n upon the subject I
committed at once to the flames, satisfied I never could do any better,
and might possibly do very much worse.

I believe that the major part of sour-tempered, perversely wrong-headed,
and unhappily disposed people, of hot-headed fanatics, victims to one
idea, of once noble souls who sink themselves in sensuality, and so go
down to death, and of all the sad cases one hears and reads of day after
day and year after year, are made so through unceasing aggravation at
the most impressible time of life. Do any of you who may be my readers
know of half a dozen happy families in your circle of friends and
acquaintance? Do you know of half a dozen where boys prefer home and
their sisters to the streets, or where girls do not court the most
uninviting boy in preference to their own brothers?

One would almost imagine spite had been the feeling implanted in all
homes, as they look at the private pinch exchanged between John and
James, the face made by Mary at which Martha cries and is slapped by way
of adjusting matters, and the general refusal of requests made to father
and mother, whether reasonable or not. My own childhood was moderately
happy, and yet I recall now the sense of burning indignation I sometimes
suffered at wrongs done me, which the child's sense of justice told me
were wrongs, and which I now know to have been so. Children are
themselves one of the aggravations of living, but it is because we do
not know how to treat them. I look for a time when every father shall be
just, every mother reasonable as well as loving; when children shall
neither be flogged up the way of life as in times past, or coaxed up
with sugarplums as in times present, but, seeing with clear eyes the
straight path, shall walk in it with joy, and finish their course with
rejoicing.

Another aggravation, and not a minor one either it strikes me, is the
summary way in which youth is put down by middle-aged and aged people.
Youthful emotions are 'bosh and twaddle,' youthful ideas, 'crude, sir,
very crude!' and youthful attempts to be and to do something in the
world frowned at, as if action of any sort, save inaction, before forty,
were an outrage on humanity, and an insult to the Creator.

How fares it with young professional men during the first ten years of
their career? They hope and wait, doubt and wait, curse and wait, labor
to wait, and in the mean time a wheezing old lawyer, with no more
enthusiasm than a brickbat