it with its little face
pressed close against the window-pane watching the golden sunset. Nobody
understands it. It blesses the old people and dies. One of these days
the young gentleman from Cambridge will, one hopes, have a Baby of his
own--a real Child: and serve him darn-well right.

At present he is labouring under a wrong conception of the article. He
says we over-educate it. We clog its wonderful brain with a mass of
uninteresting facts and foolish formulas that we call knowledge. He does
not know that all this time the Child is alive and kicking. He is under
the delusion that the Child is taking all this lying down. We tell the
Child it has got to be quiet, or else we will wring its neck. The
gentleman from Cambridge pictures the Child as from that moment a silent
spirit moving voiceless towards the grave.

We catch the Child in the morning, and clean it up, and put a little
satchel on its back, and pack it off to school; and the maiden lady
Understander pictures that Child wasting the all too brief period of
youth crowding itself up with knowledge.

My dear Madam, you take it from me that your tears are being wasted. You
wipe your eyes and cheer up. The dear Child is not going to be
overworked: _he_ is seeing to that.

As a matter of the fact, the Child of the present day is having, if
anything, too good a time. I shall be considered a brute for saying
this, but I am thinking of its future, and my opinion is that we are
giving it swelled head. The argument just now in the air is that the
parent exists merely for the Children. The parent doesn't count. It is
as if a gardener were to say,

"Bother the flowers, let them rot. The sooner they are out of the way
the better. The seed is the only thing that interests me."

You can't produce respectable seed but from carefully cultivated flowers.
The philosopher, clamouring for improved Children, will later grasp the
fact that the parent is of importance. Then he will change his tactics,
and address the Children, and we shall have our time. He will impress on
them how necessary it is for their own sakes that they should be careful
of us. We shall have books written about misunderstood fathers who were
worried into early graves.

The misunderstood Father.

Fresh Air Funds will be started for sending parents away to the seaside
on visits to kind bachelors living in detached houses, miles away from
Children. Books will be specially writ