as loving as you please, it will still remain an
arbitrary rule) in the beginning, never seem to know when their children
are children no longer, but have become men and women. In any average
family, the position of an unmarried daughter after she is twenty years
old becomes less and less what it should be. In case of sons, the question
is rarely a practical one; in those exceptional instances where invalidism
or some other disability keeps a man helpless for years under his father's
roof, his very helplessness is at once his vindication and his shield, and
also prevents his feeling manly revolt against the position of unnatural
childhood. But in the case of daughters it is very different. Who does not
number in his circle of acquaintance many unmarried women, between the
ages of thirty and forty, perhaps even older, who have practically little
more freedom in the ordering of their own lives than they had when they
were eleven? The mother or the father continues just as much the
autocratic centre of the family now as of the nursery, thirty years
before. Taking into account the chance--no, the certainty--of great
differences between parents and children in matters of temperament and
taste, it is easy to see that great suffering must result from this;
suffering, too, which involves real loss and hindrance to growth. It is
really a monstrous wrong; but it seems to be rarely observed by the world,
and never suspected by those who are most responsible for it. It is
perhaps a question whether the real tyrannies in this life are those that
are accredited as such. There are certainly more than even tyrants know!

Every father and mother has it within easy reach to become the intimate
friend of the child. Closest, holiest, sweetest of all friendships is this
one, which has the closest, holiest tie of blood to underlie the bond of
soul. We see it in rare cases, proving itself divine by rising above even
the passion of love between man and woman, and carrying men and women
unwedded to their graves for sake of love of mother or father. When we
realize what such friendship is, it seems incredible that parents can
forego it, or can risk losing any shade of its perfectness, for the sake
of any indulgence of the habit of command or of gratifying of selfish
preference.

In the ideal household of father and mother and adult children, the one
great aim of the parents ought to be to supply, as far as possible to each
child, that freedom a