What is needed for the best development of the family under modern conditions is not more celibates, men and women of high ability and noble consecration to undertake wholesale service in its behalf, but rather that more of the best and the best-balanced men and women be absorbed, to necessary degree, and at the right period of life, in the task of actual transmission of their quality and tendency through the living tissues of the social organism in the vital process of parenthood.

What is needed to secure that result is not only a new ideal of social obligation but also, and definitely, such skill in economic and domestic adjustments as will more and more leave a margin of strength and energy for a chosen vocation not wholly mortgaged to family uses, in the case of women as of men.

It is quite time that some of the rightly honored "maiden aunts of society," as our leading spinsters have been called, used some of their wisest thought and their most self-sacrificing service toward securing such economic and domestic adjustments as will work toward the diminution of their own kind! Again it must be insisted that what society-at-large now needs most is not celibates, however wise and good, working along one line, without close touch with the main experiences of birth and death and common social relationship, but rather the deepening and broadening of common human relations through the reaction of the wise and good upon all the fundamental ties that bind the race and the generations together.

The loss to society of those who might have been fathers and mothers and chose to be so devoted to religious orders as to stand apart from their race-life is an admitted calamity in the view of most people who study mediaeval history.
=Dangers of Extreme Specialization.=--Moreover, the tendency now in all departments of industry and professional service is toward a specialization which often defeats its own end and lessens rather than increases the usefulness of its own department.

"We want not workers," says Emerson, "but men working." We want not specialists in the extreme sense but all-round students devoting themselves to one sphere of research or activity with a constant sense of its relation to all other spheres of thought and action.