Samantha on Children's Rights

by Marietta Holley

And she is jest as truthful as the day is long, that is, what she calls truth. Everything is new to her and strange. The thoughts in her little brain jest wakin’ up, and to a imaginative child the dreams and fancies that fill her little mind, the child’s world within, must seem as strange as the new strange things of the world about her.

It is all a untried mystery to her, and it stands to reason that she can’t separate things all to once and put the right names to ’em all. The gay romances of the child’s fairy world within from the colder reasonin’ of the world without. The child’s world is purer than ourn, it is the only land of innocence and truth we know in this dreary life. And it seems as if we would let our souls listen to catch any whispers from that land, so sweet, so evanescent.

For there is the only perfect faith, unbounded, uncalculating, so soon to be displaced by doubt. The only perfect innocence, the blessed ignorance of wrong, so soon, so surely to be stained by the knowledge of sin. The divine faith in other’s goodness so soon to be dimmed by distrust. The gay, onthinkin’ happiness, so soon to be darkened by sorrow and anxiety—the rosy hopes so soon to fade away to the gray ashes of disappointment. Fair land! sunny time! so bright, so fleetin’—it seems as if we should treat its broken language, its strange fancies tenderly and reverently, rememberin’ the lost time when we, too, were wandering in its enchanted gardens. Rememberin’ that the gate of death must swing back before we can again enter a world of such purity, such beauty.

But we do not, we meet its pure and sweet unwisdom with our grim, rebukin’ knowledge which we gained as Eve did, its innocent, guileless ways with the intolerance of our dry old customs, its broken fancies, its sweet romancin’ with cold derision or the cruelty of punishment. It makes me fairly out of patience to think on’t.

It stands to reason, when everything under the sun is new and strange to ’em, they can’t git all to once the meanin’ of every big word in the Dictionary, and mebby they will git things a little mixed sometimes. But how can they help it? Why, what if we should be dropped right down into a strange country where we had never sot our feet before and told to walk straight, and wuz punished every time we meandered, when we didn’t know a step before us, or on each side on us, how could we help meanderin’ a little, how could we help sometimes talkin’ about the inhabitants of the world we wuz accustomed to, usin’ its language?

What we would need would be to be sot in the right way agin, with patience, and over and over agin, and time and time agin. Patience and long sufferin’ and reason is what we should need, and not punishment, and that is what children need.

Many a child is skairt and whipped into bein’ a hippocrite and liar, when, if they had been encouraged to tell the truth—own up their little faults and meanderin’s—and treated justly, patiently, and kindly, they would have been as truthful and transparent as rain water. Children have sharp eyes and are quick to see injustice, and things sink deep into their little souls. They are whipped if they don’t tell the truth, skaired dark nights with the lurid passage—“Liars shall have their portion in the lake of fire and brimstone.”

And then they see their mother smile into some disagreeable visitor’s face and groan at her back. How can the baby wisdom part the smile from the groan, and find truth under ’em? How can we? They are taught under fear of severest punishment to be honest—“Thou shalt not steal.” And then, with their earliest knowledge, they hear their mother boast of some advantage she has gained over the shopkeeper, and their father congratulating himself on how he got the better of his neighbor in a horse trade. And if she be the child of a business man, happy for her if she does not wonder at that sight strange to men and gods, to see her father lose all his wealth one day, to rise up rich the next, rise up from a crowd of poor men and wimmen he has cheated and ruined.

She is taught that deceit is an abomination to the Lord. And then she stands with her little eyes on a level with the washstand, and sees her big sister paint and powder her face, darken her eyebrows, and pad her lean form into roundness. She is taught the exceeding sinfulness of envy, strife, and emulation. And then, in the same breath, urged to commit to memory more Bible verses than little Molly Smith has learned, and consulted about the number of ruffles on her dress with the firm resolve to have one more than she has, so as to be cleverer and look dressier than she duz.

She is taught that God loves good children, and to flee from evil communications, and then counseled to never by any means associate with the washerwoman’s little girl, who is very good, but to play with the banker’s little boy, who is very bad.