throne defeats this
end of easy accomplishment through imitation. Where there are too many
children in the family for the father to properly support, or the
mother to healthfully or happily care for, the nearness of age often
means friction and not comradeship. Where in such families the older
children act as "little fathers" or "little mothers" they may be
defrauded of a child's right to care-free leisure or develop a
tyrannous control of the younger ones far from helpful to the
development of either. The coming of new members to the family,
however, in right spacing and right conditions, means that each child
gets the benefit of all the teaching each other child receives and
makes it far easier for all to learn the ways of life. The art of
obedience which is learned in such conditions is a share in a family
public opinion, outlined, indeed, by the parents, but maintained by
all the younger members of the group. Not that the same elements enter
into the early character-drill of each child. There are as many
temperaments and as many capacities and as many differing reactions to
like conditions in any family, as a general thing, as there are
children to be considered. This difference, however, while it makes
family discipline more difficult, makes it also usually more
effective, for it insures that parents shall study reasons for rules
and try at least to reach an obvious basis for them in personal and
social well-being rather than in the parents' will. This leads the way
to later democracy by stimulating the sense of justice and the sense
of individualistic right, together with the sense of mutual tolerance
and mutual aid in the very beginnings of family living together.

=Special Responsibility of the Average Mother.=--The burden of this
preliminary training toward social order and social welfare rests
to-day more heavily upon the mother than upon any one else, even the
father. He often has pressing business down-town whenever hard
questions of family discipline must be faced. He is often so
overburdened with the financial support of the family that he cannot
give time or attention necessary to the constant helping of children
to escape from the savage to the civilized, from the selfish to the
helpful, from the ignorant to the ever-learning. At any rate, just as
many men "keep their religion in their wife's name," so, many fathers,
although successfully appealed to as final authority in larger
concerns of family orde