The distraction of choice grievously increases the actual burden and stress upon women, for it is comparatively easy to put up with the inevitable. What with moral strain of this sort and the anxious selection among conflicting methods of nurture and education it possibly costs the mother of to-day more psychical energy to raise four children than it did her grandmother to raise eight. It would be strange if children were not hospitable to the modern sentiment that one will is as good as another, except as the other may be demonstrably wiser in regard to the matter in hand. Willing submission to authority as such, or sense of the value of discipline as a condition of the larger and less obvious well-being of society, is hardly to be expected from childish reasoning, and must come, if at all, as the unconscious result of a training which reflects general sentiment and custom. It is institutional in its nature, not visibly reasonable. But the child, in our day, finds no such institution, no general state of sentiment such as exists in Japan and existed in our own past, which fills the mind from infancy with suggestions that parents are to be reverenced and obeyed; nor do parents ordinarily do much to instil this by training. Probably, so great is the power of general opinion even in childhood, they would hardly succeed if they tried, but as a rule they do not seriously try. Being themselves accustomed to the view that authority must appeal to the reason of the subject, they see nothing strange in the fact that their children treat them as equals and demand to know “Why?” The fond attention which parents give to their children is often of a sort to overstimulate their self-consequence. This constantly asking them, What would you like? Shall we do this or that? Where do you want to go? and so on, though amiable on our part, does the child little good. The old practice of keeping children at a distance, whatever its evils, was more apt to foster reverence. Among hand-workers, especially in the country, the work being more obvious and often shared by the whole family, the pressure of necessary labor makes a kind of discipline for all, and the children are more likely to see that there are rules and conditions of life above their immediate pleasure. Social play, as we have seen, may also do much for this perception. But this visible control of a higher law has a decreasing part in modern life, especially with the well-to-do classes, whose labors are seldom such as children may share, or even understand.