of children which
compels certain reciprocal courtesies. When children for any reason
are unable or unwilling to yield the elementary courtesies of the
home, it is for them in all decency to decide whether they are
justified in accepting its hospitality.

And comradeship must welcome not regret, nurture not stifle, the fine
impatiences of youth, the eager, oft unconsidered, superb, at best
resistless, idealisms of youth. Parents are not to mistake this finely
impatient idealism for unreasoning impetuosity. They are to remember
that, howsoever inconveniently and troublingly, youth represents the
ungainsayable imperiousness of the future. Parental scoffing and
cynicism are more chilling to the heart of youth than the world's
derision. The world's scornful darts fall hurtless upon the shield of
him, armed by parental hand for life's battle with the weapons of
idealism. And in comradeship it is not enough for parents not to mock
nor to be scornful of children's so-called impracticable ideals. Where
these are not, parents must commend them by their own works rather
than command them by their words. Comradeship always means the taking
of counsel and not the giving of commands. But there can be no taking
of counsel with youth at twenty if the parental habit have been one of
command prior to that time. Twenty years of absolutism cannot suddenly
be replaced by the democratic way of holding counsel.

Parents must be willing to forfeit all save honor in pressing upon
youth the categorical and undeniable summons of the ideal. Parents
must sometimes, ofttimes, be immovably firm, so firm as to be ready to
lose the love of children rather than to sacrifice their self-respect.
Men and women are not worthy of the dignity and glory of parenthood
who lack the courage to brave the frown of a child, the strength to
front a child's displeasure. Remembering that parents usually love
their children not wisely but too well and that children love their
parents wisely but not too well, let the gentleness of parents be
lifted up and hallowed by firmness and the firmness of children be
hallowed and glorified by gentleness.

If anything the case is still harder for the uneducated or slightly
educated parents of children, who have been enabled to tread the
highway of education. It seems indecent on the part of these to
treat parents in contemptuous fashion, sitting at table with them but
never exchanging a word of converse. Even when children hav