control. No one has a right to condemn methods he has not tried. I know,
for I have seen, I know, for I have myself tested, that command and
authority are short-lived; that they do not insure the results they aim
at; that real and permanent control of a child's behavior, even in little
things, is gained only by influence, by a slow, sure educating,
enlightening, and strengthening of a child's will. I know, for I have
seen, that it is possible in this way to make a child only ten years old
quite as intelligent and trustworthy a free agent as his mother; to make
him so sensible, so gentle, so considerate that to say "must" or "must
not" to him would be as unnecessary and absurd as to say it to her.

But, if it be wiser and better to surround even little children with this
atmosphere of freedom, how much more essential is it for those who remain
under the parental roof long after they have ceased to be children! Just
here seems to me to be the fatal rock upon which many households make
utter shipwreck of their peace. Fathers and mothers who have ruled by
authority (let it be as loving as you please, it will still remain an
arbitrary rule) in the beginning, never seem to know when their children
are children no longer, but have become men and women. In any average
family, the position of an unmarried daughter after she is twenty years
old becomes less and less what it should be. In case of sons, the question
is rarely a practical one; in those exceptional instances where invalidism
or some other disability keeps a man helpless for years under his father's
roof, his very helplessness is at once his vindication and his shield, and
also prevents his feeling manly revolt against the position of unnatural
childhood. But in the case of daughters it is very different. Who does not
number in his circle of acquaintance many unmarried women, between the
ages of thirty and forty, perhaps even older, who have practically little
more freedom in the ordering of their own lives than they had when they
were eleven? The mother or the father continues just as much the