of earnestness and humility, never in the mood of defiance.
Whether or not this entail the necessity of physical separation is less
important than that it be clearly understood that there is a higher law
even than parental mandate or filial whim, that parents and child alike
do well to understand. Parents dare not fail to act upon the truth that,
if intellectual coercion be bad, the unuttered and unexercised
compulsions toward a lower moral standard are infinitely worse. A child
may not forget that, when parental dictate is repudiated in favor of a
higher law, it must in truth be a higher law which exacts obedience. And
even peace must be sacrificed when the higher law summons.

CHAPTER IX

THE DEMOCRATIC REGIME IN THE HOME

The parental-filial relation is almost the only institution of society
that has not consciously come under the sway of the democratic regime
or rather influences. Within a century, the world has passed from the
imperial to the monarchical and from the monarchical to the democratic
order--save in two rather important fields of life, industry and the
home. In these two realms the transformation to the democratic modus
remains to be effected,--I mean of course the conscious, however
reluctant, acceptance thereof. True it is that many children and fewer
parents have made and will continue to make it for themselves, but the
process is one which the concerted thought and co-operative action of
parents and children can far better bring to consummation. The
difficulty of the transformation is increased almost indefinitely by
the microscopic character of the family unit. It is not easy to keep
the open processes of the State up to the standards of democracy,--how
much more difficult the covert content of the inaccessible home!

In all that parents do with respect to the home, assuming their
acceptance of the democratic order and its requirements, they may not
forget that the home, like every educational agency of our time, must
"train the man and the citizen." Milton's insistence is not less
binding today than it was when first uttered nearly three centuries
ago. A man cannot be half slave and half free. He cannot be fettered
by an autocratic regime within the home and at the same time be a free
and effective partner in the working out of the processes of
democracy. Democracy and discipline are never contradictory and the
discipline of democracy can alone be self-discipline. Professor Patten
in h