Father.
THE DOMESTIC HEARTH
THE DOMESTIC HEARTH
March 1, 19—.
My dear Alexa,—
If you have a fault—and far be it from your adoring father to suggest that you have—but if you have a fault, it shows itself in your trick of asking questions beginning with an “ought.” I think my recollection is right when it tells me that your last three letters have, together with a good deal that was both interesting and diverting, contained a query as to whether you or somebody else “ought” or “ought” not to do something or other. When it is a case of You, I feel myself more or less competent to answer; for about You I do know a little, you see; but when you ask me what somebody else ought to do or to leave undone, somebody else of whom I know nothing, why, then I am stricken with a feeling of hopeless futility. I sit here and dither, and cover sheets of letter paper with my illegible handwriting only to tear them up after a miserable half-hour’s boggling. For to know what a person “ought” to do, one must know the person, you see, and the circumstances in which that person is posed. There are no “oughts” unrelated to particular persons and particular circumstances. If there were, what plain sailing life’s perilous voyage would be, wouldn’t it? In point of dismal fact that voyage is made upon an uncharted sea. A few plain general instructions in the principles of navigation are all we get; we have to look out for the rocks and shoals and whirlpools and adverse currents for ourselves.
There are not nearly so many “oughts” in life as you in the solemn ingenuousness of your youth doubtless imagine. As you grow older you will find the “oughts” diminish and the “musts” increase. That is to say what looks like moral freedom gradually, and not so very gradually either, gives way to what in stern fact is practical necessity. But I suppose I must come to the point.