The conflict now arises between what might roughly be styled the
parental demand of dutifulness and the equally vague and amorphous
filial demand for justice--justice to the demands of a new
self-affirmation, of a crescent self-reliance. And after the storm and
fire of clashing, happily there supervenes a still, small period of
peace and conciliation unless in the meantime parents have passed, or
the conflict have been followed by the disaster of cureless
misunderstanding. It may be well, though futile, to remind some children
that it is not really the purpose of their parents to thwart their will
and to stunt their lives and that the love of parents does not at filial
adolescence, despite some Freudian intimations, necessarily transform
itself into bitter and implacable hostility. To such as survive, parents
aging or aged and children maturing or mature, this ofttimes becomes the
period most beauteous of all when children at last have ceased to make
demands and are bent chiefly upon crowning the aging brows of parents
with the wreath of loving-tenderness.

One further reservation it becomes needful to make. I must need limits
myself more or less to parental-filial relations as these develop in
homes in which it becomes possible for parents consciously to influence
the lives of their children, not such in which the whole problem of life
revolves around bread-winning. I do not consider the latter type of home
a free home. It is verily one of the severest indictments of the social
order that in our land as in all lands bread-winning is almost the sole
calling of the vast majority of its homes. I do not maintain that all
problems are resolved when this problem is ended, but the fixation
respectively of parental and filial responsibilities hardly becomes
possible under social-industrial conditions which deny leisure and
freedom from grinding material concern to its occupants.

The miracle of high nurture of childhood is enacted in countless homes
of poverty and stress, but the miracle may not be exacted. It was hard
to resist a bitter smile during the days of war, when the millions were
bidden to battle for their homes. Under the stress of war-conditions,
some degree of sufficiency, rarely of plenty, fell to the lot of the
homes of toil and poverty--the customary juxtaposition is not without
interest. But now that the war is ended, the last concern of the masters
of industry is to maintain the better and juster order of