It is a thankless task to be a parent in these exacting days, and I wonder now and then at the temerity which prompts man or woman to assume such hazardous duties. Time was, indeed, when parents lifted their heads loftily in the world; when they were held to be, in the main, useful and responsible persons; when their authority, if unheeded, was at least unquestioned; and when one of the ten commandments was considered to indicate that especial reverence was their due. These simple and primitive convictions lingered on so long that some of us can perhaps remember when they were a part of our youthful creed, and when, in life and in literature, the lesson commonly taught was that the province of the parent is to direct and control, the privilege of the child is to obey, and to be exempt from the painful sense of responsibility which overtakes him in later years. In very old-fashioned books, this point of view is{43} strained to embrace some rather difficult conclusions. The attitude of Evelina to her worthless father, of Clarissa Harlowe to her tyrannical parents, seemed right and reasonable to the generations which first read these novels, while we of the present day are amazed at such unnatural submissiveness and loyalty. “It is hard,” says Clarissa’s mother, in answer to her daughter’s despairing appeals, “if a father and mother, and uncles and aunts, all conjoined, cannot be allowed to direct your choice;” an argument to which the unhappy victim replies only with her tears. How one longs to offer Mrs. Harlowe some of these little manuals of advice which prove to us now so conclusively that even a young child is deeply wronged by subjection. “Looked at from the highest standpoint,” says one of our modern mentors, “we have no more right to interfere with individual choice in our children than we have to interfere with the choice of friends;” a statement which, applied as it is, not to marriageable young women, but to small boys and girls, defines matters explicitly, and does away at once and forever with all superannuated theories of obedience.{44}