While an average increase of juvenile freedom is to be anticipated, there is reason to think that here and there it has already gone too fair. I refer to the United States. Besides in some cases unduly subordinating the lives of adults, the degree of independence there allowed to the young appears to have the effect of bringing them forward prematurely, initiating them too early in the excitements proper to maturity, and so tending to exhaust the interests of life before it is half spent. Such regulation of childhood as conduces to full utilization of childish activities and pleasures, before the activities and pleasures of manhood and womanhood are entered upon, is better for offspring at the same time that it is better for parents.
How far is parental authority to go? and at what point shall political authority check it? are questions to be answered in no satisfactory way. Already I have given reasons for thinking that the powers and functions of parents have been too far assumed by the state; and that probably a reintegration of the family will follow its present undue disintegration. It seems possible that from the early form in which social and family organizations are compulsory in character, we are passing through semi-militant, semi-industrial phases, in which the organizations of both state and family are partly compulsory, partly voluntary, in character; and that, along with complete social reintegration on the basis of voluntary coöperation, will come domestic reintegration of allied kind, under which the life of the family will again become as distinct from the life of the state as it originally was. Still there remain the theoretical difficulties of deciding how far the powers of parents over children may be carried; to what extent disregard of parental responsibilities is to be tolerated; when does the child cease to be a unit of the family and become a unit of the state. Practically, however, these questions will need no solving; since the same changes of character which bring about the highest form of family will almost universally prevent the rise of difficulties which result from characters of lower types proper to lower societies.
Moreover, there always remains a security. Whatever conduces to the highest welfare of offspring must more and more establish itself through the replacing of children of inferior parents reared in inferior ways by children of better parents reared in better ways. As lower creatures at large have been preserved and advanced through the instrumentality of parental instincts; and as in the course of human evolution the domestic relations originating from the need for prolonged care of offspring have been assuming higher forms; and as the care taken of offspring has been becoming greater and more enduring; we need not doubt that, in the future, along with the more altruistic nature accompanying a higher social type, there will come relations of parents and children needing no external control to insure their well-working.
