e second story window of your fatherly
superiority and example. Go into the front yard and play ball with
him. When he gets into scrapes, don't thrash him as your father did
you. Put your arm around his neck, and say you know it is pretty bad,
but that he can count on you to help him out, and that you will, every
single time, and that if he had let you know earlier, it would have
been all the easier."

Again, the child has a right to more justice in his discipline than we
are generally wise and patient enough to give him. He is by and by to
come in contact with a world where cause and effect follow each other
inexorably. He has a right to be taught, and to be governed by the
laws under which he must afterwards live; but in too many cases
parents interfere so mischievously and unnecessarily between causes
and effects that the child's mind does not, cannot, perceive the logic
of things as it should. We might write a pathetic remonstrance against
the Decline and Fall of Domestic Authority. There is food for thought,
and perhaps for fear, in the subject; but the facts are obvious, and
their inevitableness must strike any thoughtful observer of the times.
"The old educational regime was akin to the social systems with
which it was contemporaneous; and similarly, in the reverse of these
characteristics, our modern modes of culture correspond to our more
liberal religious and political institutions."

It is the age of independent criticism. The child problem is merely
one phase of the universal problem that confronts society. It seems
likely that the rod of reason will have to replace the rod of birch.
Parental authority never used to be called into question; neither was
the catechism, nor the Bible, nor the minister. How should parents
hope to escape the universal interrogation point leveled at everything
else? In these days of free speech it is hopeless to suppose that even
infants can be muzzled. We revel in our republican virtues; let us
accept the vices of those virtues as philosophically as possible.

A lady has been advertising in a New York paper for a German governess
"to mind a little girl three years old." The lady's English is
doubtless defective, but the fate of the governess is thereby
indicated with much greater candor than is usual.

The mother who is most apt to infringe on the rights of her child (of
course with the best intentions) is the "firm" person, afflicted with
the "lust of dominion." There is no