to be reared from a condition of helplessness to one of self-support by those who took the responsibility of bringing him into the world.

And a parent, however sensitive he may be, will recognize, if he be also wise and just, that the manifold relations of society necessarily affect his sentimental relation with his child. As a parent, especially if widowed, grows old, she loves her children absorbedly. Her interest in the world is very largely merged in them. They embody her only hold upon the future. To expect such an absorbing affection and interest in return is to hope against nature. And when a parent, either through a conventional sentiment of filial duty, or by coercion, pecuniary or otherwise, succeeds in monopolizing his child, the latter is likely to suffer arrested development and abnormality of spirit.

tion.

The illegitimacy of the "gratitude" argument becomes more obvious when we reflect that it is precisely in cases where the strongest grounds for filial gratitude exist that there is least probability of parental usurpaUnder the surviving tradition of parental ownership, the majority of parents, even in democracies, regard their children altogether too much as personal appendages. Even among well-meaning and ordinarily just persons there is a large modicum of unconscious selfishness in the parental attitude. The average nouveau riche launches his children from the very cradle into luxurious dissipation as advertisers of his fortune. A father builds up a fanciful career for a son not yet in trousers, and spends years in a struggle with the tastes of another human being in order to make the latter's life realize a proud and selfish dream. Parental arrogation of the right to control the marriages of children is one of the stock themes of the novelist. A child owes gratitude to a parent in proportion as the latter has resisted self-indulgence and displayed self-sacrifice. And a parent who has subordinated self-interest to the child's real good, during tender and formative years, will be the last person to claim an absorbing lien upon his later life.

In his paper on Edmund Burke, Mr. Augustine Birrell, drawing a comparison between Burke and Cardinal Newman, felicitously lays bare the characteristic attitude of ultra-conservatives in all departments. Burke and Newman, as they regarded humanity, were constantly asking themselves, the former, "How are these men to be saved from anarchy? the latter, "How are these men to be saved from atheism?" Neither Burke nor Newman

"

"was prepared to rest content with a scientific frontier, an imaginary line. So much did they dread their enemy, so alive were they to the terrible strength of some of his positions, that they could not agree to dispense with the protection afforded by the huge mountains of prejudice and the ancient rivers of custom."

From a similar point of view, some persons may object to giving expression to the sentiments of this paper, on the theory that it is more important that the spirit of the Fifth Commandment should be conserved than that justice should be done, and that it is necessary to cherish the popular fetich of parenthood, in order that the average man shall continue adequately to honor his father and his mother. I believe this contention to be entirely unsound, and that an instructive analogy may be drawn from the history of the emancipation of wives. Looking at the actual results of educating women liberally and of giving wives independent rights of property, nothing can be more amusing than the prophecies of sentimental wiseacres when the innovations were proposed. It was thought that if women were educated as men were, and thus made intellectually independent of their husbands, romantic love and connubial loyalty would vanish from the world; that unless the law continued to sanction a husband's right to spend his wife's last cent, domestic life and social order and grace would become extinct.

As matter of fact, nowhere in the world is conjugal affection more strong than in the newer Western communities of America, where the spirit of democracy has made most radical progress. In that region not only have connubial property relations been placed on a substantially just basis, but in many of the States great progress has been made toward equal political rights for women. The presence of women as companions of their husbands on public occasions, and the prevailing equality and reciprocal respect between spouses, can hardly have failed to strike even superficial observers of life in the Western States. Connubial love is only the more tenacious and enduring for having a rational basis, instead of resting upon a simpering and plastic amiability.

Reciprocal love and sense of duty between parents and children are deeply implanted by nature in normal human beings. It is, if anything, more purblind than it was as to marital devotion, to claim that an artificial sense of obligation is necessary for their preservation. During the agitation for the abolition of slavery in this country, one of the considerations constantly advanced in extenuation of the "peculiar institution" was that the slaves as a class were well treated and contented and had strong affection for their masters. Post-bellum history teems with illustrations that personal devotion was, if anything, strengthened by manumission. Strong affection is, of course, consistent with a relation of actual slavery, or with what is quite substantially the same thing, marital or parental absolutism. But the tendency of equality and freedom of will is to evolve a deeper feeling, a more genuine mutual love.

In the chapter on "Religious Conformity" in his essay "On Compromise," Mr. John Morley remarks, in treating of the general duty of a man honestly to avow his beliefs and unbeliefs:

"Now, however great the pain inflicted by the avowal of unbelief, it seems to the present writer that one relationship in life, and one only, justifies us in being silent where otherwise it would be right to speak. This relationship is that between child and parents. Those parents are wisest who train their sons and daughters in the utmost liberty both of thought and speech; who do not instil dogmas into them, but inculcate upon them the sovereign importance of correct ways of forming opinions; who, while never dissembling the great fact that if one opinion is true, its contradictory cannot be true also, but must be a lie and partakes of all the evil qualities of a lie, yet always set them the example of listening to unwelcome opinions with patience and candor. Still all parents are not wise. They cannot all endure to hear of any religious opinions except their own. Where it would give them sincere and deep pain to hear a son or daughter avow disbelief in the inspiration of the Bible and so forth, then it seems that the younger person is warranted in refraining from saying that he or she does not accept such and such doctrines. This, of course, only where the son or daughter feels a tender and genuine attachment to the parent. Where the parent has not earned this attachment, has been selfish, indifferent, or cruel, the title to the special kind of forbearance of which we are speaking can hardly exist. In an ordinary way, however, a parent has a claim on us which no other person in the world can have, and a man's self-respect ought scarcely to be injured if he finds himself shrinking from playing the apostle to his own father and mother. . . . Even in the case of parents, and even though our new creed is but rudimentary, there can be no good reason why we should go further in the way of economy than mere silence. Neither they nor any other human being can possibly have a right to expect us, not merely to abstain from the open expression of dissents, but positively to profess unreal and feigned assents. No fear of giving pain, no wish to soothe the alarms of those to whom we owe much, no respect for the natural clinging of the old to the faith which has accompanied them through honorable lives, can warrant us in saying that we believe to be true what we are convinced is false."

This language is significantly valuable, because it repudiates all figments of "divine right," so to speak, which average sentiment has attached to parenthood. Ordinary democratic justice is recognized: if a parent has not deserved generous treatment, the child is under no pious obligation to render it. As to Mr. Morley's immediate point, it is to be remembered that the essay was written many years ago, when the feeling against what was very arrogantly termed "Infidelity" was much more widespread than at present. As the notion of turpitude in a person's inability to make himself believe what he would like to believe becomes extinct, the illustration from religious conformity will lose its force.

But Mr. Morley's spirit and attitude evince sweet reasonableness. If by self-sacrifice in non-essential matters a child can avert a sensitive pang from a beloved parent, duty and inclination will go hand in hand. in the act of indulgence. If, however, a parent can be made happy only

by the sacrifice of substantial moral scruples, the child must say "no" with the same firmness that parental duty would enjoin were the request to come from an unreasonable child. And there are moral obligations which a person owes to himself and, through himself, to society. A man has no right to surrender a career of serious and honorable usefulness to the narrowness, prejudice, caprice, or selfishness even of a parent. It is his duty to do his duty as he, not his father, sees it. And even in comparative trivialities, the tendency to parental exaction may be so strong and may develop so rankly under indulgence, that non-submission may be an obvious duty for the good of the parent's own soul.

And here, especially if the parent be approaching senility and be disposed to view the exercise of normal independence by the child as an unnatural outrage, the latter may be subjected to a harrowing experience. Lear's wrath may be overlooked as senile dementia, but Lear's reproaches and tears are abstract pathos. As to this phase, a few words of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, spoken not in youth but at fourscore "Over the Tea-Cups," may be taken as authoritative and practically helpful:

"Do you say that old age is unfeeling? It has not vital energy enough to supply the waste of the more exhausting emotions. Old Men's Tears, which furnished the mournful title to Joshua Scottow's Lamentations, do not suggest the deepest grief conceivable. A little breath of wind brings down the raindrops which have gathered on the leaves of the tremulous poplars. A very slight suggestion brings the tears from Marlborough's eyes, but they are soon over, and he is smiling again as an allusion carries him back to the days of Blenheim and Malplaquet. Envy not the old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him with the scythe so often as with the sandbag. He does not cut, but he stuns and stupefies."

It is during the advanced years of parents that flagrant instances of filial immolation most numerously occur. It should be remembered that now the former relation of life has been reversed; the child has become, as it were, the parent, and the parent the child. With the blunting of the intellectual perception, the old man or woman tends to become obtuse to the rights of others in like manner as young children. The habit of unremitting and merciless exaction becomes stronger with every year of submission. The sentiment of society should be such as to fortify every person in doing his rational duty both by himself and his parent; and such duty requires that he act toward one in second childhood with the same tenderness, but with much the same firmness, as toward his actual children. WILBUR LARREMORE.

THE LATEST STAGE OF LIBRARY DEVELOPMENT.

THE origin, in our country, of the public library movement, which we must not confuse with the free public library movement, is associated with no less a person than Benjamin Franklin, and dates from no less auspicious a year than that which gave birth to the father of his country, the year 1732. During that year the Philadelphia Library Company, "mother of all the subscription libraries of North America," to use the words of the distinguished founder, was organized. Exactly ten years later, little over a century and a half ago, the first legislation that is concerned with the American library took place, resulting in the acts of incorporation of society libraries. The latest library legislation which has national significance bears the date of 1898. Between these two dates, 1742 and 1898, several stages of library legislation, all of the greatest significance, and all playing an important rôle in library history, might be mentioned.

The first legislation following the incorporation of society libraries was the passage in 1835 of laws establishing district-school libraries, the pioneer State being New York. Twenty-one States followed the example of the Empire State, and very great interest was aroused. Still, on the whole, the period representing the stage of library history inaugurated by New York may be considered a failure, though it directly preceded the organization of free public libraries. The next legislation, which occurred in 1849, is the most epochal of our library history. We call it the most epochal, because it gave us the law which through taxation placed libraries on a firm basis. The first State to pass an act to the effect that libraries be maintained like other municipal, county, State, and national institutions was New Hampshire, which State again showed her progressiveness, only a few years ago, by requiring all her towns and cities to establish and maintain public libraries, by taxation. The year 1849, then, is the year which marks the beginning of the free public library. Since then several States, Massachusetts being the first, have passed laws, which provide that towns and cities be encouraged and assisted by the State in the matter of establishing and maintaining libraries.