Part 10

If your firm transacts business on a capital of a hundred thousand instead of half a million dollars, what is it but a little less paper, fewer clerks, and narrower rooms? Though your farm have but fifty instead of two hundred acres, there is just as much land on the earth. Suppose you argue before a jury only two cases to-day instead of three, there are a dozen young advocates who will be glad of the crumbs that fall from your table, and Fate will mete out her sure, rough-handed justice. With half the business you are doing now, could not you and your family be comfortably and decently fed, clothed, and sheltered? House, dress, and furniture might not be so fine, but something of more worth than they would be finer. A family's support does not necessarily involve sumptuous fare, purple and fine linen, damask and rosewood. If the choice lies between Turkey carpets, or even three-ply, under a child's feet, and a father's hand clasping his to guide his steps, what man who believes--I will not say in immortality, but in virtue,--what father who is not utterly unworthy to bear the sacred name, can for one moment waver?

Every man, and especially every father, should aim to have a character that shall alone have weight both with his fellow-citizens and his children. His integrity should be so unimpeachable that his motives shall be unquestioned. So far as his reputation is truthful, it should be firmly grounded on moral virtues and moral graces, so that his word shall have a force quite independent of his surroundings. He should be strong enough to be able to live in a plain house, and wear plain clothes, and deny himself, not only luxuries, but comforts and beauties, for the sake of his children's society and improvement, without forfeiting the respect and esteem of his neighbors or inflicting any pain of mortification upon his children. You cannot do anything in this world without money, if money is your sole or your chief claim to consideration; but, in the face of ten thousand denials, I would still maintain that it is possible to attain a character and a standing that shall set money at defiance. He who refuses to believe this, and acts upon a contrary belief, shows not only a want of real inward dignity, but of a knowledge of history and of life. A picture of Raphael, fitly framed and hung, is a treasure to be prized beyond words; but with no frame at all, and hung in the dreary parlor of a village inn, it is worth more, and would be more widely sought and more highly prized than a palaceful of commonplace paintings. Let all the accessories be as beautiful as you can command; but at all events make sure of the picture. He is not a wise man who expends all his energies on the frame, and trusts to luck for the painting.

Nor is it any excuse to say that you must lay up provision against the future. No one has any right to sacrifice the present to the future. You do not know that you will have any future. "The present, the present, is all thou hast for thy sure possessing." You may forego present luxuries for future needs or for future luxuries, but you may not forego present needs for future possibilities. If besides performing the duty of today you can also lay up money for to-morrow, it is well; but to slight a certain to-day for an uncertain to-morrow, is all ill. Provide, if you can, means to send your boy to college, to educate your daughter, to shelter your old age; yet, remember, before those means can be used, the boy, the girl, the man, may lie each in his silent grave; but though there may never be a college student, a ripening maiden, a gray-haired man, there is now a little boy, a little girl, who stand in need of their father; and a father is of more worth to his son than a college, of more worth to his daughter than many tutors. Train them in the way they should go, going yourself before them with a steady step, and trust God for that future against which you are unable to provide.

And this remember: the very best provision against the future is investments in heart and muscle and brain. Money without them is worthless. They without money are still inestimable riches. If your son at twenty-one is alienated from his father, dissipated, headstrong, weak, a source of anxiety and trouble to his family, he will pierce your heart through with many sorrows, though you have hundreds of thousands of dollars laid up for him in the bank. If your daughter is a frivolous, woman, the silks with which your wealth enables you to adorn her, the society with which it may perhaps enable you to surround her, will only set her folly in a stronger light. But if your children stand on the threshold of their manhood and their womanhood, strong, self-poised, mailed for defence and armed for warfare, glad and grateful for the love that has forged each weapon and taught its skilful handling, no king on his throne is so blessed as you. They have all that they need to conquer the world. Your money may be a snare to your child, your wisdom never. If you lose your money, it is gone forever. The child whom your love is enriching with youthful health and promise may go before you suddenly out of the world, but your labor and your love are not lost. Somewhere, under a warmer sun than this, his earthly promise bursts into the full blossom and the mellow fruit of performance more beautiful than eye can see or heart conceive.

The adequate care and guidance of the family which he has founded is a man's business in life. Farming, preaching, and shopkeeping are secondary matters, to be regulated according to the needs of the family. The family is not to be regulated by their requirements. And a family's needs are not gay clothing and rich food, but a husband and father. It is the great duty of his life to be acquainted with his children, to know their character, their tastes, their tendencies, to know who are their associates, and what are their associations, what books they read, and what books they like to read, to gratify their innocent desires, to lop off their excrescences and bring out their excellences, to know them as a good farmer knows his soil, draining the bogs into fertile meadows and turning the watercourses into channels of beauty and life. He may furnish his children opportunities without number, but the one thing beyond all others which he owes them is himself. He may provide tutors and schools; but to no tutor and no school can he pass over his relationship and its responsibilities. If he is a stranger to his children, if they are strangers to him, he shall be found wanting when he is weighed in the balance.

Niebuhr, we are told by his biographer, "considered the training of his children, especially of his son, as the most imperative duty of his life, to which all other considerations, except that of very evident and important service to his country, ought to be subordinated. In ordinary times he placed private duties above public ones." Before the child was born his fatherly fondness was planning schemes for the future. "In case it should be a boy, I am already preparing myself to educate him. I should try to familiarize him very early with the ancient languages, by making him repeat sentences after me, and relating stories to him in them, in order that he might not have too much to learn afterwards, nor yet read too much at too early an age; but receive his education after the fashion of the ancients. I think I should know how to educate a boy, but not a girl; I should be in danger of making her too learned.... I would relate innumerable stories to the boy, as my father did to me; but by degrees mix up more and more of Greek and Latin in them, so that he would be forced to learn those languages in order to understand the stories." By and by, when the child is eight months old, we find him curtailing his literary investigations because he is "moreover, just now, too much occupied with Marcuccio." When "Marcuccio" is five years old his father writes: "We have daily proofs of Marcus's noble nature; still I am well aware that this affords us no guaranty, unless it be guided with the most watchful care.... I succeed with teaching as well as I could have ventured to hope.... I am reading with him Hygin's Mythologicum,--a book which, perhaps, it is not easy to use for this purpose, and which, yet, is more suited to it than any other, from the absence of formal periods, and the interest of the narrative. For German, I write fragments of the Greek mythology for him.... I give everything in a very free and picturesque style, so that it is as exciting as poetry to him; and, in fact, he reads it with such delight that we are often interrupted by his cries of joy. The child is quite devoted to me; but this educating costs me a great deal of time. However, I have had my share of life, and I shall consider it as a reward for my labors if this young life be as fully and richly developed as lies within my power."

If Niebuhr, one of the most learned men of his time, ambassador of Prussia to Rome, with all the business to transact, not only of Prussia, but of all the petty German powers that had no minister of their own, engaged in minute and abstruse historical investigation bearing upon a work with which he was occupied and which may be said to have revolutionized Roman history,--if his time was not too valuable to bestow upon the amusement, the affection, and the education of a baby, where shall we find, in America, a man whose valuable time shall be a sufficient reason for the neglect of his children? It may not be necessary or desirable to copy Niebuhr's course with exactness. His residence in Rome devolved upon him a larger part of the mental education of the boy than would have been necessary at home. I am also inclined to think that he was too careful and troubled, and did not have faith enough in Nature and God. But the point which I wish to show is, that, in the midst of his numerous and important duties, he found time for his child; and if he could do so much, surely those who have not one tenth part of his duties and responsibilities, either in number or weight, can find time to do the far less service which devolves upon them. If they cannot, there is but one resource. If a man is not able to be both statesman and father, both merchant and father, or lawyer and father, or farmer and father, he ought to elect which he will be, and confine himself to his choice. If he is too much absorbed in scientific pursuits, or if he is not a sufficiently dextrous workman to be able to secure from his bench time enough to attend to other interests, he ought not to create other interests. No man has any right to assume the charge of two positions when he has the ability to perform the duties of but one. If he alone bore the evil consequences of his shortcomings, he would be less blameworthy, but the chief burden falls upon his children and upon the state. Reckless of moral obligation, mindful only of his own selfish impulses, the fruits of his recklessness and selfishness are,--not houses that tumble down upon their builders, machinery that cannot bear its own strain, garments that perish with the first using,--these are bad enough, but these are harmlessness itself compared with the evils which he causes. The harvest of his headlong wickedness is living beings who must bear their life forever. He bids into the world, tender little innocent souls, knowing that he cannot or will not stand guard over them to ward off the fierce, wild devils that lie in wait to rend them. Plastic to his touch, they may be moulded to vessels of honor or vessels of dishonor, for the promise of God is absolute, yea, and amen. Yet he turns aside to fritter away his time over newspapers, to talk politics, to buy and sell and get unnecessary gain, and leaves them to other hands, to chance comers, to all manner of warping and hardening influences, so that their after-lives must be one long and bitter struggle against early acquired deformity, or a fatal yielding and a fatal torpor whose end is deadly dismay.

But in popular opinion and by common usage all is thrown upon the mother. By all tradition she is the centre, the heart, the mainspring, of the household. From what newspaper, what book, what lecture, would you learn that fathers have anything to do at home but to go into their slippers and dressing-gowns, and be luxuriously fed and softly soothed into repose? The care and management of the children fall upon the mother. Who does all the fine things in the pretty nursery rhymes? "My mother." It is her sphere, divinely circled. All the fitnesses of her life point in that one direction. All men's hands are so many finger-posts saying, "This is the way, walk ye in it."

It is the mother's sphere to take motherly care of her children. It is the father's sphere to take fatherly care. Neither can leave his duties to the other without danger. The family system is a combination of the solar and the binary systems. All the little bodies whirl around a common centre, but that centre is no solitary orb. It is two suns, self-luminous, revolving around each other, and neither able to throw upon its mate the burden of its shining.

Many fathers seem to think that they have nothing to do with their children except to caress them and frolic with them an hour or two in the evening, until they are old enough to be assistants in work. But just as soon as there is the fatherly relation, there is the fatherly duty. A baby in a house is a well-spring of pleasure; but it is also a well-spring of care and anxiety immeasurable, of whose waters there is no reason why the father should not drink as deeply as the mother. The glory, the honor, the immortality, will shed a full light upon him, and he also

"With heart of thankfulness should bear Of the great common burden his full share."

I have seen a great deal of pleasantry played off against the doctrines of woman's rights in newspapers, pictorial and otherwise; the wife is represented as being immersed in public employments, while the meek, sad husband stays at home and minds the baby. I do not know that any important ends would be answered by an indiscriminate female-haranguing in the market-place; but I do know that it would be a great deal better for all concerned if fathers would pay more attention to the little ones. Womanly gentleness and tenderness, and long-suffering to-baby-ward reads sweetly in books, rounds graceful periods from melodious lips, and is the loveliest of all modes of levying black mail. But when you come down to matters of fact, a fractious child is just as likely to be quieted by its father's lullaby as by its mother's, if you pin the father down to lullabies. Men who are inclined to take care of their children never find any hinderance in their manhood. Male nurses for children are no less efficient than female nurses. It is not his sex, but his selfishness, that makes man's unfitness. He will not endure the tedium of soothing and tending his child. He knows the mother will, and he lets her do it. Her fitness is a good excuse for his self-indulgence. But if he is disposed to take the trouble, he can do it often as well as she; often better, for the mother's weaker and wearier nerves and greater sensitiveness act on the little one and increase its irritability, while the father's strength and calmness are a sort of soporific. Somebody says that a mother's arm is the strongest thing in the world. It upbears the child as she walks back and forth through the long night-hours soothing its restlessness and pain, and never tires. Vastly well spoken. Suppose, O smooth-tongued Seignior, you take a turn with the baby yourself, and see whether your arm tires. If it does, do not for one moment indulge in the pleasing illusion that hers does not. It is made of flesh and blood and bones just like yours, and like causes produce like effects. But what _is_ true is, that her unselfish mother-love is so strong that she keeps on, notwithstanding the ache. Go and do thou likewise. I do not say that fathers will not. Many do, and what man has done man may do. Leave female endurance to poetry, and remember that in actual life the laws of bone and muscle are as fixed as any other laws of natural philosophy, and that action is surely followed by fatigue. Walk you the floor with the baby in your arms, if he must be carried, at least two hours to her one, because your arms were stronger to begin with, and because hers have an added weakness from the advent of this little round-limbed Prince. Do not, above all things, betake yourself to a remote and silent part of the house and dream your pleasant dreams, while the mother loses her sleep and her rest by the ailing and fretful baby. But a man's rest must not be broken. Why not as well as a woman's? He must have a clear head and a firm hand to transact the next day's business. But what is she going to do? The cases are so innumerous as to form a very insignificant proportion wherein the American mother is not also cook, laundress, seamstress, housekeeper, and chambermaid, with sometimes one awkward, ignorant, inefficient Irish servant, rarely two, and not rarely none at all. As a matter of moral economy the care of a baby is enough to occupy any woman's time, and is all the care she ought to have. As I have before said, even under the curse, this is the arrangement that was made for her. Her motherhood frees her from toil; but man's care is heavier than God's curse, and she too often bears on her own head both her punishment and his. If he makes such provision for her that she has absolutely no other than her maternal duties, she can afford, perhaps, to lose her rest at night, since she can make it up in the daytime; and unquestionably nature has fitted babies to mothers more closely than to fathers; but to lay upon her, besides the care of her children, all manner of other cares, and then leave her with aching nerves and weakened frame and failing heart to worry it out as she may, is a culpable cruelty for which no amount of pretty sentiment is the smallest atonement.[4]

[4] I like sometimes to take my views out on an airing, before making a final disposition of them, just to see how they are received. On one such occasion, an excellent man, in comfortable circumstances, expressed his very hearty dissent from my opinions about woman's work. He thought women had a pretty easy time of it, and appealed to his wife, just then entering the room, to say what had been her own experience. I wish type could convey the clear, ringing decisiveness and incisiveness of the tone with which she instantaneously responded "HARASSED TO DEATH!"

There are so many ways where there is a will! There are so many opportunities for usefulness, if a man would only improve them. How many times does the merchant, the lawyer, the busy business man, stop at the street-corners, or in his own haunts, to chat with friends? How many hours there are in the twenty-four when a man might run down from his study, come in earlier from his shop, take a recess from his fields, and rest himself and his wife by giving the little one a ride in the basket-wagon, or the elegant carriage, or amusing it on the carpet, while tired mamma lies down for a much-needed nap, or turns off a greater amount of belated mending or cooking than she could do in four hours with baby. And what benefit would not the man himself receive, what gradual diminution of his selfishness in thus waiting upon the helplessness of this little creature. Under what bonds for the future and for virtue does it not lay him? Let him look down upon his baby with earnest eyes, and inwardly resolve to be himself a man pure and honorable as he wishes this boy to be; let him remember to bear himself toward all women as he would have all men bear themselves to the tiny woman in his arms.