I have more confidence to agree with nature about these things than any of the conclusions of the schools. Just let your children have freedom, and they will fall right into your ways and do just as you do. But you try to make them, and there is some magnificent, splendid thing in the human heart that will not be driven. And do you know it is the luckiest thing for this world that ever happened that people are so. What would we have been if the people in any age of the world had done just as the doctors told them? They would have been all dead. What would we have done if, at any age of the world, we had followed implicitly the direction of the church? We would have been all idiots, every one. It is a splendid thing that there is always some fellow who won't mind, and will think for himself. And I believe in letting children think for themselves. I believe in having a family like a democracy. If there is anything splendid in this world it is a home of that kind. They used to tell us, "Let your victuals close your mouth." We used to eat as though it was a religious performance. I like to see the children about, and every one telling what he has seen and heard. I like to hear the clatter of the knives and spoons mingling with the laughter of their voices. I had rather hear it than any opera that has ever been put upon the boards. Let them have liberty; let them have freedom, and I tell you your children will love you to death. Now, I have some excuses to offer for the race to which I belong. I have two. My first excuse is that this is not a very good world to raise folks in anyway. It is not very well adapted to raising magnificent people. There's only a quarter of it land to start with. It is three times better fitted for raising fish than folks, and in that one quarter of land there is not a tenth part fit to raise people on. You can't raise people without a good climate. You have got to have the right kind of climate, and you have got to have certain elements in the soil, or you can't raise good people. Do you know that there is only a little zig-zag strip around the world within which have been produced all men of genius? The southern hemisphere has never produced a man of genius, never; and never will until civilization, fighting the heat that way and the cold this, widens this portion of the earth until it is capable of producing great men and great women. It is the same with men that it is with vegetation; you go into a garden, and find there flowers growing. And as you go up the mountain, the birch and the hemlock and the spruce are to be found. And as you go toward the top, you find little, stunted trees getting a miserable subsistence out of the crevices of the rocks, and you go on up and up and up, until finally you find at the top little moss-like freckles. You might as well try to raise flowers where those freckles grow as to raise great men and women where you haven't got the soil.