This is as true of highly cultivated fathers and mothers as of simple bourgeois or peasant parents. Perhaps, indeed, it may be truer of the first class, the latter torment their children in a naive way, while the former are infinitely wise and methodical in their stupidity. Rarely is a mother of the upper class one of those artists of home life who through the blitheness, the goodness, and joyousness of her character, makes the rhythm of everyday life a dance, and holidays into festivals. Such artists are often simple women who have passed no examinations, founded no clubs, and written no books. The highly cultivated mothers and the socially useful mothers on the other hand are not seldom those who call forth criticism from their sons. It seems almost an invariable rule that mothers should make mistakes when they wish to act for the welfare of their sons. "How infinitely valuable," say their children, "would I have found a mother who could have kept quiet, who would have been patient with me, who would have given me rest, keeping the outer world at a distance from me, with kindly soothing hands. Oh, would that I had had a mother on whose breast I could have laid my head, to be quiet and dream." A distinguished woman writer is surprised that all of her well-thought-out plans for her children fail--those children in whom she saw the material for her passion for governing, the clay that she desired to mould. The writer just cited says very justly that maternal unselfishness alone can perform the task of protecting a young being with wisdom and kindliness, by allowing him to grow according to his own laws. The unselfish mother, she says, will joyfully give the best of her life energy, powers of soul and spirit to a growing being and then open all doors to him, leaving him in the broad world to follow his own paths, and ask for nothing, neither thanks, nor praise, nor remembrance. But to most mothers may be applied the bitter exclamation of a son in the book just mentioned, "even a mother must know how she tortures another; if she has not this capacity by nature, why in the world should I recognise her as my mother at all." Certain mothers spend the whole day in keeping their children's nervous system in a state of irritation. They make work hard and play joyless, whenever they take a part in it. At the present time, too, the school gets control of the child, the home loses all the means by which formerly it moulded the child's soul life and ennobled family life. The school, not father and mother, teaches children to play, the school gives them manual training, the school teaches them to sing, to look at pictures, to read aloud, to wander about out of doors; schools, clubs, sport and other pleasures accustom youth in the cities more and more to outside life, and a daily recreation that kills the true feeling for holiday. Young people, often, have no other impression of home than that it is a place where they meet society which bores them.