“I won’t.”
“I tell you, come in directly, sir—do you hear?”
“I won’t,” replies the urchin taking to his heels.
“A sturdy republican, sir,” says his father to me, smiling at the boy’s resolute disobedience.
Be it recollected that I give this as one instance of a thousand which I witnessed during my sojourn in the country.
It may be inquired, how is it that such is the case at present, when the obedience to parents was so rigorously inculcated by the puritan fathers, that by the blue laws, the punishment of disobedience was death? Captain Hall ascribes it to the democracy, and the rights of equality therein acknowledged; but I think, allowing the spirit of their institutions to have some effect in producing this evil, that the principal cause of it is the total neglect of the children by the father, and his absence in his professional pursuits, and the natural weakness of most mothers, when their children are left altogether to their care and guidance.
Mr Sanderson, in his Sketches of Paris, observes:— “The motherly virtues of our women, so eulogised by foreigners, is not entitled to unqualified praise. There is no country in which maternal care is so assiduous; but also there is none in which examples of injudicious tenderness are so frequent.” This I believe to be true; not that the American women are really more injudicious than those of England, but because they are not supported as they should be by the authority of the father, of whom the child should always entertain a certain portion of fear mixed with affection, to counterbalance the indulgence accorded by natural yearnings of a mother’s heart.
The self-will arising from this fundamental error manifests itself throughout the whole career of the American’s existence, and, consequently, it is a self-willed nation par excellence.
At the age of six or seven you will hear both boys and girls contradicting their fathers and mothers, and advancing their own opinions with a firmness which is very striking.
At fourteen or fifteen the boys will seldom remain longer at school. At college, it is the same thing; (note 6) and they learn precisely what they please, and no more. Corporal punishment is not permitted; indeed, if we are to judge from an extract I took from an American paper, the case is reversed.