ir country to keep them
here, though we knew and know now that there is great danger." Did not
this Belgian mother serve her children infinitely better than do those
parents who imagine that they must deny their children nothing save the
possibility of discomfort and want?

Edward Everett Hale tells a story which clearly shows what Emerson
thought best for a young man and wherein he conceived the
responsibility of parents to lie. I congratulated him as I
congratulated myself on the success of our young friend, and he said:
"Yes, I did not know he was so fine a fellow. And now, if something
will fall out amiss, if he should be unpopular with his class, or if
he should fail in business, or if some other misfortune can befall
him, all will be well." He himself put it, "Good is a good doctor,
but bad is sometimes a better."

With one further evil effect, perhaps the worst, of the habitude of
ceaseless parental giving, I have dealt elsewhere. It fosters more
than all else the parental sense of possession. Have I not given my
children everything?--asks a hyper-wasteful father or a
super-bounteous mother. Yes, it might be answered, you have given them
_everything_ and that is all you have given them. Giving a child
things without number is no guarantee of peace or beauty in the
parental-filial relation. Giving, giving, eternal giving is bound to
narcotize into sodden self-satisfaction, or at last to rouse to
protest an awakening soul. If, Mr. Successful or Madam Prosperous, you
think that you are satisfying your children because you are giving
them an abundance of things, you may be destined some day to suffer a
sorry awakening. Remember that too many things kill a home more surely
than too few. Children may ask and ought to ask more of parents than
things, and, far from being satisfied with things, they ought to
demand of parents that these minimize things and magnify that of
life which is unconditioned by things. To magnify the home is not to
furnish it richly but to give it noble content.

Over-stressing the physical side of the life of children and
under-emphasizing the spiritual side of their life leads inevitably to
certain results. Some years ago, I knew a family in which both parents
died within a brief period. There was some perfunctory grief, though
in each case the funeral was one of the new-fashioned kind, marked
alike by tearlessness and the use of motorcars. The interesting thing,
as I looked upon these comfo