One day several years ago, when Mr. Lowes Dickinson's statement that he had found no conversation and—worse still—no conversationalists in America was fresh in our outraged minds, I happened to meet an English woman who had spent approximately the same amount of time in our country as had Mr. Lowes Dickinson. "What has been your experience?" I anxiously asked her. "Is it true that we only 'talk'? Can it really be that we never 'converse'?"
"Dear me, no!" she exclaimed with gratifying fervor. "You are the most delightful conversationalists in the world, on your own subject—"
"Our own subject?" I echoed.
"Certainly," she returned; "your own subject, the national subject,—the child, the American child. It is possible to 'converse' with any American on that subject; every one of you has something to say on it; and every one of you will listen eagerly to what any other person says on it. You modify the opinions of your hearers by what you say; and you actually allow your own opinions to be modified by what you hear said. If that is conversation, without a doubt you have it in America, and have it in as perfect a state as conversation ever was had anywhere. But you have it only on that subject. I wonder why," she went on, half- musingly, before I could make an attempt to persuade her to qualify her rather sweeping assertion. "It may be because you do so much for children, in America. They are always on your mind; they are hardly ever out of your sight. You are forever either doing something for them, or planning to do something for them. No wonder the child is your one subject of conversation. You do so very much for children in America," she repeated.
Few of us will agree with the English woman that the child, the American child, is the only subject upon which we converse. Certainly, though, it is a favorite subject; it may even not inaptly be called our national subject. Whatever our various views concerning this may chance to be, however, it is likely that we are all in entire agreement with regard to the other matter touched upon by the English woman,—the pervasiveness of American children. Is it not true that we keep them continually in mind; that we seldom let them go quite out of sight; that we are always doing, or planning to do, something for them? What is it that we would do? And why is it that we try so unceasingly to do it?
It seems to me that we desire with a great desire to make the boys and girls do; that all of the "very much" that we do for them is done in order to teach them just that—to do. It is a large and many-sided and varicolored desire, and to follow its leadings is an arduous labor; but is there one of us who knows a child well who has not this desire, and who does not cheerfully perform that labor? Having decided in so far as we are able what were good to do, we try, not only to do it ourselves, in our grown-up way, but so to train the children that they, too, may do it, in their childish way. The various means that we find most helpful to the end of our own doing we secure for the children,—adapting them, simplifying them, and even re-shaping them, that the boys and girls may use them to the full.
There is, of course, a certain impersonal quality in a great deal of what we, in America, do for children. It is not based so much on friendship for an individual child as on a sense of responsibility for the well-being of all childhood, especially all childhood in our own country. But most of what we do, after all, we do for the boys and girls whom we know and love; and we do it because they are our friends, and we wish them to share in the good things of our lives,—our work and our play. To what amazing lengths we sometimes go in this "doing for" the children of our circles!
One Saturday afternoon, only a few weeks ago, I saw at the annual exhibit of the State Board of Health, a man, one of my neighbors, with his little eight-year old boy. The exhibit consisted of the customary display of charts and photographs, showing the nature of the year's work in relation to the milk supply, the water supply, the housing of the poor, and the prevention of contagious diseases. My neighbor is not a specialist in any one of these matters; his knowledge is merely that of an average good citizen. He went from one subject to the other, studying them. His boy followed close beside him, looking where his father looked,—if with a lesser interest at the charts, with as great an intentness at the photographs. As they made their way about the room given over to the exhibit, they talked, the boy asking questions, the father endeavoring to answer them.
The small boy caught sight of me as I stood before one of the charts relating to the prevention of contagious diseases, and ran across the room to me. "What are you looking at?" he said. "That! It shows how many people were vaccinated, doesn't it? Come over here and see the pictures of the calves the doctors get the stuff to vaccinate with from!"
"Isn't this an odd place for a little boy on a Saturday afternoon?" I remarked to my neighbor, a little later, when the boy had roamed to the other side of the room, out of hearing.