of irreverence which
he offers us. Respect is for the child a fundamental need. His moral
being feeds on it. The child aspires confusedly to revere and admire
something. But when advantage is not taken of this aspiration, it gets
corrupted or lost. By our lack of cohesion and mutual deference, we, the
grown-ups, discredit daily in the child's eyes our own cause and that of
everything worthy of respect. We inoculate in him a bad spirit whose
effects then turn against us.

This pitiful truth nowhere appears with more force than in the relations
between masters and servants, as we have made them. Our social errors,
our want of simplicity and kindness, all fall back upon the heads of our
children. There are certainly few people of the middle classes who
understand that it is better to part with many thousands of dollars than
to lead their children to lose respect for servants, who represent in
our households the humble. Yet nothing is truer. Maintain as strictly as
you will conventions and distances,--that demarkation of social
frontiers which permits each one to remain in his place and to observe
the law of differences. That is a good thing, I am persuaded, but on
condition of never forgetting that those who serve us are men and women
like ourselves. You require of your domestics certain formulas of speech
and certain attitudes, outward evidence of the respect they owe you. Do
you also teach your children and use yourselves manners toward your
servants which show them that you respect their dignity as individuals,
as you desire them to respect yours? Here we have continually in our
homes an excellent ground for experiment in the practice of that mutual
respect which is one of the essential conditions of social sanity. I
fear we profit by it too little. We do not fail to exact respect, but
we fail to give it. So it is most frequently the case that we get only
hypocrisy and this supplementary result, all unexpected,--the
cultivation of pride in our children. These two factors combined heap up
great difficulties for that future which we ought to be safeguarding. I
am right then in saying that the day when by your own practices you have
brought about the lessening of respect in your children, you have
suffered a sensible loss.

Why should I not say it? It seems to me that the greater part of us
labor for this loss. On all sides, in almost every social rank, I notice
that a pretty bad spirit is fostered in children, a spirit