t better than its father and the herald of a finer son.

Generally the parent will help, for his new attitude can be expressed in
a phrase. He does not say, "I am master", but, "I am responsible." He
has begun to realize that the child is not a regrettable accident or a
little present from Providence; he is beginning to look upon the care of
the child as a duty. He has extended the ideal of citizenship, born in
the middle of the nineteenth century, which was "to leave the world a
little better than he found it"; he has passed on to wanting his son to
be a little richer than he was, and a little more learned; he is coming
to want his son to be a finer and bolder man; he will come in time to
want his daughter to be a finer and bolder woman, which just now he
bears pretty well. His wife is helping him a great deal because she is
escaping from her home ties to the open trades and professions, to the
entertainments of psychic, political, and artistic lectures which make
of her head a waste paper basket of intellect, but still create in that
head a disturbance far better than the ancient and cow-like placidity.
The modern mother is often too much inclined to weigh the baby four
times a day, to feed it on ozoneid, or something equally funny, to
expose as much of its person as possible, to make it gaze at Botticelli
prints when in its bath. She will no doubt want it to mate eugenically,
in which she will probably be disappointed, for love laughs at Galtons;
but still, in her struggle against disease and wooden thinking, she will
have helped the child by giving it something to discard better than the
old respects and fears. The modern mother has begun to consider herself
as a human being as well as a mother; she no longer thinks that

"A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive."

She is coming to look upon herself as a sort of aesthetic school
inspector. She lives round her children rather than in them; she is less
animal. Above all, she is more critical. Having more opportunity of
mixing with people, she ceases to see her child as marvelous because it
is her child. She is losing something of her conceit and has learned to
say, "_the_ baby" instead of "_my_ baby." It is a revolutionary
atmosphere, and the developing child has something to push against when
it wants to earn its parents' approval, for modern parents are fair
judges of excellence; they are educated. The old-time father was
nonplussed by his son, and