Summary Regarding the Influence of Industrial Conditions upon the Present Instability of the Family.--As we have already seen, the development of modern industry is one of the chief causes of the decay of modern family life. Certain aspects of our industrialism, such as the labor of women and children in factories, the growth of cities, and the loss of the home through the slum and the tenement, the higher standards of living and comfort, and the resulting higher age of marriage,--all of these have had, to a certain extent at least, a disastrous effect upon the family. Some of these things, like the growth of cities, seem inseparable from modern industrial development. The problem must be, therefore, how to overcome the evil effect of these tendencies in industry upon the home. There is no reason for believing that such evil effects cannot be overcome, although the problem is a difficult one. Our aim should be, not to stop industrial development, but to guide it and control it in the interest of the higher development of the family. That this is entirely feasible may already be seen from what has been accomplished in the way of regulating the labor of women and children and in the way of providing better conditions in the homes of the working population. There is, however, nothing in evidence in the causes of increasing divorce in the United States which warrants the belief that American industrial development is alone responsible for the increasing instability of our family life. The industrial development of America is less peculiar in many ways than its political and social development. Divorce and instability of the family, as we have seen, characterize the American people more than any other civilized population. This fact, then, cannot be explained entirely in terms of American industrial development, but we must look also, as has already been emphasized, to certain peculiarities in American character, American institutions, and American ideas and ideals. The divorce movement in the United States affords no proof of the theory of economic determinism. SELECT REFERENCES _For brief reading:_ WILLCOX, _The Divorce Problem: A Study in Statistics._ ADLER, _Marriage and Divorce_, Lecture II. Special Report on _Marriage and Divorce_, 1867-1906, Bureau of the Census. _For more extended reading:_ HOWARD, _History of Matrimonial Institutions._ LICHTENBERGER, _Divorce: A Study in Social Causation._ WOLSEY, _Divorce and Divorce Legislation._ WRIGHT, _First Special Report of United States Commissioner of Labor: Marriage and Divorce_, 1891. CHAPTER VIII THE GROWTH OF POPULATION