The trend, accordingly, of our social life is not to banish woman back to the house and the hearth, as our "domestic life" fanatics prescribe, and after which they lust, like the Jews in the Desert after the fleshpots of Egypt. _On the contrary, the whole trend of society is to lead woman out of the narrow sphere of strictly domestic life to a full participation in the public life of the people_--a designation that will not then cover the male sex only--and in the task of _human civilization_. Laveleye fully recognized this when he wrote:[130] "In the measure that what we are in the habit of designating as civilization advances, the sentiments of piety and the family bonds weaken, and they exercise a decreasing influence upon the actions of men. This fact is so general that a law of social development may be recognized therein." Not only has the position of woman changed, but also the relation of son and daughter to the family, who have gradually attained a degree of independence unknown in former days,--a fact noticeable especially in the United States, where the self-dependent and independent education of the individual is carried on much further than with us. The dark sides that to-day accompany also this form of development, are not necessarily connected with it; they lie in the social conditions of our times. Capitalist society evokes no beneficent phenomenon unaccompanied with a dark side: as Fourier long ago pointed out with great perspicacity, capitalist society is in all its progressive steps double-faced and ambiguous. With Laveleye, Schaeffle also detects in the changed character of the family of our days the effect of social development. He says:[131] "It is true that the tendency described in Chapter II, to reduce and limit the family to its specific functions is traceable throughout history. The family relinquishes one provisional and temporary function after the other. In so far as it officiated only in a surrogate and gap-filling capacity it makes way to independent institutions for law, order, authority, divine service, education, technique, etc., as soon as these institutions take shape."