations on which Tocqueville pinned his hopes for democracy served, as Parker's list makes clear, to discipline the acquisitive impulse. In effect, they served as extensions of the family and were often quite explicitly conceived as such, as when Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, founder and superintendent of the Hartford Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, argued that the school ought to be "intimately connected with [the] family state" and to model itself on "government ... of the parental kind." A "well organized family state," Gallaudet explained, was the basis of social order, which rested not on the "dread of human laws" but on "religious and moral principle," on "early associations of thought and feeling," on "habits formed in childhood and youth," on the "power of imitation," and on the "commanding influence of example in those who exercised authority over the mind in the early stages of its existence."

There is no need to belabor the familiar point that reverence for maternal "influence" and the domestic virtues stood at the very center of middle-class morality. What has to be emphasized, in the face of the equally familiar claim that the nineteenth-century "cult of domesticity" served only to enforce the patriarchal subordination of women and to subject the lower classes to "social control," is that it had progressive, not reactionary implications, since a well-ordered family life allegedly generated the demand for improvements that assured the unlimited expansion of capitalist production. The "cult of domesticity" was part of the rationale for reforms designed to alleviate poverty, shorten the hours of labor, and raise the working class out of the brutalizing conditions of mere subsistence. A Massachusetts bookbinder, pleading for the eight-hour day in I870, pointed out that "a multiplication of happy homes around the city, would stimulate all industry, and greatly increase the exchange of products.... As people are elevated and improved in body and mind, the wants of body and mind are multiplied. On this simple fact depend all trade, prosperity and wealth."

Theodore Parker's recital of the expanding effects of home consumption can stand as a definitive statement of these "plain principles of political economy," as the bookbinder called them. Elaborating on the contrast between Southern backwardness and Northern improvement, in his famous "Letter on Slavery," Parker pointed out that

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