Page Text
________________
W
ANGAN
Impressions of America and in America, as I can conceive it, the establishment of the family is at the base of the whole social structure, and is essential to social and material happiness, and should be, and I hope is, held to be sacred. A nation of families in the right view, must be (other things being equal) a happy nation, although that happiness may not include great material wealth or commercial achievements, for the home where the family is, is the heaven on earth if it is constituted and preserved within the sacred meaning of the word itself.
But I find in this great country of yours, not unity of conception and practice, but great diversity, and that diversity - if my impression is correct - is a diversity of unhappy contradictions. I do not understand how it can be that home relations, which answer for family, by which I mean the ties and the children of our love, can be so easily broken. In your country when the son marries he leaves the paternal roof, the home in which he was born and reared, and separates himself from that circle, and establishes a different home beyond the limits of the old home; he creates as it were, (if I understand it) a separate, a distinct home for himself. This fear of living in the same family for a generation is very prevalent, I think in this country. This feature of your social life is peculiar in my view and is not realized nor desired among us. There seems to be a stat of enlarging the home circle by bringing into it the wife of the brother, with you. Perhaps yon are afraid of the mother-in-law, as I have heard. With us it is different. The home of the father of the on who marries the daughter of a different family is from that moment, the home of the daughter who, is now the wife, and she loves not her husband only, but her mother-inlaw, her father-in-law, her brother-in-law - in fact, all the members of the family into which she is adopted or brought, and her rights and privileges are equally sacred and as inviolable in the family, as the son's whose wife she is. In your country, if the husband, dies leaving the wife a widow, it, is often the case, if not always, if
€
245
Jain Education International
For Personal & Private Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
| SR No. | 006901 |
| Book Title | Jaina Philosophy |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Virchand R Gandhi, Kumarpal Desai |
| Publisher | World Jain Confederation |
| Publication Year | 2009 |
| Total Pages | 298 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 5 MB |