Perhaps you will say, beating's the rule for children;
I answer, that an old man's twice a child;
And it is fair the old should have to howl
More than poor children, when they get into mischief,
Because there's ten times less excuse for the old ones.
Strep. There never was a law to beat one's father.
Pheid. Law? pray who made the law? a man, I suppose,
Like you or me, and so persuaded others:
Why have not I as good a right as he had
To start a law for future generations
That sons should beat their fathers in return?
We shall be liberal, too, if all the stripes
You laid upon us before the law was made
We make you a present of, and don't repay them.
Look at young cocks, and all the other creatures,—
They fight their fathers; and what difference is there
'Twixt them and us—save that they don't make laws?
The unlucky father finds himself quite unprepared with any reply to these ingenious arguments. Too late he begins to see that this new liberal education has its inconvenient side. He protests it would have been better for him to allow his son to go on driving four-in-hand to his heart's content, than to become so subtle a philosopher. The only comfort which the young student offers him is the assurance that he is quite as ready to beat his mother, if occasion should arise; but it is much to the credit of domestic relations at Athens that, although the old gentleman has complained of his wife, in the earlier part of the play, as having been the cause of all his present difficulties, he shows no desire to accept this kind of consolation. He curses Socrates, and appeals to the Clouds, who, he complains, have terribly misled him. The Chorus
