But while to-day, as ever before, we have a certain proportion of these emancipated girls, and while to-day, as perhaps never before, we are able to understand that they have an element of reason on their side, it would be a mistake to suppose that they are more than exceptions.  The majority are unable, and not even anxious, to attain this light-hearted social emancipation.  For the majority, even though they are workers, the anciently subtle ties of the home are still, as they should be, an element of natural piety, and, also, as they should not be, clinging fetters which impede individuality and destroy personal initiative.

We all know so many happy homes beneath whose calm surface this process is working out.  The parents are deeply attached to their children, who still remain children to them even when they are grown up.  They wish to guide them and mould them and cherish them, to protect them from the world, to enjoy their society and their aid, and they expect that their children shall continue indefinitely to remain children.  The children, on their side, remain and always will remain, tenderly attached to their parents, and it would really pain them to feel that they are harbouring any unwillingness to stay in the home even after they have grown up, so long as their parents need their attention.  It is, of course, the daughters who are thus expected to remain in the home and who feel this compunction about leaving it.  It seems to us—­although, as we have seen, so unlike the attitude of former days—­a natural, beautiful, and rightful feeling on both sides.

Yet, in the result, all sorts of evils tend to ensue.  The parents often take as their moral right the services which should only be accepted, if accepted at all, as the offering of love and gratitude, and even reach a degree of domineering selfishness in which they refuse to believe that their children have any adult rights of their own, absorbing and drying up that physical and spiritual life-blood of their offspring which it is the parents’ part in Nature to feed.  If the children are willing there is nothing to mitigate this process; if they are unwilling the result is often a disastrous conflict.  Their time and energy are not their own; their tastes are criticised and so far as possible crushed; their political ideas, if they have any, are treated as pernicious; and—­which is often on both sides the most painful of all—­differences in religious belief lead to bitter controversy and humiliating recrimination.  Such differences in outlook between youth and age are natural and inevitable and right.  The parents themselves, though they may have forgotten it, often in youth similarly revolted against the cherished doctrines of their own parents; it has ever been so, the only difference being that to-day, probably, the opportunities for variation are greater.  So it comes about that what James Hinton said half a century ago is often true to-day:  “Our happy Christian homes are the real dark places of the earth.”