Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/542

524 One further possibility of domestic evolution remains. The last component to show itself among the feelings which hold the family together, the care of parents by offspring, is the one which has most room for increase. Absent in brutes, small among primitive men, considerable among the partially civilized, and tolerably strong among the best of those around us, filial affection is a feeling that admits of much further growth, which is needed to make the cycle of domestic life complete. At present, the latter days of the old whose married children live away from them are made dreary by the lack of those remaining pleasures to be derived from the constant society of descendants; but the time will come when this evil will be met by an attachment of adults to parents which, if not as strong as that of aged parents to children, approaches it in strength.

Further development in this direction will not, however, occur under social arrangements which partially absolve parents from the care of offspring. A stronger feeling to be displayed by child for parent in later life must be established by a closer intimacy between parent and child in early life. No such higher stage is to be reached by walking in the ways followed by the Chinese for these two thousand years. We shall not rise to it by imitating, even partially, the sanguinary Mexicans, whose children, at the age of four, or sometimes later, were delivered over to be educated by the priests. We shall not improve family feeling by approaching toward the arrangements of the Koossa-Caffres, among whom "all children above ten or eleven years old are publicly instructed under the inspection of the chief." This latest of the domestic affections will not be fostered by retrograding toward customs like those of the Andamanese, and, as early as possible, changing the child of the family into the child of the tribe. Contrariwise, such a progress will be achieved only in proportion as both moral and intellectual culture are carried on by parents to an extent now rarely attempted. When the unfolding minds of children are no longer thwarted, and stunted, and deformed, by the mechanical lessons of stupid teachers—when instruction, instead of giving mutual pain, gives mutual pleasure by ministering in proper order to faculties which are severally eager to appropriate fit knowledge presented in fit forms—when, with a wide diffusion of adult culture, joined with rational ideas of teaching, there goes a spontaneous unfolding of the juvenile mind such as is even now occasionally indicated by exceptional facility of acquisition—when the earlier stages of education passed through in the domestic circle have become, as they will in ways scarcely dreamed of at present, daily aids to the strengthening of sympathy, intellectual and moral, leaving only the more special cultures to be carried on by others; then will the latter days of life be smoothed by a greater filial care, reciprocating the greater parental care bestowed in earlier life.