“But,” I objected, “what I would say would be addressed to women alone. We don’t care to let men know how unmercifully we can handle one another. Moreover, I should use great plainness of speech”—
“I think I can set your mind at rest on that point,” interrupted my companion, drily. “I don’t believe many men would read your treatise.”
Whereupon he picked up his treatise and withdrew to his sanctum, leaving me to arrange the heads of my “discourse,” or to ponder the meaning of his last equivocal observation.
And thus it came to pass, that, sitting lonely here, and arranging plans for the coming festival—the jubilee that, throughout Christendom, commemorates the birth of a little Child in the grotto of far-off Bethlehem; musing of that Child and his mother, while from the wall, the Mater Dolorosa, wondrous in beauty and in sorrow, looked down upon me—thought followed thought, and memories—sweet, tender, and full of joy, others sad, yet precious, and mingled with wistful yearning, flowed in upon me, and I have taken up my pen, not to indite a lecture or an essay, but a simple, homely, heartfelt Christmas letter to my fellow-workers in the great mission to which God has called us.
“And first, let me remark, by way of ‘beginning at the beginning,’ as old-time teachers were wont to exhort their scholars to do—that Babies have a right to be.”
This is not the page whereon to record a frank and full opinion upon such a subject, nor is mine the will or ability to treat of the mysteries of iniquity, the violence done to conscience, humanity, and natural affection, that have come to be talked of in the so-called higher circles as familiar things, convenient and expedient measures for leaving fashionable mothers—(does not the holy word look like a bitter sarcasm, written in this connection?)—for leaving frivolous, heartless mothers, I say, at liberty to follow the devices of their own foolish brains, and delivering sordid fathers from what I have heard professing Christians style—“the curse of a large family.” I know that such abominations do exist, and so does the fair reader, who is ready to ostracize me for daring to hint thus publicly at what she privately approves and advocates. I can see that our pleasure-loving neighbors over the water are in a fair way to be rivaled, if not eclipsed, in certain respects, by their American cousins. Further than this I will not go. I only refer to this, to me revolting subject, to substantiate a conclusion at which I have arrived in the course of my serious and often sadly troubled lucubrations with regard to this matter. It is my conviction that the real root of the evil lies back of this, its most reprehensible offshoot. I have no means of settling the date at which the opinion or prejudice was implanted on this continent, but certain it is, that a vast proportion—I fear, a large majority—of American mothers, would secretly, if not openly, controvert my first proposition. There is among us, if not a woeful deficiency of genuine maternal instinct, a style—a fashion, if you choose to call it, and a very vile fashion it is—of deprecating as a grievous affliction the repeated visits of what a higher authority than “the noted Dr. ——, from Paris,” or the autocrat of neighborhood gossips, has declared to be among Heaven’s best gifts to human kind.
“Poor Mrs. A., with her eight children, like a flight of stairs—just two years between them”—is, by her friends’ very pity, made to feel that she is, in some sense, the inferior of Mrs. B., who “manages so beautifully!” She has but three, and they are seven years apart.
It matters not that Mrs. A.’s household resembles a snug nest of chirping birdlings, who lie all the warmer for being obliged to stow a little closely; who learn patience and loving-kindness and generosity by hourly practice of these graces upon one another, without being aware that any lessons are set for them—they come so naturally; who never lack company or sympathy, by reason of the abundance of home companions and home love; who bid fair to keep their parents’ name long alive upon the earth, and, in their own maturity, to transmit to an extended circle—to a large community—it may be to a whole nation, the principles taught them at their mother’s knees and from their father’s lips. It signifies little to the feminine cabal that each one of the little B.’s has been, for seven long weary years, that most forlorn and pitiable of juvenile specimens—an only baby; has become dwarfed in affections; narrowed as to ability to love and to enter into the feelings of other children; thoroughly, and often incorrigibly selfish; and when, at last, the lustrum being accomplished, the newer infant is ushered into the world, the older regards it with dire distrust and lurking jealousy, if not avowed dislike, as the usurper of his or her hitherto undisputed rights.
“My children will never be companions for one another; they are so far apart!” sighs Mrs. B., as the pert Miss of fourteen pronounces the tiny sister, who has not numbered as many hours of existence, “a regular bore!” and “wonders why she came. Nobody wants her; and it is too provoking to have a baby in the house just as one is beginning to go into society, and wants a good deal of gay company.”
But Mrs. Grundy—an American Mrs. Grundy, you may be sure, with a dash of Parisian philosophy—has declared the one matron to be a broken-down druge, a domestic slave—“quite behind the times, in fact!” while “Mrs. B. is a truly fortunate and”—here Mrs. Grundy whispers—“a very enlightened and judicious lady!”