This state of affairs is apt to have a bad effect upon the affections of young people. Their affection for their parents becomes atrophied, and they never have to learn to adjust themselves to people whose tastes and pursuits are different from their own. I think this tends towards a certain selfish completeness, a feeling of one’s own personality as something exclusive. The family is the most natural corrective of this tendency, since it is a unit composed of people of different ages and sexes, with different functions to perform; it is organic, in a way which a collection of homogeneous individuals is not. Parents love their children largely because they give so much trouble; if parents give no trouble to their children, their children will not take them seriously. But the trouble they give must be legitimate: it must be only such as is necessary if they are to do their work and have any life of their own. Respect for the rights of others is one of the things young people ought to learn, and it is more easily learnt in the family than elsewhere. It is good for boys and girls to know that their father can be harassed by worries and their mother worn out by a multiplicity of details. And it is good that filial affection should remain alive during adolescence. A world without family affection tends to become harsh and mechanical, composed of individuals who try to domineer, but become cringing if they fail. I fear that these bad effects are to a certain extent produced by sending children to boarding schools, and I regard them as sufficiently serious to offset great advantages. It is of course true, as modern psychologists insist, that the excessive influence of father or mother is a very harmful thing. But I do not believe it is likely to exist where children have gone to school from the age of two or three, as I have suggested that they should. Day school from an early age affords, to my mind, the right compromise between parental domination and parental insignificance. So far as concerns the set of considerations with which we have just been occupied, this seems clearly the best course, given a good home.