ut by Chinese law, where, if you save a man from suicide, you must feed
him for the rest of his life.

Or perhaps it is a broader view, a more socialized one. Very young, the
child is acquiring a vague sense of its responsibility to the race, is
very early becoming a citizen. It is directed that way; it hears that
liberty consists in doing what you like, providing you injure no other
man. Its personality being encouraged to develop, the child acquires a
higher opinion of itself, considers that it owes something to itself,
that it has rights. Sacrifice is still inculcated in the child, but not
so much because it is a moral duty as because it is mental discipline.
The little boy is not told to give the chocolates to his little sister
because she is a dear little thing, and he must not be cruel to her and
make her cry; he is told that he must give her the chocolates because it
is good for him to learn to give up something. That impulse is the
impulse of Polycrates, who threw his ring into the sea. But, then,
Polycrates had no luck. The child, more fortunate, is tending to realize
itself as a person, and so, as it becomes more responsible, acquires
tolerance; it makes allowances for its parents, it is kind, it realizes
that its parents have not had its advantages. All that is very
swollen-headed and unpleasant, but still I prefer it to the old
attitude, to the time when voices were hushed and footsteps slowed when
father's latchkey was heard in the lock. To the child the parent is
becoming a person instead of the God of Wrath; a person with rights, but
not a person to whom everything must be given up. Sacrifice is out of
date, and in the child as well as in the elders there is a denial of the
dream of Ellen Sturges Cooper, for few wake up and find that life is
duty. _My_ life, _my_ personality--all that has sprung from Stirner,
from Nietzsche, from the great modern reaction against socialism and
uniformity; it is the assertion of the individual. It is often harsh;
the daughter who used to take her father for a walk now sends the dog.
But still it is necessary; old hens make good soup. I do not think that
this has killed love, for love can coexist with mutual forbearance,
however much Doctor Johnson may have doubted it. Doctor Johnson was the
bad old man of the English family, and I do not suppose that anybody
will agree that

"If the man who turnips cries
Cry not when his father dies,
'Tis a proof that he had rather