The foregoing I wrote for parents who are fond of sporting with children's happiness; I will now out of their and my sport make something serious. I ask you, in the first place, about your right to prescribe for morally free beings their inclinations, or even the show of inclination, and by one act of despotism to stretch the poisonous leaden sceptre over a whole free life. Your ten years more of apprenticeship to life make as little distinction in the reciprocal liberty as talent or its want. Why do you not as well enjoin upon your daughters _friendship_ for life? Why do you not, in the second marriage, exercise the same right? But you have even no right to reject, except in the age of minority, when the child has not yet any right to choose. Or do you demand, upon their leaving the paternal roof, as pay for training them up to freedom, the sacrifice of this very freedom itself? You act as if you had been educators, without having been yourselves educated; whereas you are merely paying off to your children a heavy inherited debt to your parents, which you can never pay back to _them_; and I know but one unpaid creditor in this respect, the first man, and but one insolvent debtor, the last. Or do you shield yourselves under the barbarously immoral Roman prejudice, which offers children for sale as white negroes of the parents, because the power allowed at an earlier period over the non-moral being slips over, unobserved from the gradualness of its development, into a power over the moral being? If you may, out of love, force children to their happiness, so may they afterward, quite as well out of gratitude force you to yours. But what is, then, the happiness for which you are to throw away their whole heart, with all its dreams? Chiefly _your own_; _your_ glory and aggrandizement, _your_ feuds and friendships, are they to quench and buy with the offering of their innermost souls. Dare you own aloud your silent presuppositions in regard to the happiness of a forced marriage; for example, the dispensableness of love in wedlock, the hope of a death, the (perhaps) double infidelity, as well toward the connubial merchant as toward the extra-connubial lover? You must presuppose them sinners,[155] in order not to be yourselves robbers?