The Drifting Home. By Ernest R. Groves. Boston And New York:  Houghton Mifflin Co., 1926. Pp.  217.

The home is in disrepute. There is hardly a more remarkable social phenomenon in our time than the distrust with which the home has come to be regarded, especially by the clever young men and women of the sneering school. While changing social and economic factors are chiefly causative, perhaps no single factor is more responsible for these misgivings than the persistence with which psychiatrists and students of human behavior in general have pointed out the infinite harm of which the home is capable. That there should be a misunderstanding between an older generation, and an impatient new one, pathetically unaware of human imperfections, is by no means inevitable. But it is almost certain to follow if the parents lack that peculiar type of human sympathy with growing things which asserts itself in intelligent control. Lacking this, misunderstandings between the old and the new is the least harm that can follow. The worst is the maiming and the dwarfing of the human spirit, instead of nurturing and fructifying—as psychiatrists and social workers too well know. “Cases of social maladjustment” becomes the polite term for the human wrecks and misfits that populate hospitals for mental diseases, reformatories, and jails; and whose early starting point is too often the home. For the home, being the source from which the child receives its earliest and most potent stimuli, has the capacity for infinite harm. That it has the capacity for infinite good is a necessary corollary, and to the demonstrating of this proposition and to its analysis, Dr. Groves devotes this book. That its content has long become a stock-in-trade of psychiatric and social workers docs not preclude its usefulness to the lay public. For the lay public is woefully behind in the evaluation of the home and marriage as a social fact, which must be accepted or rejected by its own logic and on its own merits rather than as a fact of tradition. In the two hundred odd pages of the book, the author undertakes