'"I do you wrong, Dillon—but on this subject I will have no one speak. I cannot be the man you would have me; I have been schooled otherwise. My mother has taught me a different lesson,—her teachings have doomed me, and these enjoyments are now all beyond my hopes."
'"Your mother!" was the response of Dillon, in unaffected astonishment.
'"Ay, man—my mother. Is there any thing wonderful in that? She taught me this lesson with her milk—she sung it in lullabies over my cradle—she gave it me in the plaything of my boyhood—her schoolings have made me the morbid, the fierce criminal, from whose association all the gentler virtues must always desire to fly. If, in the doom, which may finish my life of doom, I have any person to accuse of all, that person is—my mother!"
'"Is this possible? Is it true? It is strange, very strange."
'"It is not strange—we see it every day—in almost every family. She did not tell me to lie—or to swindle, or to stab. No! Oh no! she would have told me that all these things were bad—but she taught me to perform them all. She roused my passions and not my principles into activity. She provoked the one and suppressed the other. Did my father reprove my improprieties, she petted me and denounced him. She crossed his better purposes and defeated all his designs, until at last, she made my passions too strong for my government, not less than hers; and left me, knowing the true, yet the victim of the false. What is more,—while my intellect, in its calmer hours, taught me that virtue was the only source of true felicity, my ungovernable passions set the otherwise sovereign reason at defiance, and trampled it under foot. Yes—in that last hour of eternal retribution, if called upon to denounce or to accuse, I can point but to one as the author of all—the weakly, fond, misjudging, misguiding woman, who gave me birth. Within the last hour, I have been thinking over all these things. I have been thinking how I had been cursed in childhood, by one who surely loved me beyond all other things beside. I can remember how sedulously she encouraged and prompted my infant passions, uncontrolled by her reason, and since utterly unrestrainable by my own. How she stimulated me to artifices, and set me the example herself, by frequently deceiving my father and teaching me to disobey and deceive him. She told me not to lie, and she lied all day to him, on my account, and to screen me from his anger. She taught me the catechism to say on Sunday, while during the week, she schooled me in almost every possible form of ingenuity to violate all its precepts.
'"She bribed me to do my duty, and hence my duty could only be done under the stimulating promise of a reward. She taught me that God was superior to all, and that he required obedience to certain laws, yet as she hourly violated those laws herself in my behalf, I was taught to regard myself as far superior to him. Had she not done all this, I had not been here and thus: I had been what I now dare not think on. It is all her work. The greatest enemy my life has ever known has been my own mother."
'"This is a horrible thought, captain, yet I cannot but think it true."
'"It is true. I have analyzed my own history, and the causes of my character and fortunes now, and I charge it all upon her. From one influence I have traced another, until I have the sweeping amount of twenty years of crime and sorrow and a life of hate, and probably a death of ignominy, all owing to the first ten years of my infant education, when the only teacher that I knew was the woman that gave me birth."'
This is a fictitious tale indeed, but it is sadly true to nature. We have seen the victim of indulgence trained by the mere neglect of restraint to a violence of passion which reviled and abused the mother that bore him. We have known the abandoned son turn with doubled fist and furious gestures to his mother, and tell her,—"You have trained me to all this." We have known those who escaped this dreadful fate, mourn through life, the mental suffering, or the bodily debility, which the mistaken indulgence of a mother's love had entailed upon them. And if the man could always look back with the skill of Heinroth to his early childhood, even when no gross neglect of discipline was to be discovered, would he not accuse her early and excessive indulgence of his dawning appetites and craving desires as the source of that violence of passion—that obstinacy, which cost him so much painful discipline in youth, and perhaps still poison the peace of his manhood? Is there no argument, no appeal which can reach the heart of those mothers, who are sacrificing the future peace and character and hopes of their children, to the mere pleasure of gratifying them for the moment?