He utters grave warning to those well-meaning philanthropists who, in the name of Family Sanctity, are opposing the reforms which Social Reformers most ardently desire. “If it be a question of providing work for the unemployed, meals for the children, pensions for the old; if it be a matter of municipal trams, municipal wash-houses, municipal dwellings, in every instance,” he protests, “they raise the cry that the independence of the family is threatened, and exhort their friends to fight the measure to the death. Is it surprising that the word ‘Family’ has come to stink in the nostrils of those who are striving to improve the conditions of the poor? Is it any cause for wonder if they begin to attack the Family, and inquire what manner of monster that is which can only be preserved by bringing as offerings to its den hungry children and suffering mothers?” “The sanctity of the family,” he boldly affirms, “is menaced at the present time by the austerity of the thoughtful rather than by the sentimentality of the thoughtless.”[5] However this may be, the Crowd consciousness and the city upbringing must of necessity act as a disintegrating force, tearing the family into pieces. If the Crowd condition, which, in part, is to supplement it, may be made a dignified and noble thing, there need be less regret over a change which, desirable or otherwise, would appear to be inevitable. The communal midday meal, for example, which the school children of the cities are coming to partake of altogether, should be something better than a squalid scramble for physical sustenance in soup or suet. The communal recreation, one would hope, may develop in something more desirable than the aimless activities of the Hampstead Heath bank holiday. The communal politics should be something more restrained than the stampeded “Swing of the Pendulum,” first against one party in power, then against the other. The communal intellect might be directed towards other and more reputable ends than the devising of the last lines of “Limericks,” or the search for true “tips” of horses, in the effort after unearned monetary gain. And the spirit of a collective mind, “the spirit of the hive,” residing in the various industrial cities, may find expression and a conscious revelation of itself, in something more beautiful and also more intelligible than the chaotic squalor of uniformly mean streets and buildings which make up the centres of industrial England.