It is particularly by their contempt, which they are at no pains to disguise, for the competence that comes from contract and later from habit, by their refusal to recognise the position of the head of the family, that women every day and in every minute particular are training their children to despise their father. Democracy seems bent on bringing up its children to despise their parents. No other construction can be put upon the facts, however good and innocent the motives. Just sum up the facts. In the first place democracy denies that the living can be guided by the dead; it is one of its fundamental axioms that no generation should be tied and bound by its predecessor. What inference can children be expected to draw from this except that they owe no obedience to their father and mother? Children have naturally only too great a tendency to look down on their parents. They are proud of their physical superiority; they know that their star is rising while that of their parents is setting. They are imbued with the universal prejudice of modern humanity that _progress is constant_ and that therefore whatever is of yesterday is _ex hypothesi_ inferior to that which is of to-day. They are driven also, as I am constrained to believe, by a sort of Nemesis inspired by fear lest human science and power should hurry forward too fast if the children were content to pick up the burden of life where their parents left it, and simply followed their fathers and did not insist on effacing all that their fathers had done and beginning again--with the result that the edifice never rises far above its foundations, and that children for this and other reasons have a natural inclination to treat their parents as Cassandras. Then, as it were to clench the argument, democracy is ready with its teaching that each generation is independent of the other, and that the dead have no lesson to impart to the living. In the second place, democracy, applying the principle still further and proclaiming the doctrine that the State is master of all, withdraws the child from the family, as often and as completely as it can. "Democracy," said Socrates, in one of his humorous dialogues, "is a mountebank, a kidnapper of children. It snatches the child from its family while he is playing, takes him far away, allows him no more to see his family, teaches him many strange languages, drills him till his joints are supple, paints his face and dresses him in ridiculous clothes, and imparts to him all the mysteries of the acrobat's trade until he is sufficiently dexterous to appear in public and amuse the company by his tricks."