the words of a popular manual for young women, "... became what he was through maternal influence." But it does not seem fanciful to conjecture that the doctrine of maternal influence commended itself, to an enterprising and forward-looking people, largely because it served to assure them that moral and material progress went hand in hand. "Woman is the mother of the race," explained Julia Ward Howe, a prominent feminist. "... In all true civilization she wins man out of his natural savagery to share with her the love of offspring, the enjoyment of true and loyal companionship." Faith in the civilizing power of women made it possible for the nineteenth century to believe that enlightened self-interest would find its characteristic expression not in a ruthless pursuit of the main chance, much less in "luxury" and fashionable dissipation, but in family feeling—in the determination of conscientious parents to provide their children with opportunities unavailable to themselves.

In the long run, of course, it was a lost cause, this attempt to build up the family as a counterweight to the acquisitive spirit. The more closely capitalism came to be identified with immediate gratification and planned obsolescence, the more relentlessly it wore away the moral foundations of family life. The rising divorce rate, already a source of alarm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, seemed to reflect a growing impatience with the constraints imposed by long-term responsibilities and commitments. The passion to get ahead had begun to imply the right to make a fresh start whenever earlier commitments became unduly burdensome. Economic progress also weakened the economic foundations of Gallaudet's "well ordered family state." The family business gave way to the corporation, the family farm—more slowly and painfully—to a collectivized agriculture ultimately controlled by the same banking houses that had engineered the consolidation of industry. The agrarian uprising of the I870s, I880s, and I890s proved to be the first round in a long, losing struggle to save the family farm, enshrined in American mythology, even today, as the sine qua non of a good society but subjected in practice to a ruinous cycle of mechanization, indebtedness, and overproduction.

The same changes that weakened the family threatened to reverse the

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