Page:Books and men.djvu/39

 Rh have us believe. If it be true that nature counts for nothing and training for everything, then what a gap between the boys and girls of two hundred years ago and the boys and girls we know to-day! The rigid bands that once bound the young to decorum have dwindled to a silver thread that snaps under every restive movement. To have "perfectly natural" children seems to be the outspoken ambition of parents, who have succeeded in retrograding their offspring from artificial civilization to that pure and wholesome savagery which is too plainly their ideal. "It is assumed nowadays," declares an angry critic, "that children have come into the world to make a noise; and it is the part of every good parent to put up with it, and to make all household arrangements with a view to their sole pleasure and convenience."

That the children brought up under this relaxed discipline acquire certain merits and charms of their own is an easily acknowledged fact. We are not now alluding to those spoiled and over-indulged little people who are the recognized scourges of humanity, but merely to the boys and girls who have been