Positively I am aghast when I pause to think of the almost accidental fashion in which so many American children are brought up. Their parents love them and adore them, they do for them everything in the world except what seems to me to be the right thing. Instead of endeavoring to lash them to the good old mast, they have such a way of letting them drift with the contemporary tide! Few things in life are to me at once so engaging, so pathetic and so repellent as a street-car load of boys and girls who have just come from the high school; the girls with their pompadours and their rats, their Latin grammars, their giggling and their ogling; the boys, nice boys, but with such grotesque trousers, flashy shoes and absurd hats. Why doesn’t some one in authority give them less objectionable ideas on the subject of dress, of conduct, of, in short, life? They are really the most dreadful, trashy, tiresome little creatures. It is a constant marvel to me that so many of them, in a few years, without parental or outside aid, abandon their revolting ways and become perfectly good men and women. I admit with gladness that we do seem somehow to muddle through. Wouldn’t it, however, be better if children were brought up as my suppositious infants are brought up? Or would it in the long run make any particular difference? In the first place, the mother of my children doesn’t spend entire days at country clubs or the houses of friends playing bridge whist. She stays at home a good deal and plays with the children instead, because she likes to and because they like to have her. Few sights are more depressing, give one a more nauseating sensation, cause one to form a lower estimate of humanity, than a roomful of overdressed American mothers hectically playing bridge; and it is a sight one may see almost every day in the year from one end of the country to the other. In the second place, why should children be allowed to stuff their little insides with candy merely because they seem to like it? A southern cousin of mine used to pick out the best pieces in a box of candy and eat them himself, remarking, “We shall leave the hair-oil and lip-salve varieties for the children, as all children are natural scavengers.” This may be true, but I should protest vehemently against their being allowed to scavenge. That children should be permitted to ruin their digestions, that they should ever be given any form of food that isn’t good for them, strikes me as a parental crime. Parents have the entire matter in their hands; they are, or ought to be, the supreme court, the law. Why not decide for the best instead of for the slipshod half way, or the worst?