general consent, and the relations of the parties are placed by
express treaty on an unsentimental footing.

Unfortunately this mitigation of family sentimentality is much
more characteristic of large families than small ones. It used to
be said that members of large families get on in the world; and it
is certainly true that for purposes of social training a household
of twenty surpasses a household of five as an Oxford College
surpasses an eight-roomed house in a cheap street. Ten children,
with the necessary adults, make a community in which an excess of
sentimentality is impossible. Two children make a doll's house, in
which both parents and children become morbid if they keep to
themselves. What is more, when large families were the fashion,
they were organized as tyrannies much more than as "atmospheres of
love." Francis Place tells us that he kept out of his father's way
because his father never passed a child within his reach without
striking it; and though the case was an extreme one, it was an
extreme that illustrated a tendency. Sir Walter Scott's father,
when his son incautiously expressed some relish for his porridge,
dashed a handful of salt into it with an instinctive sense that it
was his duty as a father to prevent his son enjoying himself.
Ruskin's mother gratified the sensual side of her maternal
passion, not by cuddling her son, but by whipping him when he fell
downstairs or was slack in learning the Bible off by heart; and
this grotesque safety-valve for voluptuousness, mischievous as it
was in many ways, had at least the advantage that the child did
not enjoy it and was not debauched by it, as he would have been by
transports of sentimentality.

But nowadays we cannot depend on these safeguards, such as they