ich the inclination of the
young seems to suggest, would be to run the risk of being regarded as
officious or meddling, and thereby of inviting insult. Parents whose
children are known to be of the class pictured are themselves timid
and indisposed to insist upon obedience from them, for fear of
offending them and causing them to go away from home. The inexperience
and ignorance of childhood and youth, coupled with the grant of too
great liberty, are responsible for the too general tendency to wrong
doing.
Negro parents who were themselves victims of oppression as well as
those who were born under the benign influences of freedom, have crude
and unwise notions about the duty of requiring their children to do
some kind of work. Too many Negro children are guarded from soiling
their hands and developing their muscles with necessary and useful
toil. The struggling, industrious widow as well as the
well-conditioned housewife whose husband has a good home and makes a
good living, seeks to relieve her children of work. This encouragement
of laziness can have but one outcome--the living in the sweat of
others' faces than their own. Under conditions such as these, parents
possessed of radically ignorant and wrong notions about rearing their
children, unconsciously cultivate tendencies which lead to
criminality. To the extent that a child's mind becomes familiar with
higher conditions and mind-work, to that degree does physical exertion
in the way of mere muscle-work become distasteful, and as a result the
child becomes less efficient as a mere bread-winner by the sweat of
his brow. Education is chargeable with producing a condition for which
parents and not school teachers are responsible. Complete and entire
reform in our system of home-training of our boys and girls will go
far to relieve youthful Negroes of just censure for ill-breeding. How
far all these reflections are applicable to the rearing and training
of white children is for white parents to consider.
Mr. Philip Alexander Bruce, in a recent publication in the
_Contemporary Review_,[6] accounts for moral delinquencies in the
young of the race by the very natural and normal disposition of
Negroes, where numerically strong, to segregate themselves from the
whites. In London one finds a French settlement. In nearly every large
city in the United States, Germans live together. Italians, Swedes,
and Norwegians settle among their congeners. It is not contended that
th
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