But seriously, to go back to my original contention, why is it that many persons who seemed to be endowed with normal intelligence irrevocably mislay it when they begin to beget offspring? They do. I assert, declare and insist that they do. A few evenings ago I went to a dinner, and at about the time the coffee appeared the conversation turned upon this very topic. One of the men said, with emphasis, that he had certain ideas about the bringing up of children. He thought they were good ideas, but his wife almost always opposed them for what, in his opinion, was the most foolish of reasons. He went on shaking a finger at her half in earnest, half in jest. “She often lets the children do things of which I disapprove, because other parents are everywhere letting their children do these things,” he said. “Now that to me is no reason at all. I don’t care what other parents are allowing their children to do. I know what I want my children to do, and not to do.” The wife smiled sweetly and admiringly, and I knew that, when it came to a crisis, she would always have her own, possibly misguided, way. She would let her young daughter engage in the various activities her little set happened for the moment to be engaged in, and he, to save discussion, would in the end acquiesce. To me there was here a considerable forfeiture of intelligence on the part of both. The man sacrificed principle to peace, the woman allowed herself to be swayed by perhaps idiotic, if not worse, conventions and fashions for which she secretly did not care. I immediately began to wonder what, under the circumstances, I should do myself. This consideration over a good cigar, while all around me the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy was being threshed out and Dr. Cook was sadly and with genuine regret disposed of, took me far away from the dinner table. I began to think of my own bringing up, of the bringing up of various local families who in the press are usually referred to as “prominent.” And the result of the revery seemed to be that although there was no particular scheme of education, no very definite ideas on the subject, children in the end seemed to grow up and, as the English say, “muddle through” somehow. But, I found myself inquiring, couldn’t there be some way less casual, less haphazard, less at the mercy of the trivial and the contemporaneous? Being a bachelor and knowing nothing whatever about it, I of course feel that there could. To a great extent, the parents I know seem to be lacking in standards; they apparently, from day to day, trust to luck. I am convinced that, if I were blessed with progeny, I should evolve a more definite manual to go by; that my children wouldn’t be allowed merely to muddle through as best they could.