ssed the age of childhood, or to demand it, is guilty of a
serious offence against that child.

That the intimate family life which sometimes resulted--especially when,
as frequently happened, the seeming mutual devotion was also real--might
often be regarded as beautiful and almost ideal, it has been customary to
repeat with an emphasis that in the end has even become nauseous. For it
was usually overlooked that the self-centred and enclosed family, even
when the mutual affection of its members was real enough to bear all
examination, could scarcely be more than partially beautiful, and could
never be ideal. For the family only represents one aspect, however
important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities. He
cannot, she cannot, be divorced from the life of the social group, and a
life is beautiful and ideal, or the reverse, only when we have taken into
our consideration the social as well as the family relationship. When the
family claims to prevent the free association of an adult member of it
with the larger social organisation, it is claiming that the part is
greater than the whole, and such a claim cannot fail to be morbid and
mischievous.

The old-world method of treating children, we know, has long ago been
displaced as containing an element of harsh tyranny. But it was not
perceived, and it seems indeed not even yet to be generally recognised,
that the system which replaced it, and is only now beginning to pass away,
involved another and more subtle tyranny, the more potent because not
seemingly harsh. Parents no longer whipped their children even when grown
up, or put them in seclusion, or exercised physical force upon them after
they had passed childhood. They felt that that would not be in harmony
with the social customs of a world in which ancient feudal notions were
dead. But they merely replaced the external compulsion by an internal
compulsion which was much more effective. It was based on the moral
assumption of claims and duties which were rarely formulated because
parents found it quite easy and pleasant to avoid formulating them, and
children, on the rare occasions when they formulated them, usually felt a
sense of guilt in challenging their validity. It was in the nineteenth
century that this state of things reached its full development. The sons
of the family were usually able, as they grew up, to escape and elude it,
although they thereby often created an undesirable divorce from