Then there are parents who love their children like wild beasts.  It is a passionate, blind, instinctive, unreasoning love.  They have no more intelligent discernment, when an outside difficulty arises with respect to their children, than a she-bear.  They wax furious over the most richly deserved punishment, if inflicted by a teacher’s hand; they take the part of their child against legal authority; but, observe, this does not prevent them from laying their own hands heavily on their children.  The same obstinate ignorance and narrowness that are exhibited without exist within also.  Folly is folly, abroad or at home.  A man does not play the fool out-doors and act the sage in the house.  When the poor child becomes obnoxious, the same unreasoning rage falls upon him.  The object of a ferocious love is the object of an equally ferocious anger.  It is only he who loves wisely that loves well.

The manner in which children’s tastes are disregarded, their feelings ignored, and their instincts violated is enough to disaffect one with childhood.  They are expected to kiss all flesh that asks them to do so.  They are jerked up into the laps of people whom they abhor.  They say, “Yes, Ma’am,” under pain of bread and water for a week, when their unerring nature prompts them to hurl out, “I won’t, you hideous old fright!” They are sent out of the room whenever a fascinating bit of scandal is to be rehearsed, packed off to bed just as everybody is settled down for a charming evening, bothered about their lessons when their play is but fairly under way, and hedged and hampered on every side.  It is true that all this may be for their good, but, my dear dolt, what of that?  So everything is for the good of grownup people; but does that make us contented?  It is doubtless for our good in the long run that we lose our pocketbooks, and break our arms, and catch a fever, and have our brothers defraud a bank, and our houses burn down, and people steal our umbrellas, and borrow our books and never return them.  In fact, we know that upon certain conditions all things work together for our good, but, notwithstanding, we find some things a great bore; and we may talk to our children of discipline and health by the hour together, and it will never be anything but an intolerable nuisance to them to be swooped off to bed by a dingy old nurse just as the people are beginning to come, and shining silk, and floating lace, and odorous, faint flowers are taking their ecstatic young souls back into the golden days of the good Haroun al Raschid.

Even in this very point lies one of the miseries of childhood, that no philosophy comes to temper their sorrow.  We do not know why we are troubled, but we know that there is some good, grand reason for it.  The poor little children do not know even that.  They find trouble utterly inconsequent and unreasonable.  The problem of evil is to them absolutely incapable of solution.  We know that beyond our horizon stretches the infinite universe.