Essay No. 1
Our Children
ARE WE DOING THE BEST FOR THEM?
(Reprinted from the "Daily Telegraph.")
ARE we taking the wrong way with our children, and replacing the harsh repression of former periods by a pernicious indulgence, as cruel in result as kind in intention ? The question is asked by our correspondents, and there could hardly be an inquiry of more universal interest, nor one more difficult to answer. There are some controversies of such momentous importance that it is impossible not to ponder upon them, but which are yet passing through an indefinite phase that must make debate inconclusive and almost useless. Upon these subjects men and women can only rely upon their own instinct and judgment, their special knowledge of their own responsibility, and their observation of the methods of bringing up children adopted in other households, with the consequent results. In these cases, all argument is a mere conflict of prophecy. Parents take their own course, at their own risk. The training of every single child is a new experiment of incalculable possibilities. No certainty of
success can exist at the outset of the process, and the error of a wrong method is hardly discovered until too late for remedy. In other words—where various persons are making their way by different routes through a hitherto untraversed wood, nothing but the event itself can show which has taken the best course. This is, we think, recognised by our thoughtful correspondent, the "Deputy Lieutenant " ; but, though he does not dogmatise, he is inclined to think that the welfare of posterity is threatened by the false sentimentalism of to-day. Let us remember the remorseless truth of the stern law, " To be weak is to be miserable." To spare our children, only to make it more certain that we shall have failed to harden them for the battle of life ; to render it more probable that they will go down in the struggle ; to send them out only to suffer, and bend and break under the ruthless pressure of the modern world—that is perhaps the worst crime which can be committed against the future of the race and the happiness of humanity. The real happiness of our children will be in proportion to the amount of tincture of steel we are able to put into their moral system—physical strength being taken for granted as an ideal now universally pursued. Therefore among the many applications of Madame Roland's famous maxim there is none more serious than this. 0 Kindness, what things are done in thy name ! Let us look about us. There is no person of mature experience
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who is not acquainted with the tragedy of the spoiled child ultimately compelled to confront the world with a feebly-based and falsely-formed character. We are acquainted with the weak mother—a creature filled with a foolish idolatry of her own offspring, devoid of clear-sightedness in their regard, taking their worst tendencies for amiable eccentricities or for a sign of original talent. This lady, wherever we behold her, is overcome with a natural fondness for her children, and yet for their own sakes almost any harshness compatible with their physical health and mental progress would be better than an ignoble and helpless inability to control their conduct, and to compel them, by gentleness if possible, by strictness if necessary, to adopt right habits. For it is true that we are creatures of habit, and the tenacious instincts, the second nature formed by the wholesome routine of a sound training, will often stand to us when physical strength fails and active will is worn out.
So let the world, seeking still what has always been its greatest blessing, pray that good mothers may be multiplied. Infinite is the debt which must always be owed to them, and never can be repaid by the children they have trained up to lead strong and honourable lives as men and women. A wise country would put up statues to the famous mothers of great men. " Thou art my warrior, I holp to frame thee," are the splendid words Shakespeare puts into the mouth of his Roman matron, and in
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these cases no memorial should be put up to Coriolanus without some conspicuous acknowledgment of the deep-hearted womanhood by which Volumnia filled the spirit of her son with power. In the past, then, there have been men and women, and plenty of them, as true and efficient as the earth is ever likely to produce. If we look about us we shall happily see on every side a sufficiency of fine character, and in nearly all these past and present instances we shall find that it is the influence of the excellent mothers which has been supreme. They have not, perhaps, acted by rule. They have not aired the technical terminology of the latest hygienic or educational fad. They have simply been in themselves sound, true persons, not the slaves of false emotions or contemptible ideals, who have breathed their own moral being into their sons and daughters. In these matters, while we would take vigilant advantage of every sure advance in physiological and psychological knowledge, we confess that we deeply distrust all pedantry, mouthing, pretentious terms, and proclaiming of theories equally elaborate and untried. " My friend," says the German poet, in lines breathing the patient constructive temper which finally conquered the revolutionary spirit radiating from France, " my friend, despise not the narrow laws of the elders." No. Rather let us reverently regard and study these laws, remembering the greatness of the men and women that have been. For
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our part, if civilised countries had made further pro.. gress towards the common organisation which some day, though it is far hence, will unite them, we should heartily advocate a Royal Commission for the serious and scientific study of the methods of good mothers. The results might well be of amazing value in assisting the sound progress of the race. It would be found, we think, that these models of household management had avoided the extremes both of complaisance and severity, and that, with a natural sense of the fact that measure is the mark of all sanity, they had ruled their children with a serene and steady firmness, and with an anxious vigilance even more solicitous to be wisely kind than to be immediately tender. Yet the best mothers have had strong souls. "Sparta hath many a worthier son than he," expressed the highest spirit to which a woman can rise. Not less fine was the answer of the emigrant to Robert Louis Stevenson when he travelled steerage and remonstrated with her upon letting her dare-devil little boy run wild all over the ship at the risk of his neck. She replied memorably, "I would rather see him break his neck than break his temper." That is quite sound.
Thus we repeat, in this connection, what we have several times maintained of late, that if we are to have sound social development in the future we must hold fast to the familiar simplicities of human Wisdom, must graft modern science upon old experi-
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ence. It is agreed, upon the whole, that more children are now ruined for life by over-indulgence than are marred by excessive severity. Yet let us keep cool heads in comparing both sides of the account, in the effort to see where the real truth lies. The egoistic parents of a former day were invariably delighted when their children resembled them ; and from this most amusing and naïve of all human weaknesses modern fathers and mothers are by no means wholly free. Then there was accepted, to an absurd extent, the theory that children were naturally limbs of iniquity, and must be literally " licked " into grace with a more than bear-like benevolence. There was a vast amount of stupid misunderstanding and tyranny shown towards children. They were crushed, mocked, and coerced. There were heavy thrashings for small offences, and the small people were subjected to such purposeless cruelties as being made to sit still for hours and being compelled to read good books they could not understand, until they learned to hate the very idea of restraint. No one desires to go back to this state of things, but there is a real danger of moving, not deliberately, but by a more unreasoning sentimental drift, towards the opposite extreme. Now that the question is raised, all that mothers and fathers can do in every household where boys and girls are growing up is to think seriously over the matter, and to revise their methods if their observation or instinct tells
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them that slack, or selfish, or feeble, or vicious tendencies are beginning to show in their children. However busy parents may be—and the increasing want of time to think is a great danger in this connection—they absolutely must take time to ponder this matter. A portion, at least, of the holidays ought always to be spent with the little ones, or with sons and daughters home from school. The criterion we recommend is simple. Watch the growth of habit in the children. Notice not so much what they do under the immediate stress of command—though whether obedience is reluctant or prompt and cheerful is important—but how they act naturally. As the sapling bends, so will the tree grow, and to find out the main bent of character, so that it may be corrected if need be in time, is the first of all parental duties. If boys and girls are closely regarded by parents and teachers from this point of view, no day will pass without enlightenment and profit. We can now approach the question which is subordinate to the considerations we have described, but which is often discussed as though it were part rather of the ends than of the means. We refer to the question of physical punishment. No dogmatic recipe can be recommended as an infallible means of working every sort of moral cure. We shall not enter into a discussion between the relative merits of the cane or the " tawse," as the more effective instrument of correction. There are still
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some people who do not spare the child for fear of spoiling the rod. Physical chastisement ought never to be inflicted in a state of temper or with a brutal hand. But formation of right habits is so essential to efficient manhood and womanhood that when gentle methods have been of no avail, sharper and sterner methods ought to be tried. Children, for their own sake, must be made by one means or another to do the right thing until it becomes an instinct, and any other view means that false kindness which is, after all, the worst cruelty.
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