laid with its brute force, even for the smallest purpose, on a little
child, without longing for a sudden miracle to give the baby an equal
strength to resist.

When we realize what it is for us to dare, for our own pleasure, even with
solemnest purpose of the holiest of pleasures, parenthood, to bring into
existence a soul, which must take for our sake its chance of joy or
sorrow, how monstrous it seems to assume that the fact that we have done
this thing gives us arbitrary right to control that soul; to set our will,
as will, in place of its will; to be law unto its life; to try to make of
it what it suits our fancy or our convenience to have it; to claim that it
is under obligation to us!

The truth is, all the obligation, in the outset, is the other way. We owe
all to them. All that we can do to give them happiness, to spare them
pain; all that we can do to make them wise and good and safe,--all is too
little! All and more than all can never repay them for the sweetness, the
blessedness, the development that it has been to us to call children ours.
If we can also so win their love by our loving, so deserve their respect
by our honorableness, so earn their gratitude by our helpfulness, that
they come to be our "lovers and friends," then, ah! then we have had
enough of heaven here to make us willing to postpone the more for which we
hope beyond!

But all this comes not of authority, not by command; all this is perilled
always, always impaired, and often lost, by authoritative, arbitrary
ruling, substitution of law and penalty for influence.

It will be objected by parents who disagree with this theory that only
authority can prevent license; that without command there will not be