The Forerunner Part 63

We are reared in a black and white world: sharp wrong,--to do almost anything amusing, and particularly and most of all, To Disobey; sharp right,--to do nothing whatever, and particularly and best of all, To Obey. We come out into a world that is all colors of the rainbow in every shade and blending, where the things people tell us to do are mostly wrong, and to do right requires the most strenuous and independent activity. Greatly are we hindered in the work of life to-day by our mis-taught infancy.

In the narrow round of family life, the inevitable repet.i.tions, the natural ruts of usage, the child has forced upon him the conservatism he should have every help to out-grow. Habit uncriticized and unresisted; convention an unquestioned good; these are the rules of the little world. How he hates it! How he longs for something different--for something to happen! The world is full of differences and happenings, but he is helpless to meet them--he has been only trained in narrow routine.

The oldest status in life, that of serving woman, is about him in his infancy. That mother should do for him is right and natural, but why should his mother be waiting on these other persons? Why is she the house-servant as well as the mother? If she is but a fashionable person in gay attire, he still has about him women servants. He cannot think as yet, but he accepts from daily contact this serving womanhood as natural and right, grows up to demand it in his household and to rear his children in its shadow; and so perpetuate from age to age the patriarchal error.

Then deep into this infant soul sinks the iron weight of what we call Discipline. We women, having small knowledge of child-nature or world-nature, never studying nature at all, but each girl-mother handed on from nursery to nursery, a child teaching children, we undertake to introduce the new soul to life!

We show him, as "life," the nursery, kitchen and parlor group in which we live. We try to teach him the behavior required by these surroundings. Two of the heaviest crosses to both the child and mother lie in his bi- and tri-daily difficulties with clothing, and prolonged initiation to the sacred mysteries of the table. We seek, as best we may, to bend the new soul visiting this world to a correct fulfilment of the polite functions of our domestic shrine; and we succeed unhappily well. We rear a world of people who put manners before morals, conventions before principles, conformity before initiative. Sorely do we strive with the new soul, to choke questionings and crush its resistance.

"Why?" says the child, "Why?" protesting with might and main against the mummery into which he is being forced.

"Because Mother says so!" is the reason given. "Because you must obey!"

is the duty given; and to enforce the command comes punishment.

Punishment is a pitiful invention arbitrarily inserted in place of consequence. Its power is in giving pain. Its appeal is to terror.

We, immovable and besotted in our ancient sanctuaries, deliberately give pain to little children, deliberately arouse in them that curse of old savagery, blind fear. To compel behavior which we cannot explain even to ourselves, to force the new wine of their young lives into the old bottles of our traditional habits, we keep alive in the little child an att.i.tude of mind the whole world should seek to outgrow and forget forever.

The ethics of the nursery does not give us laws to be learned and understood; relations of cause and effect for instructive practice; matters of general use and welfare not to know and practice which argues a foolish ignorance. It gives command purely arbitrary and disconnected; their profit is not visible to the child; and their penalties, while painfully conspicuous, bear no real relation to offences.

Besides being arbitrary and disconnected, the penalties we give our children have this alarming weakness--they are wholly contingent upon discovery. No whipped child is too young to learn that his whipping did not follow on the act--unless his mother knew he did it. Thus with elaborate care, with trouble to ourselves and anguish to the child, we develop in him the att.i.tude of mind with which our criminals, big and little, face the world--it is not what you do that matters--it is being found out. This is not the position of the thinking being--it is nursery-mindedness.

Pain and terror we teach our babies, and also shame. The child is pure, innocent, natural. One of the first efforts of nursery culture is to smear that white page with our self-made foulness. We labor conscientiously and with patience, to teach our babies shame. We degrade the human body, we befoul the habits of nature, we desecrate life, teaching evil and foolish falsehood to our defenceless little children. The "s.e.x-taboos" of darkest savagery, the decencies and indecencies of primitive convention, we have preserved throughout the ages in our guarded temple of ancient idols, and in that atmosphere we rear the child.

The heaviest drag on progress is the persistence of race-habits and traditions, once natural and useful, but long since outgrown. The main stronghold of this body of tradition is in that uneducated, undeveloped, unorganized, lingering rudiment of earlier social forms--the woman-servant group of primitive industries, in which our children grow.

We have cried out against the crushing restriction of old religions; and, going farther, have seen that these religions have their strongest hold on the woman and the child. It is here suggested that it is not the religion that keeps down the woman and renews its grip on each new generation of children, but that it is the degraded status of the woman and her influence on the child which made possible such religions in the first instance, and which accounts for their astonishing persistence in modern times.

In the atmosphere of the nursery each child re-learns continually the mental habits of a remote and lowly past. His sense of duty is a personal one, it is obligation; and justified when we attempt to justify it by the beneficent services of the parent. This parental religion naturally pictures G.o.d as a parent--a father of course, and people as his children. We, as his children, are to love and serve and glorify him, and he to take care of us, parentally.

Coming out into the world of which he has been taught nothing, the young man finds no corroboration whatever for this theory. He does not see the alleged grounds of the religious views given him, and so he drops his religion altogether.

If he had early been shown G.o.d in a thousand beautiful common instances, as ever-present, unescapable, and beneficent Law--the sure, sound constant force of life, then he would find the same G.o.d still visibly at work in the world of love and labor, and not lose his religion by outgrowing his nursery.

Instead of personal grat.i.tude for personal service as a cause for good behavior, he should be shown that his parents and teachers serve him and other children because so best is the human race improved; and that he, and the other children, owe their life's service to the same great body, to the human race. This ideal would need neither patching nor enlargement, but would last unbroken through life.

Our nursery-bred consciences suffer personally for personal sins, with morbid keenness, but are stone blocks of indifference to the collective sins which are the major evils of life to-day. A man may pointed out to us as a wholesale malefactor, a dealer in bad meat, a poisoner of the public mind through a degraded press, an extortioner, liar, doer of uncounted evil; we reply that he is a "moral man"--that his personal relations are excellent; and, if one continues to complain, we say, "What has he done to you?"

Personality is the limit of our moral sense, the steady check to growth in ethical understanding, as it is in economics, and in art. The normal growth of the human soul to-day is into a wide, fluent, general relation with mankind; and a deeper more satisfying and _workable_ conception of G.o.d than we ever knew before. In our nursery-mindedness we face the problems of civic morality, catching visible offenders and shutting them in a closet, sending them supperless to bed, hurting and depriving them in various ways, as blindly, stupidly and unprofitably as a woman spanks her child.

Children reared in a democratic, scientific, broadly educative atmosphere, would grow up able to see the absurdity of our primitive inst.i.tutions--but such an atmosphere does not originate in and cannot be brought into the nursery.

As an inevitable reaction from nursery-government, the child finds joyous relief in sheer riot and self-will. The behavior of our boys in college shows well their previous uneducated and ill-educated condition.

The persistence of "hazing" among twentieth century persons old enough to go to school, shows the weakness of nursery culture. This is a custom prevalent among low savage races, known as "initiation by torture." Its reason--if it ever had any--was to outdo nature's cruelest and most wasteful methods, and to prepare for a life of struggle and pain by a worse experience to begin with. About the age of p.u.b.erty, when body and mind are both sensitive, this pleasant rite took place. Those who survived it, habituated to cruelty and unreason, were thereby fitted to live cruel and unreasonable lives--and did so.

Race-customs, as old as this, die hard. They have to be understood, condemned, opposed, and educated out of us. Our small children get no such education. They, as a cla.s.s, get no influence tending to uplift and develop their sociological status. Clever and "well-trained" they may be; well-loved and well--at least, expensively-dressed. But as soon as they escape the nursery bounds, out pops the primeval savage, unrestrained. These young students, with their revolting practices, ought to know that they are in the social stage with cannibalism, voudooism, fetich-worship; and to be hot with shame at their condition.

It is the race's babyhood,--a drooling, fumbling, infantile folly--manifested almost to adult age. That it endures is due to our nursery-mindedness.

About the little child should cl.u.s.ter and concentrate the n.o.blest forces of our latest days, our highest wisdom and deepest experience, our most subtle skill. Such wisdom, skill and experience do not exist in the average young woman, albeit a mother; still less in her low-cla.s.s, ignorant serving-maids. A wider, deeper love would desire better environment for the child, more foresight and more power would provide it. But our love, though intense, is narrow and largely childish--the mother has not long left the influence of her own nursery; and neither wisdom nor power grew there. Some day our women will see this. They will understand at last what womanhood is for, and the power and glory of civilized motherhood. They will see that the educative influences of the first few years are pre-eminently important, and prepare for them as a.s.siduously as they prepare to give a college education to older children.

The baby is a new human soul, learning Life. He should have about him from the first, Truth and Order, with a sequence of impressions which great minds have labored to prepare. He should have his mother's love, his father's care, his brother's and sister's society; his home's seclusion; and he should also have from his earliest days, a place to share with many other children, and the love and care and service of such guides and teachers as are most fit to help the growing of the world.

We have gone far indeed in those things we learn after we leave home.

In our trades and professions, our arts and sciences, in the broad avenues of the world's life, we have made great progress--albeit hampered always to some extent by our nursery-mindedness.

But in our own personal relations we are stagnant, hide-bound, inert.

Our littleness, our morbidness, our self-consciousness, our narrowness, our short-sightedness, our oppressive, insistent, omnipresent personality--all these still crush us down. b.u.mptious with a good child's complacency, grieving with a bad child's remorse, indifferent and rebellious as ill-trained children are, we live unawakened among social laws. We enjoy when we can; we suffer much--and needlessly; but we seem incapable of taking hold of our large world-questions and settling them.

It is only an apparent limitation. We are quite capable were we but taught so. What hinders us is Nursery-Mindedness.

A VILLAGE OF FOOLS

There was a certain village, a little village on a little stream; and the inhabitants thereof were Fools.

By profession they were tillers of the soil; and they kept beasts, beasts of burden, and beasts to furnish meat. They lived upon the products of their tillage, and upon the beasts, and upon fish from the stream.

The Wise said, "This is a good village. There is land to furnish food, and beasts in plenty, and a good stream flowing steadily from the tree-clothed hills. These people should prosper well."

They did not know that the people of the village were Fools; Utter Fools. Observe now their Foolishness! They cut down the trees of the hills to make their fires withal; many and great fires, without stint or hindrance; and presently there was no more any forest upon the hills to cover them. Then the moist breath of the cloud-building forest was dried away; and the thick wet sponge about the roots of the forest was dried away; and the snow slid down the hills as it slides down steep roof gables; and the rain ran down the narrow valleys as it runs down gutter pipes; and the village was swept by floods in flood time, and lay parched and thirsty in the dry season. And the people of the village called the flood an Act of G.o.d, and they called the drought an Act of G.o.d; for they were Fools.

Their fields they tilled continuously, for they needs must eat; gathering from the good ground year after year, and generation after generation, till the ground became sour and stale, and was bad ground and bore no fruit.

"Surely," said the Wise, "they will gather from the stables of their beasts and from the village that which shall enrich their soil and make it bear fruit again."

They did not know that the people of the Village were Fools.

Thus did they with their beasts. They kept them thick in their village; draught animals and burden-bearers; and from the defiled streets arose a Plague of Flies, and tormented the people, so that they fell sick of divers diseases. And they themselves crowded together ever more thickly, till all the village became unsavory and unfit for human habitation. Then they arose, wagging their heads sagaciously; and with vast labor and expense they gathered together from their stables and their habitations all that which should enrich the soil and produce fruit again; and they poured it carefully into the stream. Now this was the stream from which they drank; and when they drank their diluted diseases they fell sick anew, and many died.

Also the fish fed upon this filth, and they also absorbed diseases; and the people fed upon the fish which had fed upon the filth, and again fell sick, and many died.

And those who died they carefully wrapped up in many coverings and laid in the ground--them and their diseases with them--that the seeds thereof might be fostered eternally, and continually came forth anew.

But the Wise burned their dead in clean fire, cherishing their memories in their hearts, but not their slowly deteriorating remains in the dark earth. And the wise kept their forests as a wild garden, planting as well as reaping; having wood therefrom at need, and always the green beauty and the cool shade, the moist winds and carpet of held water over the hill slopes.

Their streams were pure and steady, tree shadowed and gra.s.s bordered from end to end; for a tree beareth food as well as a field, and is planted in a moment and the young tree cometh up as the old tree dieth.

And their fields they fed continually, so that they bore more rather than less from year to year, and they prospered and did not die of hand-made diseases.

But they knew not their own wisdom, for these things it seemed to them that even Fools might see, and do accordingly.

Neither did the Fools know their own foolishness.

WHAT DIANTHA DID