This bids fair to be—as I knew it would, if once I permitted myself to write at all on the subject—not a paragraph, but a whole essay—or perhaps, if I did not check myself, a whole volume! But after all, what I want to say is merely that as no child can be born without a father, so he cannot be properly trained without a father's daily assistance. And that, since most fathers come to the task even more untrained than the mothers, some training must be undertaken. By whom? By the mother. It is, I solemnly believe, your duty to go ahead a little on this part of the journey, find out what ought to be done, and teach, coax, induce your husband to co-operate with you in these things. No one knows better than you do that he is only a boy at heart after all—perhaps the very dearest boy of them all. This boy you have to help while yet the other children are little—but be sure that, as you teach him, so, all the time, will he teach you. Every principle laid down in this book, above all others the principle of freedom, will apply to him. He will take the lessons a trifle more reluctantly but more lastingly than the younger boys; and in a little while you will be envied of all your women friends because of the competency, the reliability, the contentment of your children's father.
THE UNCONSCIOUS INFLUENCE
When all is said and done, it remains true that the finest, the most subtle and penetrating influence in education is precisely that education for which no rules can be laid down. It is the silent influence of the motives which impel the persons who constantly surround us. If we examine for a little our own childhood we see at once that this is so. What are those canons of conduct by which we judge others and even occasionally ourselves? Whence came that list of impossible things, those things that are so closed to us that we cannot, even under great stress, of temptation, conceive ourselves as yielding to them?
There is an enlightening story of a young man, born and bred a gentleman, who, by the way of fast living falls upon poverty. In the hard pressure of his financial affairs he is about to commit suicide, when suddenly he finds, in an empty cab, a roll of bills amounting to some thousands of dollars. The circumstances are such that he knows that he can, if he will, discover the owner; or, he can, without fear of detection, keep the money himself. He makes up his mind, deliberately, to keep it, and then, almost against his will, subconsciously as it were, walks to the office of the man who lost the money and restores it to him.
Now, doubtless, in his downward career he had done many things which judged by any absolute standard of morality were quite as wrong as the keeping of that money would have been, but the fact remained that he could not do that deed. Others, yes, but not that. He was a gentleman, and gentlemen do not steal private property, whatever they may do about public property. Yet probably, in all his life he had not once been told not to steal—not one word had he been taught, openly, on the subject. No one whom he knew stole. He was never expected to steal. Stealing was a sin beyond the pale. So strong was this unconscious, but unvarying influence, that by it he was saved, in the hour of extreme need, from even feeling the force of a temptation that to a boy born and reared, say, in the slums, would have been overwhelming.
Now, considering such things, I take it that it behooves us, as parents, to look closely at the sort of persons that we are, clear inside of us. To examine, as if with the clear eyes of our own children, waiting to be clouded by our sophistries, the motives from which we habitually act in the small affairs of everyday life. Are we influenced by fear of what the neighbors will say? Have we one standard of courtesy for company times, and another for private moments? If so, why? Are we self-indulgent about trifles? Are we truthful in spirit as well as in letter? Do we permit ourselves to cheat the street-car and the railroad company, teaching the child at our side to sit low that he may ride for half-fare? Do we seek justice in our bargaining, or are we sharp and self-considerate? Do we practice democracy, or only talk it and wave the flag at it?
And so on with a hundred other questions as to those small repeated acts, which, springing from base motives, may put our unconscious influence with our children in the already over-weighted down-side of the scale; or met bravely and nobly, at some expense of convenience, may help to enlighten the weight of inherited evil. Sometimes I wonder how much of what we call inherited evil is the result not of heredity at all, but of this sort of unconscious education.