children don’t find it delightful by any means.  On the contrary, they are never so happy as when they can get a little care, or cheat themselves into the belief that they have it.  You can make them proud for a day by sending them on some responsible errand.  If you will not place care upon them, they will make it for themselves.  You shall see a whole family of dolls stricken down simultaneously with malignant measles, or a restive horse evoked from a passive parlor-chair.  They are a great deal more eager to assume care than you are to throw it off.  To be sure, they may be quite as eager to be rid of it after a while; but while this does not prove that care is delightful, it certainly does prove that freedom from care is not.

Now I should like, Herr Narr, to have you look at the other side for a moment:  for there is a positive and a negative pole.  Children not only have their full share of misery, but they do not have their full share of happiness; at least, they miss many sources of happiness to which we have access.  They have no consciousness.  They have sensations, but no perceptions.  We look longingly upon them, because they are so graceful, and simple, and natural, and frank, and artless; but though this may make us happy, it does not make them happy, because they don’t know anything about it.  It never occurs to them that they are graceful.  No child is ever artless to himself.  The only difference he sees between you and himself is that you are grown-up and he is little.  Sometimes I think he does have a dim perception that when he is sick it is because he has eaten too much, and he must take medicine, and feed on heartless dry toast, while, when you are sick, you have the dyspepsia, and go to Europe.  But the beauty and sweetness of children are entirely wasted on themselves, and their frankness is a source of infinite annoyance to each other.  A man enjoys himself.  If he is handsome, or wise, or witty, he generally knows it, and takes great satisfaction in it; but a child does not.  He loses half his happiness because he does not know that he is happy.  If he ever has any consciousness, it is an isolated, momentary thing, with no relation to anything antecedent or subsequent.  It lays hold on nothing.  Not only have they no perception of themselves, but they have no perception of anything.  They never recognize an exigency.  They do not salute greatness.  Has not the Autocrat told us of some lady who remembered a certain momentous event in our Revolutionary War, and remembered it only by and because of the regret she experienced at leaving her doll behind, when her family was forced to fly from home?  What humiliation is this!  What an utter failure to appreciate the issues of life!  For her there was no revolution, no upheaval of world-old theories, no struggle for freedom, no great combat of the heroisms.  All the passion and pain, the mortal throes of error, the glory of sacrifice, the victory of an idea, the triumph