compelled to adopt
untested parental opinion, and the docility of filial agreement
finally result in intellectual dishonesty or aridity. Than this
nothing could be more ungenerous, utilizing the intimacies of the home
and the parental vantage-ground in the interest of enforcement of
one's own viewpoints. If I had a son, who, every time he opened his
mouth, should say, "Father, you are right," "Quite so, pater," "Daddy,
I am with you," I should be tempted to despise him. I would have my
son stand on his feet, not mine, nor any chance teacher's or boy
comrade's, or favorite author's, but his own, and see with his own
eyes and hear with his own ears, nerving me with occasional dissent
rather than unnerving me with ceaseless assent.

Children are equally unjustified in attempting to compel parental
adoption of filial views, but for many reasons it is much easier for
parents to withstand filial coercion than the reverse, and up to this
time the latter coercion has been rather rarer than the former. "The
idea of the unity of two lives for the sake of achieving through their
unsunderable union the unity of the children's lives with their own,"
citing the fine word of Felix Adler, is a very different thing,
however, from lowering the high standards of voluntary unity to the
level of compulsory uniformity.

Another cause of clashing may be briefly dealt with, for it is not
really clashing that it evokes. They alone can clash who are near to
one another, and I am thinking of an unbridgeable remoteness that
widens ever more once it obtains between parents and children. Not
clash but chasm, when parents and children find not so much that their
ideals are so pitted against one another as to occlude the hope of
harmonious adjustment, as that in the absence of ideals on one side or
the other there has come about an unbridgeable gap. Nothing quite so
tragic in the home as the two emptinesses or aridities side by side,
with all the poor, mean, morally sordid consequences that are bound to
ensue! And the tragedy of inward separation or alienation is
heightened rather than lessened by the circumstance that the bond of
physical contact persists for the most part unchanged.

Really serious clashing often grows out of the question of callings
and the filial choice thereof. It is quite comprehensible that parents
should find it difficult not to intervene when children, without
giving proper and adequate thought, are about to choose a calli