THE HOME AND THE CHILD

If this were the first of these lectures I would feel like apologizing for having brought you here under false pretenses; but you came here with your eyes open now and I haven’t any sympathy for you!

I spoke yesterday of applied ethics, of realizable ideals. Before I begin my regular theme of today I want to say a word as to my utterances yesterday. I intend to try to avoid the position in which a former fellow-townsman of mine, a Mr. Richard Grant White, who was a great Shakespearean scholar got himself. It was once announced that he was to deliver twelve lectures on Shakespeare; in his first lecture he outlined what he intended to say in the other eleven; and then he spent the other eleven in answering the attacks on the first. I intend to try to avoid getting into a similar predicament, but I must make one explanation.

Two or three remarks that were made to me after the close of the lecture yesterday suggested to me that I ought perhaps to have laid emphasis on a point which seemed to me so obvious that I did not emphasize it. Two or three gentlemen spoke to me in a way that indicated that they thought that in advocating realizable ideals I had somehow seemed to advocate low ideals. I do not believe that to most of you I conveyed any such impression, but if I did I of course wish to correct it. I should be ashamed of myself unless I believed in high ideals. I do not think that an ideal is really a high ideal unless it is one that is at least partially realizable. My preaching is not against high ideals but against wrong ideals. I remember in a little story by Miss Mary E. Wilkins when she makes one of her characters say anent the leading village worthy who claimed to be much better than anyone else, “I think there are some people who aren’t so far ahead of us as they are to one side of us; sometimes it is latitude and sometimes it is longitude that separates reformers.” I would be sorry indeed to have any word of mine understood as implying any willingness to lower our ideals. All I want is to have the people that preach them sure that they are really high ideals. No ideal can be right for this world if it is not fitted to be used in this world. It cannot be right to preach to men and women a standard of conduct up to which you do not expect them to live. My plea is only that those who preach shall strive to preach a doctrine up to which it is possible to live, and that those who listen shall not listen merely to gratify their esthetic sensibilities, but shall listen with the serious purpose of applying and of acting upon the principles laid down to them. Perhaps in what I had to say yesterday I ought to have guarded myself against the possibility of anyone’s misconstruing my language. I hope I have so guarded myself in what I have said today.

The first place where I desire to see any man or woman realize his or her ideals is in connection with those most intimately thrown with him or her. The very first place in which it is necessary that ideals should be realized is in the man’s own home. It is so elementary that it seems hardly necessary to say that everything else in our civilization rests upon the home; that all public achievement rests upon private character; that the state cannot go on onward and upward, that the nation cannot make progress, unless the average individual is of the right type, unless the average American is a pretty decent fellow and unless his wife is a still better fellow. It will not be possible otherwise for the nation permanently to rise.

The first essential toward the achievement of good citizenship is, of course, the building up the kind of character which will make the man a good husband, a good father, a good son; which will make the woman a good daughter when she is young, a good wife and mother as she grows older. Absolutely nothing is gained by filling a man with vague aspirations for the betterment of his kind if you have not filled him first of all with the desire to do decently by those members of mankind with whom he passes most of his life.

We all of us know the type of man, frequently found at cross-road groceries, who in his abundant leisure is able to explain precisely how humanity should be benefited and the nation run, meanwhile he himself exists at all only because his wife takes in washing. We also know the man who in public life is filled with the loftiest aspirations; but whose family unite in breathing a sigh of relief whenever he is absent from the house.

Of course there is now and then a man who in some given crisis plays the hero although on other occasions he plays the brute—there are such cases; but it is a mighty unsafe thing to proceed upon the assumption that because a man is ordinarily a brute he will therefore be a hero in a crisis. Disregarding the exceptions, and speaking normally, no man can be of any service to the state, no man can amount to anything from the standpoint of usefulness to the community at large, unless first and foremost he is a decent man in the close relations of life. No community can afford to think for one moment that great public service, that great material achievement, that ability shown in no matter how many different directions, will atone for the lack of a sound family life.

Multiplication of divorces means that there is something rotten in the community, that there is some principle of evil at work which must be counteracted and overcome or widespread disaster will follow. In the same way, if the man preaches and practices a different code of morality for himself than that which he demands that his wife shall practice, then no profession on his part of devotion to civic ideals will in the least avail to alter the fact that he is fundamentally a bad citizen. I do not believe in weakness; I believe in a man’s being a man; and for that very reason I abhor the creature who uses the expression that “a man must be a man” in order to excuse his being a vile and vicious man.

I recollect saying to a young friend who was about to enter college, “My friend, I know that you feel that you ought to be a good man; now, be willing to fight for your principles whenever it is necessary; if you’re willing enough to fight nobody will complain about your being too virtuous.”

If you accept only the weak man who cannot hold his own as the type of virtuous man, you will inevitably create an atmosphere among ordinary, vigorous young men in which they will translate their contempt of weakness into contempt of virtue. My plea is that the virtuous man, the decent man, shall be a strong man, able to hold his own in any way, just because I wish him to be an agent in eradicating the misconception that being decent somehow means being weak; I want this to apply to every form of decency, public as well as private.

The worst development that we could see in civic life in this country would be a division of citizens into two camps, one camp containing nice, well-behaved, well-meaning little men, with receding chins and small feet, men who mean well and who if they are insulted feel shocked and want to go home; and the other camp containing robust and efficient creatures who do not mean well at all. I wish to see our side—the side of decency—include men who have not the slightest fear of the people on the other side. I wish to see the decent man in any relation of life, including politics, when hustled by the man who is not decent, able so to hold his own that the other gentleman shall feel no desire to hustle him again. My plea is for the virtue that shall be strong and that shall also have a good time. You recollect that Wesley said he wasn’t going to leave all the good times to the Devil. In the same way we must not leave strength and efficiency to the Devil’s agents. The decent man must realize that it is his duty to be strong just as much as to be decent. There are a good many types of men for whom I do not care; and among those types I would put in prominent place the timid good man—the good man who means well but is afraid. I wish to see it inculcated from the pulpit by every ethical teacher, and in the home, that just to be decent is not enough; that in addition to being a decent man it is the duty of the man to be a strong man. And also this; to let the fact that he is a decent man dawn on his neighbors by itself, and without his announcing it or emphasizing it.

With both men and women the prime necessity to remember is that the simple duties are the most important. I believe that they also mark the way by which, and by which alone, it is possible to realize the truest and highest happiness. I have known a good many miserable people in my life, and infinitely the most miserable among them have been those who have deliberately and with set purpose devoted their lives to the pursuit of what they call pleasure. A young girl, a young man, can be happy for a few years and to a certain degree, in following a life from which every vestige of serious effort and of attempt to fulfill duty has been removed; but they can thus be happy only at the cost of laying up for themselves an infinite store of misery in the future. In this audience there are many who fought in the great Civil War. The memories that those men prize are not the memories of the days of ease, of the days when life was pleasant for them; the memories that they prize, and that they wish to hand down as heritages of honor to their children, are the memories of the days of toil and effort, of the days of the march and the battle, the weary months in camp, the time when in the full flush of their vigorous young manhood they gladly risked everything—life itself—for the great prize of death in battle for the right.

It is not given to every generation—fortunately it is given to only an occasional generation—to spend itself for so great a goal; but we can all render, not as distinguished, but as essential, a service in ordinary life, if only we will face the ordinary humdrum every-day duties in the spirit in which the soldiers of the Civil War faced their great and exceptional task. But this we can only do if we put duty before pleasure, and make of it our highest happiness.

As I said to you yesterday, I do not intend to preach anything that I do not think can be practiced. I call your attention to the fact that I have not said that you shall put duty in the place of pleasure; I have merely asked you to put it before pleasure. Pleasure has its place. I wish you to have a good time, I wish you to enjoy yourselves. But I wish you to remember that merely having a good time will turn to bitter dust in your mouth, to Dead Sea fruit in your mouth, if you devote your whole attention only to the pursuit of pleasure, and especially to the pursuit of vapid pleasure. Pleasure interspersed as an occasional needed relief in doing your life work as duty demands that you do it—such pleasure is worth having. But pleasure pursued as a serious business represents about as melancholy an occupation as any that I know of anywhere. Of course, if you have the pure Bridge Club type of mind I can’t expect to appeal to you. If unlimited Bridge, continued through that section of eternity that you enjoy on this earth, represents your ideal, then nothing that I can say will in any way shake or alter it—which will be, not my fault, but yours. If, however, you have in you the desire for higher things, then I believe that it is possible to make you realize that in the long run your greatest enjoyment will come from the performance of duty. It is very important that we should consider our rights; but it is all-important that we should consider our duties.

A little while ago I was handed a letter from the Equal Suffrage Association asking me to speak on behalf of Woman Suffrage. I have always told my friends that it seemed to me that no man was worth his salt who did not think very deeply of woman’s rights; and that no woman was worth her salt who did not think more of her duties than of her rights. Now, personally I am rather tepidly in favor of woman’s suffrage. When the opportunity came I have always supported it. But I have studied the condition of women in those states where they have the suffrage and in the adjacent states where they do not have it; and, after such study I have never been able to take as great interest in the question as in many other questions because it has always seemed to me so infinitely less important than so many other questions affecting women. I do not think that the harm that its opponents fear will come from it, but I do not think that more than a fraction of the good that its advocates anticipate will come from it. In consequence, while I favor it yet, as I said, I favor it tepidly, because I am infinitely more interested in other things. I do not believe that the question of woman’s voting is a thousandth or a millionth part as important as the question of keeping, and where necessary reviving, among the women of this country, the realization that their great work must be done in the home, that the ideal woman of the future, just like the ideal woman of the past, must be the good wife, the good mother, the mother who is able to bear, and to rear, a number of healthy children. Now, I notice that a good many men applauded that statement. I wish to say to those men in their turn that there is no human being with whom I have less sympathy than the man who is always loudly in favor of woman doing her duty while he falls short in the performance of his own. He in his turn is not fit to exercise the suffrage if he is not a good man in his own home. If he does not make it the first duty of his life to be an efficient home-maker, a good and loving husband, a wise and loving father, he is a mighty poor citizen. And let him be exceedingly careful that he occupies the proper relation towards his family, and does his duty to the state; before he tries to talk to the woman about keeping her proper position. Let him do his duty first before troubling himself as to how she does hers.

I wish to speak especially about the relation of the home and the child. There is a natural—and I cannot help thinking a regrettable—tendency to treat with a certain levity what ought to be the great fundamental truth underlying every system of morals taught in this country. I do not wish to see this country a country of selfish prosperity, where those who enjoy the material prosperity think only of the selfish gratification of their own desires, and are content to import from abroad not only their art, not only their literature, but even their babies. Look at the census returns published in 1910, and you will see that this country is beginning to travel the path that France has long been traveling. Two-thirds of our increase now comes from the immigrants and not from the babies born here, not from young Americans who are to perpetuate the blood and traditions of the old stock. It surely ought to be so obvious as to be unnecessary to point out that all thought of the next generation, all thought of its vocational, artistic or ethical training is wasted thought if there is not to be a next generation to train. The first duty of any nation that is worth considering at all is to perpetuate its own life, its own blood. That duty will not be performed unless we have not merely a high but a sober ideal of duty and devotion in family life, unless our men and women realize what true happiness is, realize and act on the belief that no other form of pleasure, no other form of enjoyment, in any way takes the place of that highest of all pleasures which comes only in the home, which comes from the love of the one man and the one woman for each other, and for their children. Nothing else takes the place or can take the place of family life, and family life cannot be really happy unless it is based on duty, based on recognition of the great underlying laws of religion and morality, of the great underlying laws of civilization, the laws which if broken mean the dissolution of civilization. Unless the average man and woman are married and have healthy children then my coming before this audience is a waste of time and it is a waste of time for you in your turn to come here and listen to me. If you do not believe in your own stock enough to wish to see the stock kept up then you are not good Americans, you are not patriots; and if you do not believe in this, then I for one shall not mourn your extinction, and in such event I shall welcome the advent of a new race that will take your place, because you will have shown that you are not fit to cumber the ground.

This is the most essential and the least pleasant truth that I have to tell you. I can’t expect you to applaud it. But I want you to think over it; and I don’t care a rap what you think of me for telling it to you, if only you will think seriously of the truth itself. In the long run no man or woman can really be happy unless he or she is doing service. Happiness springing exclusively from some other cause crumbles in your hands, amounts to nothing; and in no other way can service as good be rendered as by the right type of mother and father—and I have put them in their order of precedence, the mother first, the father next.

Speaking here in a great educational institution I wish to extend my profound sympathy to the teachers and instructors who are continually brought into contact with what I may call the cuckoo style of parent—the parent who believes that when he can once turn his child into school he shifts all responsibility from his own shoulders for the child’s education, the parent who believes that he can buy for a certain sum—which he usually denounces as excessive—a deputy parent to do his work for him. There is no profession in this country quite as important as the profession of teacher, ranging from the College President right down to the lowest paid teacher in any one of our smallest country public schools. There is no other profession so important. But not the best teacher can wholly supply the want of what ought to be done in the home by the father and the mother. And you men here, I wish you to remember that I put the father in with the mother. I know perfectly well that he cannot fulfill quite as useful a function in the home; but he has his place! He has no right to try to shift the burden wholly upon the woman’s shoulders and then wonder why the children are not better brought up. We continually speak—and it is perfectly proper that we should—of the enormous importance of the woman’s work in the home. It is more important than the man’s. She does play a greater part. But the man is not to be excused if he fails to recognize that his work in the home, in helping bring up, as well as provide for, the children, is also one of his primary functions.

Just because she is more important in the home than the father I wish to speak especially to the women on one point in connection with bringing up children. One of the things that makes one sad in certain families is to see the harm done by the loving parent who is foolish. I trust that I need not say that I abhor and condemn the father and the mother who do not give ample and manifest love to the children. It is a dreadful thing to have a child brought up in a loveless home; it is a dreadful thing to have the children who are brought into the world deprived of the love and the devotion which is their due. But great though the harm is that is done by the hard, narrow, unsympathetic parent, it is hardly greater than the harm done by the well-meaning parent—and I regret to say more often by the woman than the man—the well-meaning parent who permits tenderness of heart to extend until it becomes softness of head. Too often, among hard-working friends of mine I have known a woman say, “I’ve had to work hard all my life and my daughter shall be brought up as a lady”; meaning—poor soul—that the daughter shall be brought up to be utterly worthless to herself and to everyone else. I have often seen a good woman—at least a woman who was good in purpose—allow her children to become utterly selfish, and really elaborately trained for avoiding the performance of duty, under the mistaken impression that she was being kind and loving to them. The worst wrong that can be committed by you mothers and fathers to your children is to train them in such fashion that they have no recognition of duty to themselves or to others. Your children had better have been taken away from you and adopted somewhere else than brought up by you if you are guilty of the culpable weakness of gratifying your own feeling of weak, ease-loving affection by failing to make them behave from the beginning as they ought to behave.

I am speaking of what I have seen in humble households. I have seen it in aggravated degree in bigger households; but, just as I told you yesterday, I am not concerned very much with the multi-millionaire excepting as we are foolish enough to allow ourselves to be hurt by anything that is wrong in his example. I meet just as large a proportion of good people among multi-millionaires as among others; but anything merely affecting them is a small question. I am not dealing with them. If they all went wrong, and the rest of the American people went right, the nation would still be all right.

The man in whom I am primarily interested, the woman in whom I am most interested, is the average man and the average woman, the American whom we see about us running the trolley-cars, running the steam-cars, running every small business, taking care of the small houses, doing all the ordinary things around about us. It is for and to them that I am speaking.

If the mother teaches the girl that when she comes home she is to sit in the front parlor at ease and let the mother work in the kitchen and run up and down stairs until at the end of the day she is utterly worn out, she not only wrongs herself—that I am not concerned about, for she is too foolish to have me care very much about her—but, what I am concerned about, she inflicts a dreadful wrong on the daughter and upon all with whom the daughter is afterwards to be brought into contact. If the girl trained in such a way is a fundamentally good girl she will finally unlearn the lesson she was taught at home; but it will cost her years of effort to unlearn the lesson; and if she is of weak character she will have been permanently spoiled.

And in just the same way with the father—and here I am going to say a word especially to the father who is pretty well off in this world’s goods. If the father brings up the boy in such fashion that he cannot do anything except spend money in vacuous fashion he has not helped the boy, he has hurt him. It would have been better for the boy that the father had never earned money at all than to have earned money if his training is to be in such fashion. Of course, you fathers, it is a great error to think that it is necessary to show needless harshness to your sons. I have no patience with that type of twisted Puritanism which forbids the father to show love and affection and consideration for his son. You do not make the boy hardier or better by making him miserable; you do not tend to make him a good citizen by giving him a feeling of sore dislike for his parent. Make him your companion, make him your friend; do all you can for him; and then make him understand that in his turn he must do all he can for you and for the rest of the family. Make it a reciprocal bond between you. But never whether from carelessness or folly let him grow up thinking that it is proper for him to lead a useless or idle life or one of mere pleasure. We have room in this country for a busy leisure class but we have no room for an idle class, I don’t care at which end of the social scale, whether of a hobo or a multi-millionaire.

And one more word to the mother. I have spoken of the mother’s training of the daughter. Perhaps it is even worse if the mother permits the son to grow up selfish and without regard for the feeling of others. I remember a good many years ago reading a little story that impressed me much. It described a tired, rather wornout mother getting into a railroad train with her boy. The mother sat by the window in the seat; the minute the little boy discovered that he was not by the window he began “mother, I want to sit by the window”; she replied “mother is tired”; then he, “mother, I want to sit by the window”; she answered “now, Johnnie, you wouldn’t ask to sit by the window when poor mother is so tired”; he, pouting and sullen “I want to sit by the window”; she, patiently “Johnnie, I want to look out of the window, I am very tired, I want to rest”; he, louder and more angry, “I want to sit by the window”; whereupon at last the mother let him sit by the window! The author of the story went on to say that sometime in the future a sad little wife would wonder “why men were so inconsiderate”; and that the blame would rest really as much with Johnnie’s unwise mother as with himself. Of course, what the Johnnie of that type needs is a firm parental hand. Let him have discipline in as ample a measure as love.

I remember a most excellent backwoods mother whom I once knew who, having disciplined a boy who sadly needed it, was addressed by a rather sentimental lady of my acquaintance as follows: “Oh, my dear Mrs. So and So, I am sure it hurt you worse than it did him”! To which my backwoods friend responded, “indeed it did not, he had been very bad; and I thoroughly enjoyed it”!

So my plea today is for that form of applied ethics which lies at the base of every kind of good citizenship. We cannot have good citizenship in the present unless the average man and the average woman do their duty in their homes; we cannot have good citizenship in the future unless in the average home the average boy and girl are so brought up that in the future they will be American men and women of the right type, able and anxious to meet all the exacting demands that American citizenship now makes, and that it will make in ever increasing degree upon our people as the generations pass.