averts pain and suffering. Hard is it for parents to accept the
truth pointed out by Coleridge that experience is only a lamp in a
vessel's stern, which throws a light on the waters we have passed
through, none on those which lie before us.

The conflict then is between children who insist upon the privilege of
acquiring the wisdom of life through personal experience which includes
blundering and suffering, and parents whose sense of possession
strengthens their native resolution to bring to loved children all the
benefits and gains of life's experiences without permitting children to
pay the price which life exacts. And parents, in the unreasoning
passion to ward off hurt and wound from the heads of children, forget
that if the wisdom of experience were transmissible we should have moral
stagnation and spiritual immobility in the midst of life.

But if parents may not expect to be able to transmit the body of their
life-experience to children, neither should children assume that the
multiplication table is an untested hypothesis because accepted by
parents, or that elementary truths are wholly dubious because parental
assent has been given thereto. If parents must learn that children
cannot be expected to regard every thesis as valid solely because held
by parents, children need hardly take it for granted, though it may of
course be found to be true, that the parental viewpoint is uniformly
erring and invalid.

If parents, who are tempted to yield to the instinct of proprietorship
rather, as we have seen, than of domination, would but understand, as
was lately suggested in a psychological analysis of Barrie's "Mary
Rose," that there are women who mother the members of their circles so
persistently that they impose a certain childishness on them, the
mother's influence often producing incompetence and timidity! To such
parents, however, as will not admit the fact of possession, it remains
to be pointed out that parents do not live forever and are usually
survived by their children. The "owned" child is not unlikely with the
years to become and to remain a poor, miserable dependent
intellectually and spiritually, once its parents are gone.

View another case, the marriage of the "owned" child, even when it
does not accept any marriage that offers as a mode of release from
parental bondage. I have had frequent occasion to note that the
"owned" child, freed from parental suppression, is often revenged upon
parental tyr