into a vessel of honor or a vessel of dishonor long before he can put in a word about the matter.  He has no voice as to his education or his training, what he shall eat, what he shall drink, or wherewithal he shall be clothed.  He has to wait upon the wisdom, the whims, and often the wickedness of other people.  Imagine, my six-foot friend, how you would feel to be obliged to wear your woollen mittens when you desire to bloom out in straw-colored kids, or to be buttoned into your black waistcoat when your taste leads you to select your white, or to be forced under your Kossuth hat when you had set your heart on your black beaver:  yet this is what children are perpetually called on to undergo.  Their wills are just as strong as ours and their tastes are stronger, yet they have to bend the one and sacrifice the other; and they do it under pressure of necessity.  Their reason is not convinced; they are forced to yield to superior power; and of all disagreeable things in the world, the most disagreeable is not to have your own way.  When you are grown up, you wear a print frock because you cannot afford a silk, or because a silk would be out of place,—­you wear India-rubber overshoes because your polished patent-leather would be ruined by the mud; and your self-denial is amply compensated by the reflection of superior fitness or economy.  But a child has no such reflection to console him.  He puts on his battered, gray old shoes because you make him; he hangs up his new trousers and goes back into his detestable girl’s-frock because he will be punished if he does not, and it is intolerable.

It is of no use to say that this is their discipline and is all necessary to their welfare.  I maintain that that is a horrible condition of life in which such degrading surveillance is necessary.  You may affirm that an absolute despotism is the only government fit for Dahomey, and I may not disallow it; but when you go on and say that Dahomey is the happiest country in the world, why, I refer you to Dogberry.  Now the parents of a child are, from the nature of the case, absolute despots.  They may be wise, and gentle, and doting despots, and the chain may be satin-smooth and golden-strong; but if it be of rusty iron, parting every now and then and letting the poor prisoner violently loose, and again suddenly caught hold of, bringing him up with a jerk, galling his tender limbs and irretrievably ruining his temper,—­it is all the same; there is no help for it.  And really, to look around the world and see the people that are its fathers and mothers is appalling,—­the narrow-minded, prejudiced, ignorant, ill-tempered, fretful, peevish, passionate, careworn, harassed men and women.  Even we grown people, independent of them and capable of self-defence, have as much as we can do to keep the peace.  Where is there a city, or a town, or a village, in which are no bickerings, no jealousies, no angers, no petty or swollen spites?  Then fancy yourself, instead of the neighbor and occasional visitor of these poor human beings, their children, subject to their absolute control, with no power of protest against their folly, no refuge from their injustice, but living on through thick and thin right under their guns.