In the daily scandals, in the quarrels
of friends, in bankruptcy disclosures, in lawsuits, in police reports,
we have constantly thrust before us the pervading selfishness,
dishonesty, brutality. Yet when we criticise nursery-management and
canvass the misbehaviour of juveniles, we habitually take for granted
that these culpable persons are free from moral delinquency in the
treatment of their boys and girls! So far is this from the truth, that
we do not hesitate to blame parental misconduct for a great part of the
domestic disorder commonly ascribed to the perversity of children. We do
not assert this of the more sympathetic and self-restrained, among whom
we hope most of our readers may be classed; but we assert it of the
mass. What kind of moral culture is to be expected from a mother who,
time after time, angrily shakes her infant because it will not suck;
which we once saw a mother do? How much sense of justice is likely to be
instilled by a father who, on having his attention drawn by a scream to
the fact that his child's finger is jammed between the window-sash and
sill, begins to beat the child instead of releasing it? Yet that there
are such fathers is testified to us by an eye-witness. Or, to take a
still stronger case, also vouched for by direct testimony--what are the
educational prospects of the boy who, on being taken home with a
dislocated thigh, is saluted with a castigation? It is true that these
are extreme instances--instances exhibiting in human beings that blind
instinct which impels brutes to destroy the weakly and injured of their
own race. But extreme though they are, they typify feelings and conduct
daily observable in many families. Who has not repeatedly seen a child
slapped by nurse or parent for a fretfulness probably resulting from
bodily derangement? Who, when watching a mother snatch up a fallen
little one, has not often traced, both in the rough manner and in the
sharply-uttered exclamation--"You stupid little thing!"--an irascibility
foretelling endless future squabbles? Is there not in the harsh tones in
which a father bids his children be quiet, evidence of a deficient
fellow-feeling with them? Are not the constant, and often quite
needless, thwartings that the young experience--the injunctions to sit
still, which an active child cannot obey without suffering great nervous
irritation, the commands not to look out of the window when travelling
by railway, which on a child of any intelli