The duty--surely the obvious duty--of parents to their children is to assist them, to the full extent of their means, toward self-development. We have no right to bring children into the world to warp and stunt their growth, to make them merely reflections of ourselves, or to keep them back from independence when they come to man’s or woman’s estate. What the parent needs, perhaps, most to learn is to relax constantly and in ever-increasing degree that hold which was necessary during the early years of childhood, but which, even then, we take too much for granted and employ far too habitually. Parents often claim too great a possession of their own children; they make cages for their characters, and mould them away from their natural bent to what suits their own family pride, their own taste, or their own sense of importance, sometimes conscientiously believing this to be the parental prerogative. But if parents are to use safely their power to impose moral training they must build up first in their children a sense of self-reliance, of initiative, of freedom, and then trust to it. They have no right to rely for their reward on caged characters, or, by any dictation or control, to exact recompense for the services which (with whatever devotion) they have rendered. The same holds good through all human relations, parental, marital, social, racial: it is ignoble to claim loyalty or devotion from those whom you have not first made free. Gratitude--even filial gratitude--has no moral value save if it comes from a free agent. If it comes from one trained to be not free it partakes of servility. And it is better for parents to forgo gratitude than to exact its imitation or substitute, by the imposition of any restrictive conditions or claims after the years of tutelage are over. It may well be that gratitude has far too small a place in the human heart; but I am quite sure that the claim for gratitude has too large a one, and that this in excess brings the very reverse of a remedy when the other is lacking. And what is true in relation to parents and their children is true also in every other human relationship where the claim to possess intrudes to the hindrance of self-realization and self-development. The possessor, in claiming restrictive possession of others, loses possession of himself. That is what made slavery as an institution so doubly impoverishing to the human race. It impoverished the mind of the slave, but it impoverished quite as much the mind of the slave-owner.