“Entire periods,” replied Charlotte, “resemble this father and son whom you have been describing.  Of the state of things when every little town was obliged to have its walls and moats, when the castle of the nobleman was built in a swamp, and the smallest manor-houses were only accessible by a draw-bridge, we are scarcely able to form a conception.  In our days, the largest cities take down their walls, the moats of the princes’ castles are filled in; cities are no more than great places, and when one travels and sees all this, one might fancy that universal peace was just established, and the golden age was before the door.  No one feels himself easy in a garden which does not look like the open country.  There must be nothing to remind him of form and constraint, we choose to be entirely free, and to draw our breath without sense of confinement.  Do you conceive it possible, my friend, that we can ever return again out of this into another, into our former condition?”

“Why should we not?” replied the Assistant.  “Every condition has its own burden along with it, the most relaxed as well as the most constrained.  The first presupposes abundance, and leads to extravagance.  Let want reappear, and the spirit of moderation is at once with us again.  Men who are obliged to make use of their space and their soil, will speedily enough raise walls up round their gardens to be sure of their crops and plants.  Out of this will arise by degrees a new phase of things:  the useful will again gain the upper hand; and even the man of large possessions will feel at last that he must make the most of all which belongs to him.  Believe me, it is quite possible that your son may become indifferent to all which you have been doing in the park, and draw in again behind the solemn walls and the tall lindens of his grandfather.”

The secret pleasure which it gave Charlotte to have a son foretold to her, made her forgive the Assistant his somewhat unfriendly prophecy of how it might one day fare with her lovely, beautiful park.  She therefore answered without any discomposure:  “You and I are not old enough yet to have lived through very much of these contradictions; and yet when I look back into my own early youth, when I remember the style of complaints which I used then to hear from older people, and when I think at the same time of what the country and the town then were, I have nothing to advance against what you say.  But is there nothing which one can do to remedy this natural course of things?  Are father and son, parents and children, to be always thus unable to understand each other?  You have been so kind as to prophesy a boy to me.  Is it necessary that he must stand in contradiction to his father?  Must he destroy what his parents have erected, instead of completing it, instead of following on upon the same idea, and elevating it?”

“There is a rational remedy for it,” replied the Assistant.  “But it is one which will be but seldom put in practice by men.  The father should raise his son to a joint ownership with himself.  He should permit him to plant and to build; and allow him the same innocent liberty which he allows to himself.  One form of activity may be woven into another, but it cannot be pieced on to it.  A young shoot may be readily and easily grafted with an old stem, to which no grown branch admits of being fastened.”