SINCE man requires food for his personal preservation, and this food must be elaborated by artificial expedients, such as sowing and reaping, grinding and sifting, kneading and baking — arrangements only attainable by mutual co-operation and co-parceny — (unlike the food of other animals, which is taken in its natural state, without the slightest interposition of art;*) and since the daily preparation of food in the measure of its daily consumption is out of the question, it follows that he must accumulate the necessaries of life, and secure them from others of his kind. And since such security is not to be accomplished without a place for depositing his provender, where the hand of violence cannot reach it, it follows that he requires a home.*
Again, since he is compelled to attend to the artificial expedients necessary to procuring food, he as certainly requires a partner who, in his absence from home upon needful occasions, may remain there in his place, and attend in turn to the safeguard of food and provender. This however regards only the individual state: as regards the social state, there is no dispensing with a wife, from whose embraces the maintenance of lineage and generation is to be effected. Divine Wisdom has accordingly ordained, that in marriage the interests of domiciliation and procreation should be provided for together.*
As soon as children are produced, another urgent consideration arises — that of rearing them in a proper manner. In the collective form of husband, wife, and family, their united interests cannot well be attended to without a coadjutor. It then follows therefore that he requires helps and attendants.
Of these constituents, then, the well-being of life is composed: father, mother, children, servants, food.* Now since of any plurality the regulation depends on unity by coalition, the regulation of home may be said to consist in such artificial arrangement as will produce a coalescent combination of the individuals enumerated. The father being first in order of arrangement, to him the principality and management of family and home is properly consigned; and his duty as principal is to conduct this management by all the salutary expedients of encouragement and intimidation, of promises and threats, of severity tempered with tenderness, mildness, and suavity; by these means conducting all that are under his guidance to their appropriate perfection, and preserving them untainted from their incident ills.
Now the intent of home, in this point of view, is not a house of brick, or clay, or stone, or wood, but that particular coalition which takes place between husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant, proprietor and property, whether they abide in a dwelling of wood and stone, or in tent and shed, or in tree-shade and cavern: and the science of domestic management is the knowledge whereby the conditions of any such collection may be so governed as to preserve them all from detriment.*
The need of this incorporation extending to all mankind, all are bound to acquire this science; the main principle of which lies in the rulers watching over the state of the above constituents, maintaining them in their proper positions, and repairing any injury that either may sustain. And like as the physician holds it right, nay obligatory, to amputate one limb for the benefit of a nobler, so in the domestic body we should be prepared to sacrifice the meaner to the higher constituent.
Albeit in this art, as we have said, no peculiarity of residence is contemplated, the wise have yet adverted to the construction of that noblest class of residences which we term edifices. To be good, they say, a dwelling must be strong, its roof verging to elevation, its entrances ample; rooms adapted for every time and season should be prepared in it, and the requisite care taken to provide against flood and fire, burglary, theft, and nuisance from reptiles.* We have it among the dicta, that a house ought not to be higher than six yards; and when a greater elevation is attempted, there is an angel who cries, How much higher, thou wantonnest of wrongdoers!
Attention must likewise be given to the state of the neighbourhood. For it is allowed both in law and reason, that a bad neighbour is a great evil: on the other hand, when Plato took a house in a street of gold-workers, and was asked on what principle he did it, he said, it was in order to be awoke by their piercing clamour the moment that sleep overpowered and interrupted him in his studies and meditations.*