The Pensacola journal. (Pensacola, Fla.) 1898-1985, 1905-10-28
"coME OUT OF your SHELL
Husbands and wives Who Hold
AIoOf From NeighbOrs.

AIoOf From NeighbOrs.
am acquainted with too many hus-
bands and wives who, though all the
world to each other, are nothing to the
world. Their whole life is within
their home. They gather comforts
about them, they bear dainties to each
others lips, they live ana move and
have their whole being in each others
love, and, shutting out all the world.
live only for themselves.
/ say l know too many such pairs as
these. They are far too plenty. They
cannot bear to be torn from their
homes for an afternoon. They take
no interest in others.
They never call friends and neigh
bors around their board. and they con-
slider it a hardship TO fulfill the com
mon offices OF social politeness-to say
nothing Of hospitality. 1t is not un-
just to say that this is one of the
most dangerous and most repulsive
forms of married life. It is selfish
ness doubled, associated, instituted.
and it deserves serious treatment.
Homes, like individuals, have their
relations to each other, and, as no man
liveth to himself alone, no home should
live to itself alone 1t is through the
medium of homes that the social life
blood of America is kept in circula
tion-through this medium almost ex-
clusively.
Every home should be as a city set
upon a hill that cannot be hid. Into it
should flock friends and friendships.
bringing the life of the world, the
stimulus and the modifying power of
contact with various natures, the fresh
flowers Of feeling gathered from wide
fields Out of it should flow benign
charities, pleasant amenities and all
those influences which are the natural
offspring of a high and harmonious
home life.
INSTRUMENTATION of minds and
homes is the condition of individual
and social development. and falling of
this no married pair can be what they
should be to each other. Exclusive de
votion to business by day and exelu-
sive devotion to selfish home enjoy
ments at night will dry up, harden and
depreciate the richest natures in. the
course Of a few years, and as soon as
the man withdraws from the business
of the world the world has seen the
last of him and his family for life.
They have no outside associations.
1t is as IL they did not live at ALL When
they die, nobody misses them, for they
have been nothing to society. AS many
doors are open as before, and social
life feels no ripple upon its surface
when the sand is thrown upon their
collins.
There should glow in every house
throughout the land the light of a
pleasant welcome for friends. On ev-
cry hearth should leap the fame that
irradiates the forms and faces Of as
sociates. Neighborhood should mean
something more than a collection Of
dark and selfishly closed hearts and
houses. A community should be some
thing better than an aggregation of in
dividuals and homes governed by the
same laws and sustaining equal civil
burdens, NeighborhoOd should be the
name Of a vital relationship.
A community should be communi-
ty in fact-informed with a genial, so
cial life, in which the influence of each
nature, the power of each intellect. the
wealth of every individual acquisition,
the force of every well directed will
and the inspiration Of every high and
pure character should be felt by all. A
neighborhood of homes like this would
be a neighborhood indeed, and none
other deserves the Timothy
TitcOmbs Letters in Boston Globe.