Nothing is more important than to teach children, especially the children of the privileged, the art of unselfishness unless it be for the parents of privileged children to practice it. The fact that many, many families in our days are of the one or two-children variety gives to the child a tremendous impact in the direction of self-centredness,--toward what I have elsewhere called an egocentric or "meocentric" world. If, however, as happens too commonly, children are treated by selfishly and idiotically indulgent parents during the years of childhood and adolescence as if every one of them were the center of the universe, it will little avail to cry out against the child's selfishness just because he or she has reached twenty. Other-centredness will not be substituted for self-centredness at twenty, however much parents may be dismayed, if during the first twenty years the perhaps native selfishness of the child have been ministered to in every imaginable way. In order to deepen the spirit of filial unselfishness it is needful to give or rather to help children to have and to hold an aim bigger than themselves. Given unselfishness, the freedom from self-seeking and self-ministration and the presence of the will to minister and to forbear, that unselfishness which is the exclusive grace neither of parent nor of child, then comradeship, the hand-in-hand quest of life, become possible. Then and only then may parent and child become comrades, not fellow-boarders and roomers and hoarders, but fellow-travelers and sojourners alike along life's way. Without comradeship, whatever else there be, there can be no such thing as home. Comradeship shuts out the sense of possession, prevents the invasion of personality, averts alike parental tyranny and filial autocracy. But comradeship is not to be achieved through the word of parents and children,--Go to, let us be comrades. For comradeship is that which grows out of the cumulative and united experience of parent and child, if these have so lived and so labored together that unconsciously and inevitably there come to pass the fellowship of life's pilgrimage in real togetherness, comrades with souls "utterly true forever and aye." No compulsion to sympathy and understanding and forbearance where the spirit of comradeship dwells! And such comradeship is unaffected by outward circumstance or by diversities of viewpoint or of educational opportunity or of worldly possession. Perhaps comradeship ought to be stressed for a moment, viewing a tendency not quite uncommon to shelve parents, however politely, on the part of children once they imagine themselves to have become mature beings. Parental euthenasia can be practised or attempted in many and subtle ways. Sir William Osler's forty years as a limit,--of course the attribution is essentially fallacious,--fit into the notion of those children who are for an easy and if possible painless superannuation of lagging parents.