developed, they will cease to stuff their children's bodies and cram their minds while starving their souls. How often, alas, do parents pamper their children in their lower nature while pauperizing their higher nature, because of their failure to see that not alone were they co-authors of a child-body but that they are to be the continuing re-makers of a child's mind and spirit.

Are there quite enough parents like the father of a friend into whose young hands at leave-taking from home his father placed a Bible and a copy of the poems of Burns with the parting word,—Love and cling to both, but if you must give up the Bible cling to Burns. But verily we can give nothing more to our children than clothes and food and money until we remember to make something of ourselves. It is not easy for the stream of domestic influence to rise higher than the parental level. Time and again I have heard a father exclaim: "I am going to leave my boy so well off that he won't have to shoulder the burdens which all but crushed me." Less often have I seen a father so rear his son that he revealed his inmost purpose to be the fostering of his son's nobleness. Are there as many parents who would have their children finely serviceable as highly successful?

CHAPTER V

THE OBLIGATION OF BEING

But the primary duty of parents is to learn and to teach that happiness is not the supreme end of life and to dare to live it. We are so bent upon giving to our children that we forget to ask aught of them. We seem to be unmindful of what the wisest teacher of our generation has called the danger of luxury in the lives of our children. Those parents who in largest measure have learned to do without seem to think that they must overwhelm their children with things. How many parents are equal to the wisdom of the heroic Belgian mother who would not permit her children to leave Belgium in the hour of its deepest stress and suffering, saying: "Yes, we intended to take our children to England for safety but when we remembered that in the future they might hold important positions in our country and perhaps be influential in future leadership, we did not want them to come to this work ignorant of what our people have undergone and suffered during this terrible war. They would not have known because they would have spent all the period of the war in pleasant living in England. When we thought of this, we felt with sinking hearts that we owed it to them and their country to keep them here, though we knew and know now that there is great danger." Did not this Belgian mother serve her children infinitely better than do those parents who imagine that they must deny their children nothing save the possibility of discomfort and want?

Edward Everett Hale tells a story which clearly shows what Emerson thought best for a young man and wherein he conceived the responsibility of parents to lie. I congratulated him as I congratulated myself on the success of our young friend, and he said: "Yes, I did not know he was so fine a fellow. And now, if something will fall out amiss, if he should be unpopular with his class, or if he should fail in business, or if some other misfortune can befall him, all will be well." He himself put it, "Good is a good doctor, but bad is sometimes a better."

With one further evil effect, perhaps the worst, of the habitude of ceaseless parental giving, I have dealt elsewhere. It fosters more than all else the parental sense of possession. Have I not given my children everything?—asks a hyper-wasteful father or a super-bounteous mother. Yes, it might be answered, you have given them everything and that is all you have given them. Giving a child things without number is no guarantee of peace or beauty in the parental-filial relation. Giving, giving, eternal giving is bound to narcotize into sodden self-satisfaction, or at last to rouse to protest an awakening soul. If, Mr. Successful or Madam Prosperous, you think that you are satisfying your children because you are giving them an abundance of things, you may be destined some day to suffer a sorry awakening. Remember that too many things kill a home more surely than too few. Children may ask and ought to ask more of parents than things, and, far from being satisfied with things, they ought to demand of parents that these minimize things and magnify that of life which is unconditioned by things. To magnify the home is not to furnish it richly but to give it noble content.

Over-stressing the physical side of the life of children and under-emphasizing the spiritual side of their life leads inevitably to certain results. Some years ago, I knew a family in which both parents died within a brief period. There was some perfunctory grief, though in each case the funeral was one of the new-fashioned kind, marked alike by tearlessness and the use of motorcars. The interesting thing, as I looked upon these comfortable, unworried, immobile children, was that probably it had been the dream of the parents for a lifetime to make their children comfortable and happy. Well, the parents had wonderfully succeeded, had so succeeded in the matter of making their children comfortable that not even the death of parents in swift succession could shake them out of their deep-rooted comfortableness even for a moment. Within a few weeks of the passing of the mother, I met the son and heir—heir rather than son—at an amateur baseball game in which he was one of the vociferous and gleesome participants, with a cigar perched in his mouth at that angle which is, I believe, considered good form at a baseball game.

As I surveyed that sorry specimen of filial impiety, apparently without reverence for his parents or respect for himself, I was moved to ask myself where lies the fault, whose the ultimate responsibility? True enough, the children of those parents were rather empty-headed and superficial beings, but it was the parents who were primarily at fault. The mother was a blameless rather than a good woman, and the father was an unseeing, soulless money-grubber with but one aim in life—namely, to multiply his children's rather than his own comforts, and to enable them to indulge in every manner of luxury. These gave their children things and only things, and still there was something touching in the devotion of the parents, however poor and mistaken its objects. But there was something repulsive in the indifference of the children to the parents who had lived for naught else than their well-being, however mistakenly conceived.

Parents who give their children only things must face the fact that they make themselves quite dispensable, seeing that they are not things. For things and the wherewithal to secure them are alone indispensable according to the parental standards. The ultimate responsibility? Any possibility of change involves the re-education of parents. Parents must learn long before parenthood what are the values in life for which it is worth while to toil and to contend. The root of the matter goes very deep in conformity to the hint of Oliver Wendell Holmes with respect to the time at which a child's education is to be begun.

Some years past, I came upon a ludicrous illustration of the maximum care devoted to the physical nature and the minimum devoted to the moral and spiritual nurture of child-life. I heard a very well-circumstanced mother declare: "I never permit my child to have a crumb of food handed it by its governess which has not previously been tasted by me." Quite innocently I asked: "Where is the little gentleman?" The answer was: