Part 92

No more cruel treatment was ever endured by any human being than the punishment inflicted by that thoughtless man on the nervous, helpless child placed in his power.

Later, of course, there followed the punishment; a huge, powerful man striking repeatedly the delicate body of the child, emphasizing the brutality of his blows with more brutal words, and feeling when it was over that he had gloriously done his duty as a typical American father.

Of course, the actual brutal beating was only a small part of the child's ordeal.

The most horrible part was the waiting for the punishment. No man in the death cell ever suffered more than thousands of children suffer every day waiting for the brutality which is to exemplify our savage notions concerning the education of children.

If such a monstrous parody on a father should be met in some lonely wood by a huge gorilla and treated as that father treats his own son, he would complain bitterly of the gorilla's ferocity. Yet it would not equal in any way his own brutal and less excusable cruelty. ----

If a parent says that he cannot bring up his children and control them without beating them, you may say to that parent:

You never struck a child in your life except when you were angry, and you would not have dared to strike it if it had been of your own size.

Children born of decent parents can be brought up, and ARE brought up, without beatings, and if yours are a different kind of children it is a reflection on YOU, and on your whole brood and family.

The poor, ignorant hen can teach its young ones to scratch and hunt worms, and acquire whatever education they need without hurting them, and a human being should be able to do for his own as much as a hen can do.

IT IS NATURAL FOR CHILDREN TO BE CRUEL

You have perhaps read that Mrs. Isabelle Bailey, of Palmyra, N.J., was cruelly tortured by three little girls.

The unfortunate woman was eighty-five years old, paralyzed, and confined to her bed.

The three children, two of them eight and one eleven years old, tormented the poor woman in a brutal manner, of which details shall not be published here.

The helpless woman ultimately died, and the children were charged with murder. ----

This horrible story is mentioned in the hope of concentrating the minds of mothers and fathers on the fact that children are naturally more cruel, more vicious, than grown people.

The children mentioned in this case were, perhaps, abnormal and unusual monstrosities. But they serve to illustrate the fact that infancy and childhood duplicate, in the individual, the primitive animal life on earth.

Many children are brutally punished and ruined for life because ignorant parents imagine that childhood is naturally pure and innocent and good, and that a child which misbehaves must be abnormally wicked.

If parents knew more about the physical and mental development of their children, they would be better fitted to have charge of them. ----

It is a fact taught by embryology that the human body before its birth passes through numerous stages of development which correspond exactly with the lower forms of animal life.

After birth the child develops MENTALLY in the same way, passing through inferior mental stages and reaching a state of benevolence, honesty, truthfulness and self-restraint only as a result of long education and wise control.

A perfectly truthful child probably never existed. All childish races of savages are incessant liars and thieves. All children passing through the primitive stages of mental development are naturally given to deception, and even to theft, especially when they are frightened by the consequences of truth, and when things which they desire are denied them.

All children are cruel--and there is no greater brutality than confiding a helpless animal to the tender mercies of a young child.

There may be a few exceptions, but they are very rare, and there is no reason why parents should expect their particular children to be the exceptions.

You may see a man of mature age, kind-hearted, absolutely benevolent and just. And you may learn that when he was a baby he bit his nurse, lied, and was cruel to animals and to other children.

But parents are stupidly egotistical, and believe that their pretty children ought to be born morally perfect.

This moral perfection can be obtained only as the result of education.

Don't expect your children to be models of virtue.

Don't brutalize them by punishments and contempt because you discover that their primitive mental life duplicates the mental conditions of inferior animals.