What are you doing with your child's sense of right and wrong? Are
you certain that you are not training a criminal, beginning with him
at two years old? What is your boy at six years of age? Is he liar,
thief--perhaps of insane ego as he was when he first toddled from his
mother's arms? Inferentially President Roosevelt may have complimented
you on the acquisition of a large family, but rather than this, has
it occurred to you that the father and mother of one child, brought
up in the light of wisdom, may be deliverers of mankind against the
numerical inroads of the other type of parent?
Insanity is the mental condition out of which it is impossible for
the person of any age to recognize the rights of others in any form.
This insanity may be due wholly to the overdevelopment of the primary
ego in the child. At one year old the infant may be a potential
criminal of the worst type. It lies to the mother by screaming as if
in pain in order that she may be brought to its bedside. If the adult
should steal personal property as this babe steals food wilfully,
the penitentiary would be his end. Angered, this same babe might
attempt murder in babyhood, the spirit fostered by the same selfish
intolerance that is filling jails and crowding gallows traps.