children ought to be quietly chloroformed or peacefully deposited in
the Museum of Natural History by the side of the almost equally
antique Diplodoccus.

The teacherless classroom, the school which is without direction and
without dogma _ex cathedra_, is a peculiarly fitting metaphor to
invoke. It may serve to remind children that the newly achieved
equivalence of the home is not to result in parental subjection or
subordination, that the inviolable rights of personality are not
exactly a filial monopoly,--crescent filial tyranny being little less
intolerable than obsolescent parental despotism--that the passing of
the years does not make it exactly easier to abandon or to forswear
personality. It were little gain to substitute King Log of filial rule
for King Stork of parental command. Filial domination, in other words,
is not less odious because of its novelty. In a recent number of _The
Outlook_, E. M. Place, writing on "Democracy in the Home," puts it
well: "There are two kinds of despotism in the home that are alike and
equally intolerable: One is parental and the other is filial."

Bernard Shaw[K] is quite unparadoxical and almost commonplace in his
fear that there is a possibility of home life oppressing its inmates.
The peril is not of revolt against the oppressions of home life by its
inmates but of unrevolting submission which were far worse on their
part. From such oppressions there is but one escape, the deliberate
introduction of a democratic regime. "It is admitted that a democracy
develops and trains the individual while an autocracy dwarfs and
represses the possibilities within. The parent who is autocratic, who
says do this and do that because I say so without appealing to the
reason and judgment of the child, can never create the real home, the
one in which good citizens are made. The democratic home where the
individual welfare and the general welfare are given due
consideration, where conduct is the result of the appeal to reason, is
as much the right of the child as a voice in his own government is the
right of an adult."

And one thing more! Some marriages are intolerable and the only way of
peace, not of cowardice or of evasion, is the way out. Without at
this time entering into the question whether the multiplicity of
divorces is imperilling the social order, I make bold to say that it
ought not be considered an enormity on the part of children nor an
indictment of parents, if parents and adu