ng, takes him far away, allows him no more to
see his family, teaches him many strange languages, drills him till his
joints are supple, paints his face and dresses him in ridiculous
clothes, and imparts to him all the mysteries of the acrobat's trade
until he is sufficiently dexterous to appear in public and amuse the
company by his tricks."

At all events democracy is determined to take the child away from his
family, to give him the education which it has chosen and not that which
the parents have chosen, and to teach him that he must not believe what
his parents teach him. It denies the competence of parents to rear their
children and puts forward its own competence, asserting that it is only
its own that has any value.

This is one of the principal causes of the divisions between fathers
and children in a democracy.

You may retort that democracy does not always succeed in its efforts to
separate children from their parents, because there is nothing to
prevent the children extending the contempt, which for such excellent
reasons they have been taught to entertain for their parents, to their
State-appointed teachers.

This is a most pertinent observation, for the general maxims of
democracy are just as likely to make pupils despise their masters as to
make sons despise their fathers. The master, too, represents in the eyes
of his pupil that past which has no connection with the present and
which by the law of progress is very inferior to the present. This is
true; but the end of all is that between the school which counteracts
the influence of the parents and the home which counteracts the
influence of the school, the child becomes a personage who is never
educated at all. He is in like case with a child who in the family
itself receives lessons, and what is more important, example, from a
mother who is religious and from a father who is an atheist. He is not
educated, he has had no sort of education. The only real education,
that is to say, the only transmission to the children of the ideas of
their parents consists of an education at home which is reinforced by
the instruction of masters chosen by the parents in accordance with
their own views. This is precisely the form of education to which
democracy refuses to be reconciled.

* * * * *

There is a still more cogent reason why old men are neither respected
nor honoured in a democracy. Here is yet another efficiency f