are more than likely to clash when they are adopted as principles of family discipline.  “Children must mind,” says the father, in memory and emulation of his father’s method with him.  “Children must not be coerced,” says the mother, who has been reared by a different method.  Clearly a course in child psychology would have been of value to these parents in determining a common procedure.  There is probably no subject upon which either father or mother finds it so hard to yield to the other’s way as upon this.  Each feels, and rightly, that the material to be trained is so precious, and that failure, if it comes, will be so stupendous, that neither dares do what seems wrong to his own mind.  Nothing but common knowledge and a predetermined policy can solve this problem so near to the root of success or failure in marriage itself.

Girls are commonly taught too little of the duties of married women to their husbands.  They look for a lifetime of unalloyed bliss.  If they fail to realize their impossible dream, they turn their faces toward the divorce court.  Many girls have had too smooth a pathway, too little of responsibility, and too little of disappointment, before undertaking the serious duty of establishing and maintaining a lifelong partnership.  There has been little in their lives to prepare them for long-continued relations of any sort.  On the other hand, the same girls have equally little idea of what they have a right to expect of marriage for themselves.  Much of the necessary adjustment is left to chance.

[Illustration:  Photograph by Paul Thompson AMELIA E. BARR Far from interfering with her career, Mrs. Barr’s home interests were the inspiration for it.  Thrown on her own resources by the death of her husband, who sacrificed himself in a yellow fever epidemic in Texas, Mrs. Barr took up writing to make a living for her children]

Scarcely any phase of woman’s part in marriage is arousing more attention at present than the question of childbearing.  Women, and especially educated women, are accused of sterility or of intentionally avoiding motherhood.  They are said to believe that children interfere with their careers, that they can render greater service to the world in public work than in childbearing.  They “prefer idleness and luxury to the care of a family.”  The “maternal instinct is fading.”  They threaten us with “race suicide,” the “extinction of mankind,” a silent world given over to dumb beasts who have not yet learned the principles of “birth control” and “family limitation.”  Thus on the one hand.

On the other:  “The world is better served by the small family well reared than by the large one necessarily less well cared for.”  “Women are not merely the instruments of nature for multiplying mankind.  They have a right to some time for living their own lives.”  “The maternal instinct has not faded, but merely come under control of a wisdom which directs that it shall not bring forth what it cannot care for.”