bodily suggestions. And an idea that is to have this force must be implanted in childhood.
The association of parents and children is of little moral consequence unless there are ideas to communicate. The rise of a race tradition that can be handed down marks, therefore, a great hour in human development. Nothing so pregnant in social possibilities has occurred since the invention of language. The child now does something more than ape the parents' ways. It receives at the golden moment those ideas, precepts, prejudices, and habits which are to become the foundation of its character. Thenceforth it is possible to organize the individual life, and to lay a solid basis for the social union, by organizing the lives of many individuals about the same ideas and habits.
It is certain that the exposure to family government and tradition lasts until the youth can assert his physical strength against that of the parent. The sure overlap of human generations reaches, therefore, to adolescence in both sexes, and from this period of kneading by authority and shaping by suggestion youth cannot escape. By so much as the first fifteen years dominate the rest of life can the traditions of the group dominate its members. Such is the contribution that the family makes to social order.
Now, do these years really dominate? Is social custom fixed in early habit powerful? Does the life that is once built up about tradition stay so built? Once the world's wisdom said "yes." If we hesitate to say it now, it is owing to the new phase we have entered. Nowadays, no sooner does youth come forth from home with his life organized about certain ideas than we hasten to disorganize it. After the young have got in the current of custom, they meet and are swung round
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