While not asserting that all American children are of this brand, I do maintain that the sketch is fairly typical of a very large class—­perhaps of all except those of exceptionally firm and sensible parents.  The strangest thing about the matter is, however, that the fruit does not by any means correspond to the seed; the wind is sown, but the whirlwind is not reaped.  The unendurable child does not necessarily become an intolerable man.  By some mysterious chemistry of the American atmosphere, social or otherwise, the horrid little minx blossoms out into a charming and womanly girl, with just enough of independence to make her piquant; the cross and dyspeptic little boy becomes a courteous and amiable man.  Some sort of a moral miracle seems to take place about the age of fourteen or fifteen; a violent dislocation interrupts the natural continuity of progress; and, presto! out springs a new creature from the modern cauldron of Medea.

The reason—­or at any rate one reason—­of the normal attitude of the American parent towards his child is not far to seek.  It is almost undoubtedly one of the direct consequences of the circumambient spirit of democracy.  The American is so accustomed to recognise the essential equality of others that he sometimes carries a good thing to excess.  This spirit is seen in his dealings with underlings of all kinds, who are rarely addressed with the bluntness and brusqueness of the older civilisations.  Hence the father and mother are apt to lay almost too much stress on the separate and individual entity of their child, to shun too scrupulously anything approaching the violent coercion of another’s will.  That the results are not more disastrous seems owing to a saving quality in the child himself.  The characteristic American shrewdness and common sense do their work.  A badly brought up American child introduced into a really well-regulated family soon takes his cue from his surroundings, adapts himself to his new conditions, and sheds his faults as a snake its skin.  The whole process may tend to increase the individuality of the child; but the cost is often great, the consequences hard for the child itself.  American parents are doubtless more familiar than others with the plaintive remonstrance:  “Why did you not bring me up more strictly?  Why did you give me so much of my own way?” The present type of the American child may be described as one of the experiments of democracy; that he is not a necessary type is proved by the by no means insignificant number of excellently trained children in the United States, of whom it has never been asserted that they make any less truly democratic citizens than their more pampered playmates.