The choice of a career for his son is, in general, a problem of great perplexity for a man, and, often, one which he is ill equipped to manage. He probably makes large sacrifices to defray the cost of a ‘good education,’ and is liable finally to sacrifice his boy’s chances of happiness and success by an injudicious decision about his future. His difficulties may be increased, curiously enough, by his failure to realise that conditions of entry into a career are radically different from what they were thirty or forty years ago. He perhaps is still sufficiently romantic to talk about, and even to believe in, the ‘self-made man’ ideal, although the impracticability of it in these days of combines and over-population is surely manifest. Or he is likely to adopt one of two favourite attitudes; either, that his personal experience of the exigencies of his own calling determines him not to allow his son to follow it, or that the only reasonable thing for a son to do is to step into his father’s shoes and continue the work built up for him. If he is neither romantic nor obstinate, he will consult his son’s inclinations and, in all probability, he will find them either fantastic or completely unformed.

A normal boy rarely shows a marked aptitude for one particular business or profession in his early or middle school-days, and if he forms an opinion about his future it is usually much influenced by a limited knowledge of his father’s occupation.