usurp the place of God. I will
not be the Priest-Patriarch of my children. They shall grow and I will
grow beside them, helping but not cramping or overshadowing.' They grow
more. But they blunder more. Life ceases to be a discipline and becomes
an experiment...."

"That's very true," said Mr. Direck, to whom it seemed the time was ripe
to say something. "This is the problem of America perhaps even more than
of England. Though I have not had the parental experience you have
undergone.... I can see very clearly that a son is a very serious
proposition."

"The old system of life was organisation. That is where Germany is still
the most ancient of European states. It's a reversion to a tribal cult.
It's atavistic.... To organise or discipline, or mould characters or
press authority, is to assume that you have reached finality in your
general philosophy. It implies an assured end. Heinrich has his assured
end, his philological professorship or thereabouts as a part of the
Germanic machine. And that too has its assured end in German national
assertion. Here, we have none of those convictions. We know we haven't
finality, and so we are open and apologetic and receptive, rather than
wilful.... You see all organisation, with its implication of finality,
is death. We feel that. The Germans don't. What you organise you kill.
Organised morals or organised religion or organised thought are dead
morals and dead religion and dead thought. Yet some organisation you
must have. Organisation is like killing cattle. If you do not kill some
the herd is just waste. But you musn't kill all or you kill the herd.
The unkilled cattle are the herd, the continuation; the unorganised side
of life is the real life. The reality of life is adventure, not
performance. What isn't adventure isn't life. What can be ruled about
can be machined. But priests and schoolmasters and bureaucrats get hold
of life and try to make it _all_ rules, _all_ etiquette and regulation
and correctitude.... And parents and the love of parents make for the
same thing. It is all very well to experiment for oneself, but when one
sees these dear things of one's own, so young and inexperienced and so
capable of every sort of gallant foolishness, walking along the narrow
plank, going down into dark jungles, ah! then it makes one want to wrap
them in laws and foresight and fence them about with 'Verboten' boards
in all the conceivable aspects...."

"In America of course we do s