His dividends did not quarrel among themselves, nor was he under any uneasiness lest his mortgages should become extravagant on reaching manhood and run him up debts which sooner or later he should have to pay. There were tendencies in John which made him very uneasy, and Theobald, his second son, was idle and at times far from truthful. His children might, perhaps, have answered, had they known what was in their father's mind, that he did not knock his money about as he not infrequently knocked his children. He never dealt hastily or pettishly with his money, and that was perhaps why he and it got on so wel together.It must be remembered that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the relations between parents and children were stil far from satisfactory. The violent type of father, as described by Fielding, Richardson,

Smol ett and Sheridan, is now hardly more likely to find a place in literature than the original advertisement of Messrs. Fairlie & Pontifex's "Pious Country Parishioner," but the type was much too persistent not to have been drawn from nature closely. The parents in

Miss Austen's novels are less like savage wild beasts than those of her predecessors, but she evidently looks upon them with suspicion, and an

uneasy feeling that _le pere de famil e est capable de tout_ makes itself sufficiently apparent throughout the greater part of her writings. In

the Elizabethan time the relations between parents and children seem on the whole to have been more kindly. The fathers and the sons are for the most part friends in Shakespeare, nor does the evil appear to have

reached its ful abomination til a long course of Puritanism had familiarised men's minds with Jewish ideals as those which we should endeavour to reproduce in our everyday life. What precedents did not Abraham, Jephthah and Jonadab the son of Rechab offer? How easy was it to quote and fol ow them in an age when few reasonable men or women doubted that every syl able of the Old Testament was taken down

_verbatim_ from the mouth of God. Moreover, Puritanism restricted natural pleasures; it substituted the Jeremiad for the Paean, and it forgot that the poor abuses of al times want countenance.Mr Pontifex may have been a little sterner with his children than some of

his neighbours, but not much. He thrashed his boys two or three times a week and some weeks a good deal oftener, but in those days fathers were always thrashing their boys. It is easy to have juster views when

everyone else has them, but fortunately or unfortunately results have nothing whatever to do with the moral guilt or blamelessness of him who brings them about; they depend solely upon the thing done, whatever it

may happen to be. The moral guilt or blamelessness in like manner has nothing to do with the result; it turns upon the question whether a sufficient number of reasonable people placed as the actor was placed would have done as the actor has done. At that time it was universal y admitted that to spare the rod was to spoil the child, and St Paul had placed disobedience to parents in very ugly company. If his children did anything which Mr Pontifex disliked they were clearly disobedient to

their father. In this case there was obviously only one course for a sensible man to take. It consisted in checking the first signs of self Page 13

Butler, Samuel: The Way of All Flesh

wil while his children were too young to offer serious resistance. If their wil s were "wel broken" in childhood, to use an expression then much in vogue, they would acquire habits of obedience which they would

not venture to break through til they were over twenty-one years old. Then they might please themselves; he should know how to protect himself; til then he and his money were more at their mercy than he liked.How little do we know our thoughts--our reflex actions indeed, yes; but

our reflex reflections! Man, forsooth, prides himself on his

consciousness! We boast that we differ from the winds and waves and fal ing stones and plants, which grow they know not why, and from the wandering creatures which go up and down after their prey, as we are pleased to say without the help of reason. We know so wel what we are doing ourselves and why we do it, do we not? I fancy that there is some truth in the view which is being put forward nowadays, that it is our

less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.CHAPTER VIMr Pontifex was not the man to trouble himself much about his motives.

People were not so introspective then as we are now; they lived more according to a rule of thumb. Dr Arnold had not yet sown that crop of earnest thinkers which we are now harvesting, and men did not see why they should not have their own way if no evil consequences to themselves seemed likely to fol ow upon their doing so. Then as now, however, they sometimes let themselves in for more evil consequences than they had

bargained for.Like other rich men at the beginning of this century he ate and drank a good deal more than was enough to keep him in health. Even his excel ent constitution was not proof against a prolonged course of overfeeding and what we should now consider overdrinking. His liver would not

unfrequently get out of order, and he would come down to breakfast looking yel ow about the eyes. Then the young people knew that they had better look out. It is not as a general rule the eating of sour grapes

that causes the children's teeth to be set on edge. Wel -to-do parents seldom eat many sour grapes; the danger to the children lies in the parents eating too many sweet ones.I grant that at first sight it seems very unjust, that the parents should have the fun and the children be punished for it, but young people should remember that for many years they were part and parcel of their parents and therefore had a good deal of the fun in the person of their parents. If they have forgotten the fun now, that is no more than people do who

have a headache after having been tipsy overnight.