anny by an era of luxurious despotism, or, what is worse,
renews the reign of ownership and dependence by becoming the "owned"
wife or undisowned husband, a sorry, beggarly serf, whose lifelong
dependence in the worst sense is largely the sequel to parental
proprietorship or overlordship. The parental tyranny that is
well-meant and gentle yields place in marriage to a tyranny that is
most untender and may even be brutal, its victim, male or female,
habituated by parental usage to the art of unrevolting submission, or,
when not thus habituated, goaded to a vindictive and compensatory
sense of mastery.

To urge parents to relinquish the sense of possession, to prepare them
for the day when they shall find it inevitable to "give up," is to do
them a real service. Let them prepare with something of fortitude for
the day that comes to many parents, which is to establish and confirm
the fact of parental dispensableness. The fortitude may have to be
Spartan in character. It is our fate, and parents, who are practised
in the art of long-suffering endurance, must learn to bear this last
test of strength with undimmable courage and even to rejoice therein.

CHAPTER XII

PARENTS AND VICE-PARENTS

There is a further problem over and beyond all those heretofore set
forth,--the problem, which might be described under the term, the
complication of relatives, the problem, shall we call it, of help or
hindrance from family members, who, asked or unasked and usually
unasked, undertake to act as vice-parents prior to the resignation or
decease of parents. The relationship is not ordinarily one of
reciprocity, for, however great be the help or hurt that can be done
to a child by an intervening kinsman or kinswoman, the relation of the
child to him or her does not as a rule root very deep in the life of
the younger person.

One thing parents may ask, though usually they do not: one thing
children ought to ask, though usually they would not; namely, that
when relatives touch the life of parent and child,--as they not
infrequently do,--they shall exert their influence on behalf of
understanding between parent and child. I have seen much done to wreck
the home by those who forget that the parental-filial relation is a
sanctuary not lightly to be trespassed upon even by those who
physically dwell in close proximity thereto.

One of the commonest forms of pernicious intervention is the attempt
to mitigate parental severity, to so