“My fear is, Professor, that your naturalistic method overlooks much of what we have become accustomed to think when we speak of ‘breeding.’ Now, children, even American children, do not acquire this instinctively. Breeding includes restraint, externally applied restraint--I don’t mean applied with a slipper or a rattan, though restraint to have a really fine catholicity should, in my opinion, include these symbols--but restraint inculcated by a wise, or at least a wiser, authority. I believe sincerely that we have, in the past, tried to bend the twig too far. But the beneficial results of guiding twigs has been, I think, indisputably proved. Taking away too many guides and supports must have its dangers. I think of these things when I see the unhampered American girl of to-day. She is a lovely spectacle. Yet I sometimes wonder, in a trite and old-fashioned way, if her sort of training or absence of training is going to make her a woman who will know how to manage a household and children. I can see clearly enough that she is going to know how to manage a husband; but the house--and the children--” The Professor was musing. “Your anxiety makes me think of the early criticisms of the kindergarten. ‘What!’ they used to exclaim, ‘a mob of unmanageable brats and no ferule?’ Yet it is so. Your misgivings overlook, I think, the latitudes of training, the obligations of breeding. The American seems to me to be guiding his children as he guides his civic affairs, not by brute force but by giving and taking. If his child is born with the right to the pursuit of happiness, he believes in starting the pursuit early. I suppose that children in the United States have greater liberty than children in any other country. The conferring of liberty has its dangers, and those who confer it cannot expect to escape the obligations that go with the gift. It has cost the American some annoyance to confer liberty and privileges on grown-up folks from various quarters. If he decides--and he does so quite reasonably I think--to include his children, he is bound to stand with the emancipated.”