Every generation has to educate another which it has brought upon the stage.

People who readily accept the responsibility of parentship, having very different matters in their eye, are apt to feel rueful when that responsibility falls due.

What are they to tell the child about life and conduct, subjects on which they have themselves so few and such confused opinions?
Indeed, I do not know; the least said, perhaps, the soonest mended; and yet the child keeps asking, and the parent must find some words to say in his own defence.

Where does he find them?
and what are they when found?
As a matter of experience, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, he will instil into his wide-eyed brat three bad things: the terror of public opinion, and, flowing from that as a fountain, the desire of wealth and applause.

Besides these, or what might be deduced as corollaries from these, he will teach not much else of any effective value: some dim notions of divinity, perhaps, and book-keeping, and how to walk through a quadrille.
But, you may tell me, the young people are taught to be Christians.