He made one of his quick turns again.

“And that’s where our English way makes for distresses.  Mr. Prussian respects and fears his father; respects authorities, attends, obeys and—­his father has a hold upon him.  But I said to myself at the outset, ’No, whatever happens, I will not usurp the place of God.  I will not be the Priest-Patriarch of my children.  They shall grow and I will grow beside them, helping but not cramping or overshadowing.’  They grow more.  But they blunder more.  Life ceases to be a discipline and becomes an experiment....”

“That’s very true,” said Mr. Direck, to whom it seemed the time was ripe to say something.  “This is the problem of America perhaps even more than of England.  Though I have not had the parental experience you have undergone....  I can see very clearly that a son is a very serious proposition.”

“The old system of life was organisation.  That is where Germany is still the most ancient of European states.  It’s a reversion to a tribal cult.  It’s atavistic....  To organise or discipline, or mould characters or press authority, is to assume that you have reached finality in your general philosophy.  It implies an assured end.  Heinrich has his assured end, his philological professorship or thereabouts as a part of the Germanic machine.  And that too has its assured end in German national assertion.  Here, we have none of those convictions.  We know we haven’t finality, and so we are open and apologetic and receptive, rather than wilful....  You see all organisation, with its implication of finality, is death.  We feel that.  The Germans don’t.  What you organise you kill.  Organised morals or organised religion or organised thought are dead morals and dead religion and dead thought.  Yet some organisation you must have.  Organisation is like killing cattle.  If you do not kill some the herd is just waste.  But you musn’t kill all or you kill the herd.  The unkilled cattle are the herd, the continuation; the unorganised side of life is the real life.  The reality of life is adventure, not performance.  What isn’t adventure isn’t life.  What can be ruled about can be machined.  But priests and schoolmasters and bureaucrats get hold of life and try to make it all rules, all etiquette and regulation and correctitude....  And parents and the love of parents make for the same thing.  It is all very well to experiment for oneself, but when one sees these dear things of one’s own, so young and inexperienced and so capable of every sort of gallant foolishness, walking along the narrow plank, going down into dark jungles, ah! then it makes one want to wrap them in laws and foresight and fence them about with ‘Verboten’ boards in all the conceivable aspects....”

“In America of course we do set a certain store upon youthful self-reliance,” said Mr. Direck.