rtable, unworried, immobile children, was
that probably it had been the dream of the parents for a lifetime to
make their children comfortable and happy. Well, the parents had
wonderfully succeeded, had so succeeded in the matter of making their
children comfortable that not even the death of parents in swift
succession could shake them out of their deep-rooted comfortableness
even for a moment. Within a few weeks of the passing of the mother, I
met the son and heir--heir rather than son--at an amateur baseball
game in which he was one of the vociferous and gleesome
participants, with a cigar perched in his mouth at that angle which
is, I believe, considered good form at a baseball game.

As I surveyed that sorry specimen of filial impiety, apparently
without reverence for his parents or respect for himself, I was moved
to ask myself where lies the fault, whose the ultimate responsibility?
True enough, the children of those parents were rather empty-headed
and superficial beings, but it was the parents who were primarily at
fault. The mother was a blameless rather than a good woman, and the
father was an unseeing, soulless money-grubber with but one aim in
life--namely, to multiply his children's rather than his own comforts,
and to enable them to indulge in every manner of luxury. These gave
their children things and only things, and still there was something
touching in the devotion of the parents, however poor and mistaken its
objects. But there was something repulsive in the indifference of the
children to the parents who had lived for naught else than their
well-being, however mistakenly conceived.

Parents who give their children only things must face the fact that
they make themselves quite dispensable, seeing that they are not
things. For things and the wherewithal to secure them are alone
indispensable according to the parental standards. The ultimate
responsibility? Any possibility of change involves the re-education of
parents. Parents must learn long before parenthood what are the values
in life for which it is worth while to toil and to contend. The root
of the matter goes very deep in conformity to the hint of Oliver
Wendell Holmes with respect to the time at which a child's education
is to be begun.

Some years past, I came upon a ludicrous illustration of the maximum
care devoted to the physical nature and the minimum devoted to the
moral and spiritual nurture of child-life. I heard a very
well-circu