ice and
experience, will quickly become a very real and a very valuable
efficiency, but if thwarted from outside will lead to friction,
insecurity and disorganisation.

It is particularly by their contempt, which they are at no pains to
disguise, for the competence that comes from contract and later from
habit, by their refusal to recognise the position of the head of the
family, that women every day and in every minute particular are training
their children to despise their father. Democracy seems bent on bringing
up its children to despise their parents. No other construction can be
put upon the facts, however good and innocent the motives. Just sum up
the facts. In the first place democracy denies that the living can be
guided by the dead; it is one of its fundamental axioms that no
generation should be tied and bound by its predecessor. What inference
can children be expected to draw from this except that they owe no
obedience to their father and mother?

Children have naturally only too great a tendency to look down on their
parents. They are proud of their physical superiority; they know that
their star is rising while that of their parents is setting. They are
imbued with the universal prejudice of modern humanity that _progress is
constant_ and that therefore whatever is of yesterday is _ex hypothesi_
inferior to that which is of to-day. They are driven also, as I am
constrained to believe, by a sort of Nemesis inspired by fear lest human
science and power should hurry forward too fast if the children were
content to pick up the burden of life where their parents left it, and
simply followed their fathers and did not insist on effacing all that
their fathers had done and beginning again--with the result that the
edifice never rises far above its foundations, and that children for
this and other reasons have a natural inclination to treat their parents
as Cassandras. Then, as it were to clench the argument, democracy is
ready with its teaching that each generation is independent of the
other, and that the dead have no lesson to impart to the living.

In the second place, democracy, applying the principle still further and
proclaiming the doctrine that the State is master of all, withdraws the
child from the family, as often and as completely as it can.
"Democracy," said Socrates, in one of his humorous dialogues, "is a
mountebank, a kidnapper of children. It snatches the child from its
family while he is playi