ents who long suffer children to indulge in selfishness
for the sake of parental indulgence. Fostering filial selfishness is
ofttimes little more than a cheap and easy way of holding oneself up
for self-approval and to filial commendation.

Nothing is more important than to teach children, especially the
children of the privileged, the art of unselfishness unless it be for
the parents of privileged children to practice it. The fact that
many, many families in our days are of the one or two-children variety
gives to the child a tremendous impact in the direction of
self-centredness,--toward what I have elsewhere called an egocentric
or "meocentric" world. If, however, as happens too commonly, children
are treated by selfishly and idiotically indulgent parents during the
years of childhood and adolescence as if every one of them were the
center of the universe, it will little avail to cry out against the
child's selfishness just because he or she has reached twenty.
Other-centredness will not be substituted for self-centredness at
twenty, however much parents may be dismayed, if during the first
twenty years the perhaps native selfishness of the child have been
ministered to in every imaginable way.

In order to deepen the spirit of filial unselfishness it is needful to
give or rather to help children to have and to hold an aim bigger than
themselves. Given unselfishness, the freedom from self-seeking and
self-ministration and the presence of the will to minister and to
forbear, that unselfishness which is the exclusive grace neither of
parent nor of child, then comradeship, the hand-in-hand quest of life,
become possible. Then and only then may parent and child become
comrades, not fellow-boarders and roomers and hoarders, but
fellow-travelers and sojourners alike along life's way. Without
comradeship, whatever else there be, there can be no such thing as home.
Comradeship shuts out the sense of possession, prevents the invasion of
personality, averts alike parental tyranny and filial autocracy.

But comradeship is not to be achieved through the word of parents and
children,--Go to, let us be comrades. For comradeship is that which
grows out of the cumulative and united experience of parent and child,
if these have so lived and so labored together that unconsciously and
inevitably there come to pass the fellowship of life's pilgrimage in
real togetherness, comrades with souls "utterly true forever and aye."
No compuls