Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/470

454 boys at school are subject to military discipline. Add to which that parental oversight of marriageable children still goes so far that little opportunity is afforded for choice by the young people themselves. In Germany, again, there is a stringency of rule in education allied to the political stringency of rule. As writes a German lady long resident in England, and experienced as a teacher: "English children are not tyrannized over—they are guided by their parents. The spirit of independence and personal rights is fostered. I can therefore understand the teacher who said he would rather teach twenty German [children] than one English child—I understand him, but I do not sympathize with him. The German child is nearly a slave compared to the English child; it is, therefore, more easily subdued by the one in authority."

Lastly come the facts that in the United States, long characterized by great development of the industrial organization little qualified by the militant, parental government has become extremely lax, and girls and boys are nearly on a par in their positions: the independence reached being such that young ladies often form their own circles of acquaintance and carry on their intimacies without let or hinderance from their fathers and mothers.

As was to be anticipated, we thus find a series of changes in the status of children parallel to the series of changes in the status of women.

In archaic societies, without law and having customs extending over but some parts of life, there are no limits to the powers of parents; and the passions, daily exercised in conflict with brutes or men, are restrained in the relations to offspring only by the philoprogenitive instinct.

Early the needs for a companion in arms, for an avenger, and presently for a performer of sacrifices, add to the fatherly feeling other motives, personal and social, tending to give something like a status to male children; but leaving female children still in the same position as are the young of brutes.

These relations of father to son and daughter, arising in advanced groups of the archaic type, and becoming more settled where pastoral life originates the patriarchal group, continue to characterize societies that remain predominantly militant, whether evolved from the patriarchal group or otherwise: victory and defeat, which express the outcome of militant activity, having for their correlatives despotism and slavery in military organization, in political organization, and in domestic organization.

The status of children, in common with that of women, rises in proportion as the compulsory coöperation characterizing militant activities becomes qualified by the voluntary coöperation characterizing industrial activities. We see this on comparing the most militant