ery song of the individual growth, of the beauty of character, of
the strength of love and human relation, which alone make life worth
living.

And yet these parents imagine that they mean best for the child, and for
aught I know, some really do; but their best means absolute death and
decay to the bud in the making. After all, they are but imitating their
own masters in State, commercial, social and moral affairs, by forcibly
suppressing every independent attempt to analyze the ills of society and
every sincere effort toward the abolition of these ills; never able to
grasp the eternal truth that every method they employ serves as the
greatest impetus to bring forth a greater longing for freedom and a
deeper zeal to fight for it.

That compulsion is bound to awaken resistance, every parent and teacher
ought to know. Great surprise is being expressed over the fact that the
majority of children of radical parents are either altogether opposed to
the ideas of the latter, many of them moving along the old antiquated
paths, or that they are indifferent to the new thoughts and teachings of
social regeneration. And yet there is nothing unusual in that. Radical
parents, though emancipated from the belief of ownership in the human
soul, still cling tenaciously to the notion that they own the child, and
that they have the right to exercise their authority over it. So they
set out to mould and form the child according to their own conception of
what is right and wrong, forcing their ideas upon it with the same
vehemence that the average Catholic parent uses. And, with the latter,
they hold out the necessity before the young "to do as I tell you and
not as I do." But the impressionable mind of the child realizes early
enough that the lives of their parents are in contradiction to the ideas
they represent; that, like the good Christian who fervently prays on
Sunday, yet continues to break the Lord's commands the rest of the week,
the radical parent arraigns God, priesthood, church, government,
domestic authority, yet continues to adjust himself to the condition he
abhors. Just so, the Freethought parent can proudly boast that his son
of four will recognize the picture of Thomas Paine or Ingersoll, or that
he knows that the idea of God is stupid. Or that the Social Democratic
father can point to his little girl of six and say, "Who wrote the
Capital, dearie?" "Karl Marx, pa!" Or that the Anarchistic mother can
make it known that her