a book (for people who like that kind of book); but in actual life she is a nuisance.  Husbands may escape from her when their business compels them to be away from home all day; but young children may be, and quite often are, killed by her cuddling and coddling and doctoring and preaching:  above all, by her continuous attempts to excite precocious sentimentality, a practice as objectionable, and possibly as mischievous, as the worst tricks of the worst nursemaids.

LARGE AND SMALL FAMILIES

In most healthy families there is a revolt against this tendency.  The exchanging of presents on birthdays and the like is barred by general consent, and the relations of the parties are placed by express treaty on an unsentimental footing.

Unfortunately this mitigation of family sentimentality is much more characteristic of large families than small ones.  It used to be said that members of large families get on in the world; and it is certainly true that for purposes of social training a household of twenty surpasses a household of five as an Oxford College surpasses an eight-roomed house in a cheap street.  Ten children, with the necessary adults, make a community in which an excess of sentimentality is impossible.  Two children make a doll’s house, in which both parents and children become morbid if they keep to themselves.  What is more, when large families were the fashion, they were organized as tyrannies much more than as “atmospheres of love.”  Francis Place tells us that he kept out of his father’s way because his father never passed a child within his reach without striking it; and though the case was an extreme one, it was an extreme that illustrated a tendency.  Sir Walter Scott’s father, when his son incautiously expressed some relish for his porridge, dashed a handful of salt into it with an instinctive sense that it was his duty as a father to prevent his son enjoying himself.  Ruskin’s mother gratified the sensual side of her maternal passion, not by cuddling her son, but by whipping him when he fell downstairs or was slack in learning the Bible off by heart; and this grotesque safety-valve for voluptuousness, mischievous as it was in many ways, had at least the advantage that the child did not enjoy it and was not debauched by it, as he would have been by transports of sentimentality.

But nowadays we cannot depend on these safeguards, such as they were.  We no longer have large families:  all the families are too small to give the children the necessary social training.  The Roman father is out of fashion; and the whip and the cane are becoming discredited, not so much by the old arguments against corporal punishment (sound as these were) as by the gradual wearing away of the veil from the fact that flogging is a form of debauchery.  The advocate of flogging as a punishment is now exposed to very disagreeable suspicions; and ever since Rousseau rose