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shall not be published here.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.
Set them a good example, and by education make them what you want
them to be.
The ignorant and stupid belief that children are born naturally
good accounts for the brutality of many fathers and the ruin of
many young lives, making cowards of children, accentuating their
untruthfulness and cowardice and their cruelty through a desire
for revenge.