take as their moral right the services which should only be accepted, if
accepted at all, as the offering of love and gratitude, and even reach a
degree of domineering selfishness in which they refuse to believe that
their children have any adult rights of their own, absorbing and drying up
that physical and spiritual life-blood of their offspring which it is the
parents' part in Nature to feed. If the children are willing there is
nothing to mitigate this process; if they are unwilling the result is
often a disastrous conflict. Their time and energy are not their own;
their tastes are criticised and so far as possible crushed; their
political ideas, if they have any, are treated as pernicious; and--which
is often on both sides the most painful of all--differences in religious
belief lead to bitter controversy and humiliating recrimination. Such
differences in outlook between youth and age are natural and inevitable
and right. The parents themselves, though they may have forgotten it,
often in youth similarly revolted against the cherished doctrines of their
own parents; it has ever been so, the only difference being that to-day,
probably, the opportunities for variation are greater. So it comes about
that what James Hinton said half a century ago is often true to-day: "Our
happy Christian homes are the real dark places of the earth."

It is evident that the problem of the relation of the child to the parent
is still incompletely solved even in what we consider our highest
civilisation. There is here needed an art in which those who have to
exercise it can scarcely possess all the necessary skill and experience.
Among trees and birds and beasts the art is surer because it is exercised
unconsciously, on the foundation of a large tradition in which failure
meant death. In the common procreative profusion of those forms of life
the frequent death of the young was a matter of little concern, but
biologically there was never any sacrifice of the offspring to the
well-being of the parents. Whenever sacrifice is called for it is the