With one further evil effect, perhaps the worst, of the habitude of ceaseless parental giving, I have dealt elsewhere. It fosters more than all else the parental sense of possession. Have I not given my children everything?--asks a hyper-wasteful father or a super-bounteous mother. Yes, it might be answered, you have given them _everything_ and that is all you have given them. Giving a child things without number is no guarantee of peace or beauty in the parental-filial relation. Giving, giving, eternal giving is bound to narcotize into sodden self-satisfaction, or at last to rouse to protest an awakening soul. If, Mr. Successful or Madam Prosperous, you think that you are satisfying your children because you are giving them an abundance of things, you may be destined some day to suffer a sorry awakening. Remember that too many things kill a home more surely than too few. Children may ask and ought to ask more of parents than things, and, far from being satisfied with things, they ought to demand of parents that these minimize things and magnify that of life which is unconditioned by things. To magnify the home is not to furnish it richly but to give it noble content. Over-stressing the physical side of the life of children and under-emphasizing the spiritual side of their life leads inevitably to certain results. Some years ago, I knew a family in which both parents died within a brief period. There was some perfunctory grief, though in each case the funeral was one of the new-fashioned kind, marked alike by tearlessness and the use of motorcars. The interesting thing, as I looked upon these comfortable, unworried, immobile children, was that probably it had been the dream of the parents for a lifetime to make their children comfortable and happy. Well, the parents had wonderfully succeeded, had so succeeded in the matter of making their children comfortable that not even the death of parents in swift succession could shake them out of their deep-rooted comfortableness even for a moment. Within a few weeks of the passing of the mother, I met the son and heir--heir rather than son--at an amateur baseball game in which he was one of the vociferous and gleesome participants, with a cigar perched in his mouth at that angle which is, I believe, considered good form at a baseball game.