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In some particulars this impression is unfavourable in others very grateful. In all thought, both in India 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 houe 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
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