It is the right and duty of the parent to educate his child. This right is founded on nature. The child is the offspring of the parents, the continuation as it were of their own life. They are therefore the natural educators of their children. When they commit them to the care of others for instruction it is their right to have them educated as they wish. As by the supreme and sacred right of conscience man is free to give to his life its moral direction, so also does the same principle apply to the education of a child for whose conscience, as for whose life, the parent is responsible. The moral right of the parent, which is one with that of the child in that period of life, is fundamental. It constitutes the bed-rock on which rest all other rights in matters of education. To deny that principle, to deflect it from its proper meaning, to recognize it only partially, is to blast the very foundation of human nature. No reason of common good, of citizenship, can overthrow this right; on the contrary, it presupposes it; for, the State can only interfere to protect and help this right. It can never suppress it, and only supplement it when the parents are deficient and fall short of this sacred duty they owe their offspring. _II.--A Social Reason_ Society is made up of various units, lending to one another support by the mutual participation in the activities of life. The family--the first in order of time and dignity--is beyond doubt the principal and central unit. The other social factors presuppose it and exist for its protection. Is it not the source from which springs the very life of the individual and wherein society replenishes its forces? The placing of the individual as the specific social unit of our modern democracy is a pernicious error. This fallacy has destroyed Society by upsetting the essential order of its units and has robbed the individual of his most elementary rights.