novels, prurient newspaper stories, and current discussion of scandals, elopements, and divorces. Is it right that modesty should impose silence always on the right side only? Is it right that the current popular code should always go unchallenged?
We have broken to a considerable extent with the doctrine of the last century about the respective rights and duties of parents and children, which was based on the dictum that the parent is "the author of the child's being." The notion was that the parent had conferred such a blessing on the child is giving him existence that all the duties were on the side of the child, and all the rights on the side of the parent. Such a dictum with the deductions drawn from it cannot stand before a rationalizing generation. When once a child has reached an age to get a glimmering sense of what kind of a world this is, there are very few fathers who would dare to invoke this dictum as a ground of parental rights, and there are many who might find that the child would turn upon them with the most terrific accusation that could possibly be formulated: "You knew what kind of a world this is, and what kind of a man you were in it. You knew that you were a failure, or a drunkard, or a gambler, or a felon. How dared you beget me, and put me in the world to bear what you had entailed?"
I say that we have broken with this old-fashioned notion; but we have not yet, so far as I know, adopted any other consistent principle, and we shall not get the rights and duties on a sound basis until we accept the doctrine that the parents, having assumed the liberty and authority of marriage and parenthood, have all the responsibility, and all the duties, and that it is the child who has the rights. Parents, who have brought children into the world, are bound by all the deductions
