ake for our sake its chance of joy or
sorrow, how monstrous it seems to assume that the fact that we have done
this thing gives us arbitrary right to control that soul; to set our will,
as will, in place of its will; to be law unto its life; to try to make of
it what it suits our fancy or our convenience to have it; to claim that it
is under obligation to us!

The truth is, all the obligation, in the outset, is the other way. We owe
all to them. All that we can do to give them happiness, to spare them
pain; all that we can do to make them wise and good and safe,--all is too
little! All and more than all can never repay them for the sweetness, the
blessedness, the development that it has been to us to call children ours.
If we can also so win their love by our loving, so deserve their respect
by our honorableness, so earn their gratitude by our helpfulness, that
they come to be our "lovers and friends," then, ah! then we have had
enough of heaven here to make us willing to postpone the more for which we
hope beyond!

But all this comes not of authority, not by command; all this is perilled
always, always impaired, and often lost, by authoritative, arbitrary
ruling, substitution of law and penalty for influence.

It will be objected by parents who disagree with this theory that only
authority can prevent license; that without command there will not be
control. No one has a right to condemn methods he has not tried. I know,
for I have seen, I know, for I have myself tested, that command and
authority are short-lived; that they do not insure the results they aim
at; that real and permanent control of a child's behavior, even in little
things, is gained only by influence, by a slow, sure educating,
enlightening, and strengthening of a child's will. I know, for I have
seen, that it is possible in this way to make a child only ten years old
quite as intelligent and trustworthy a free agent as his mother; to make
him so sensible, so gentle, so considerate that to say "must" or "must
not" to him would be as unnecessary and absurd as to say it to her.

But, if it be wiser and better to surround even little children with this
atmosphere of freedom, how much more essential is it for those who remain
under the parental roof long after they have ceased to be children! Just
here seems to me to be the fatal rock upon which many households make
utter shipwreck of their peace. Fathers and mothers who have ruled by
authority (let it be