It seems to us--although, as we have seen, so unlike the attitude of former days--a natural, beautiful, and rightful feeling on both sides.
Yet, in the result, all sorts of evils tend to ensue.

The parents often take as their moral right the services which should only be accepted, if accepted at all, as the offering of love and gratitude, and even reach a degree of domineering selfishness in which they refuse to believe that their children have any adult rights of their own, absorbing and drying up that physical and spiritual life-blood of their offspring which it is the parents' part in Nature to feed.

If the children are willing there is nothing to mitigate this process; if they are unwilling the result is often a disastrous conflict.

Their time and energy are not their own; their tastes are criticised and so far as possible crushed; their political ideas, if they have any, are treated as pernicious; and--which is often on both sides the most painful of all--differences in religious belief lead to bitter controversy and humiliating recrimination.

Such differences in outlook between youth and age are natural and inevitable and right.