them. I learned this first from a little girl of three years. She had
been deluged with presents that Christmas morning; but before an hour
had passed she had looked them all over, and we found her curled up in
an armchair, playing with a clothes-pin and an empty baking-powder can!
Hers was the happiness found only in the land of Make-Believe.
Instead of giving my boy a soldier outfit, I would give him a
pocket-knife--assuming that he is old enough to wield one. Having a
new knife, he is ambitious to use it, and he fashions a sword out of
a stick of pine. The sword suggests playing soldier, and he proceeds
to make a peaked hat out of a newspaper; a skate-strap answers for a
belt, and he makes a pair of epaulets from a scrap of tin-foil. In this
way the boy is duly benefited: in creating these things his ingenuity
is drawn upon, and, in supplying things that he cannot make, his
imagination is exercised.
One can hardly begin too early to teach the child the pleasure of
giving. A few pennies taken by him from his own little bank, and an
excursion to a neighbouring store, will initiate the idea. A mere
trinket for each member of the household will serve the purpose and put
him on the right track. But we must go further than the family circle
with the Christmas idea. We must show the boy that while charity begins
at home, it does not end there.
One day shortly before Christmas, I took the boy to the closet where
his discarded toys were kept, and I said:
“There are millions of children in the world, and there are not always
toys enough to go around. If you will tell me which of these things
you do not play with any more, I will see that they are distributed
on Christmas Day among little boys and girls who otherwise would get
nothing.”
He looked the things over carefully, and said finally that there was
nothing that he would like to give away. I did not urge the matter; but
the next day I invited him to take a ride with me on the street-car.
Alighting at City Hall Park, we walked down the Bowery. Arriving at
Pell Street, I found Chuck Connors sunning himself on the corner.
“Chuck,” I said, “I have a dollar in my pocket that isn’t busy, and I
want you to take me to some one who needs it more than you or me.”
So off we trudged, Chuck and I, and the boy between. A few blocks
farther down we turned toward the river. It was familiar ground to
Chuck and me--but the boy’s eyes were opened to a new world. He saw the
misery of the slums. He passed a boy of his own age, barefooted--in
December--staggering under a load of scrap-wood that would have
troubled a man to bear. He saw a little girl, half clad, shivering
behind an ash-can, trying to hide herself from her drunken father,
who leered at the waif from a hallway across the street. Pushing on
into the very heart of that pitiable section, through poverty, want
and wretchedness, the boy went with us through a miserable tenement,
wherein the spectre of Starvation stalked through the sordid halls and
snarled at my dollar bill.
On the car, homeward bound, the boy tugged at my elbow.
“Father,” he said, “besides what’s in the closet, they’s a lot of other
things I don’t play with any more.”
Ever since then we have had an annual house-cleaning about a week
before Christmas, and the Salvation Army wagon carries away a goodly
load. Indeed, the event has come to be regarded as quite a festal
occasion.
As the years go on and the boy begins to leave playland behind, I would
not hurry him into the realism of the grown-up’s Yuletide. Let the
charm of mystery, of certainty, of anticipation, linger as long as it
will.
Perhaps last year you thought it was a bit incongruous when you found
yourself slipping a safety razor into a gaily-hued sock, size ten,
dangling in the chimney-corner. And perhaps you have decided that he
is too big for that sort of thing now, and that you will let it go by
default this Christmas. Maybe you are about to tell him so.
My friend, defer it.
Stick right on in the old way as long as you can get the boy to stick
with you; for, once you have severed the ties of the Christmas of his
childhood, you will have cut the tinsel thread that links your son to
the only fairyland he will ever know.
V
THE DYNASTY OF THE DIME NOVEL
My neighbour ran in at the basement door as was his wont. Coming
lightly up the stairs he entered the library, and not finding me there,
but hearing a voice beyond, he walked across the room and looked in at
the open doorway of my den, where he stood for a moment, unobserved.
This is what he saw:
The boy, then scarcely nine, stretched out comfortably on a sofa,
reading aloud; I reclining in an easy-chair with my slippered feet in
another, and listening intently; a bright light shining over the boy’s
shoulder and flooding the room.
My neighbour paused long enough to hear these words fall from the
reader’s lips in boyish monotone:
“The crack of a Winchester sounded on the night air and the engineer
fell dead!”
Then he interrupted.
“Well, in the name of reason,” he said, “what are you folks reading?”
The boy and I looked up. I took the book from the youngster’s hand and
passed it up to the intruder.
“The life and adventures of Jesse James,” I said.
My neighbour took the book gingerly, read the title and glanced
at the cover, upon which were pictured in vivid colours three
desperate-looking gentlemen in black masks, holding up a train.
“And you are reading this--together?” he asked.
“Yes,” said I; “taking turns at it, he a chapter and I a chapter.”
My neighbour shrugged his shoulders and returned the volume, dusting
his fingers.
“Don’t you think he would get to this sort of stuff soon
enough--without you helping him?”
“He arrived there to-day,” I said; “and I’m there with him.”
There you have it--the great difference of viewpoint: my neighbour
looking at it from where he stands and I looking at it from the
standpoint of my boy. My neighbour convinced that I was starting my
beloved son on the highroad to a criminal career; I calm and confident,
and cocksure that I am doing what is best for the boy. And I guess if
we were to take the vote of Parenthood on the issue, my side would go
down to overwhelming defeat.
Now, my father says that up to the time he departed from the parental
roof there were only two books in the home that he was permitted to
read--the Bible and Foxe’s “Martyrs.” From his tenth to his seventeenth
year he was actually starving, he said, for the want of stories of
adventure. Once, when he was fourteen, a departing visitor left a copy
of “Scottish Chiefs.” This he seized upon and was devouring it in the
attic when discovery by his stern pater cut him off in the middle of
a most exciting battle. The book was confiscated and he was soundly
chastised. “And do you know,” adds my father ruefully, “it was three
years before I learned how that fight came out!”
Perhaps that’s why he gave me a freer hand in my selections when I was
a kid. He did, anyway. All that he required was that it must be free
from any suggestion of the obscene and of sacrilege. Like most boys I
began my independent reading with “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” “Robinson
Crusoe,” “Swiss Family Robinson,” “Arabian Nights” and books of the
sort that boys usually receive as gifts. From these I jumped to the
nickel and dime variety. There were one or two good juvenile magazines
coming into the home, but they were not sufficient. I waded through all
the “Smart Aleck” books, including “Peck’s Bad Boy.” I took the thrills
with the ten-cent detective heroes of the Old Sleuth and Nick Carter
type, and revelled in the more or less historical exploits of David
Crockett, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill.
At fourteen I had run the gamut of cheap literature. I do not mean
that I read every “penny-dreadful” in existence, for the list is
endless--there is a new one every day. But I had “got my skin full” and
the stuff began to pall. After reading a good number of these books,
even a boy feels their want of the convincing quality. He feels, too,
their sameness and their unrealness.
Then I approached the modern style and the truer type of boy books,
stories of the Alger, Oliver Optic and G. A. Henty kind; and then
the better type of adventure stories, such as “Treasure Island” and
“King Solomon’s Mines.” Then I drifted into Wilkie Collins’ creations,
reading only the more exciting ones--“The Moonstone” and “The Dead
Alive.” After that came Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Reade; and before
I was sixteen I had got into Scott, Thackeray and Dickens. And here I
anchored. Since then, of course, I have voyaged far and wide in all
directions, but Dickens is my snug harbour, and will be to the end. No
boy could revel--shall I say wallow?--in trashy literature more than
I did; but search as I will, I cannot see where it left a trace of an
influence on my conduct or my character. I do not think it was owing
to any want of physical courage; because I know that I did my share
of fighting and took as many beatings with a dry eye as the others; a
little more of both, in fact, than it would become me to boast about.
But I never robbed a bank or had any desire to; I never craved the
career of a detective keenly enough to try my hand at it, and while at
one time I did yearn for a chance to battle single-handed with a band
of Sioux warriors, the desire never led me into more dangerous quarters
than a seat at the Wild West Show. Was I different from other boys? My
mother says certainly I was, and very much better. God bless her! My
father says I was about like the rest. My teacher--he is a prominent
member of the New York bar now, and I put the question to him squarely
just the other day--tells me frankly that I was the worst boy in
school. The three estimates, averaged, would make me an average boy,
and I think my experience as to the effect of reading material was
about the usual experience of boys in general.
They pass through the age of blood-and-thunder literature just as they
have mumps, measles and marbles, and are none the better and but little
the worse for having gone through it. As water finds its level, so the
temperament eventually finds its affinity in reading matter.
“There is no book so bad,” said the elder Pliny, “but that some good
might be got out of it.”
I know that some boys who read cheap literature go to the bad. But I
have never seen it established that the reading was responsible for the
waywardness. I do not deny that, granting the existence of a tendency
toward a life of crime, certain types of stories might encourage
the tendency. But the influence of this stuff is so slight that the
avoidance of it would not prevent the downward step.
Many a boy, fascinated by the glamour of the circus, has run away with
one. Still, this does not make the circus reprehensible nor would I,
because of that circumstance, deny my boy the pleasure of attending it.
On the contrary, I go with him to the circus and sit beside him. We
munch peanuts joyously, but I warn him to beware of the red lemonade
and tell him why it is sometimes unwholesome. He sees the show from
start to finish--under my direction. And when he has seen it I reveal
to him the reverse side of the picture--I give him a peep behind the
scenes. I tell him of the hardships and privations of a showman’s life,
the long night rides, the harsh discipline, the perils and dangers of
it.
This is exactly my attitude toward the boy’s early reading. I do not
throw wide open the doors of the paper-cover library and push him into
it. But if he shows a desire to explore it, I go with him. Wherever I
can save him time and eyestrain by a friendly suggestion, I am there to
make it. When I find him reading “Cut-Throat Charley, the Terror of the
Spanish Main,” I do not pooh-pooh the book or make sport of the boy.
I do tell him that the best pirate story ever written is Stevenson’s
“Treasure Island” and tell him that if he wants a shipwreck story that
will make his hair stand up he ought to read Poe’s “Arthur Gordon Pym”
or Reade’s “Foul Play.” Once he has read either of these, you may
depend upon it that “Cut-Throat Charley” will never ring true.
When he takes up Mr. Nicholas Carter I suggest “The Mystery of the Rue
Morgue,” “Les Misérables” and “Sherlock Holmes,” and other detective
stories of the better class.
My boy had been learning from other boys something of the exploits
of Jesse James and asked me if I would get the book. I agreed to it,
readily. Somewhat to my surprise I found that since my time the list
of James books had been increased to thirty-six. Thirty-five of these
were “pot-boilers”; “Jesse James’ Nemesis,” “Jesse James’ Revenge,”
“Jesse James’ Long Chance,” “Jesse James’ Mistake,” and so on. I passed
these over, of course, and invested fifteen cents in “The James Boys,
Jesse and Frank,” which was the book I had read when I was a youngster.
It was a plain record of the men’s exploits, compiled from newspaper
clippings of that period. I explained to the boy that the others were
largely imaginative--unreal. We read the book together. Then we read
the story of Cole Younger and his brothers and later that of the
criminal career of Harry Tracy, the infamous outlaw of the Northwest.
Together we enjoyed the romance, such as there was, of their exploits;
together we discussed the animal courage and moral cowardice of their
careers; and together we followed them to the punishment which they so
richly deserved.
Had my boy evinced a desire to read the remaining thirty-five James
books, I would not have restrained him, farther than to suggest a
change. It so happened that when he had finished the three books
mentioned he had had enough of these distinguished gentlemen and their
ilk, and began casting about in other directions.
So my message on the reading subject is, don’t think that the boy’s
craving for the nickel library is an indication of depravity, or that
indulgence in it will start him on the road to perdition. The appetite
for these books is a normal one. It develops at a time when his
appreciation of romance is in full bloom but while big words, subtle
phrasing and genuine ingenuity are not yet within his comprehension.
It demands quick action and quick results, stripped of the artistic
setting and higher polish which are demanded by the refinement of
matured intellect.
Do not regard this kind of reading as a menace to the boy’s morals,
but as a stepping-stone to something better and more beneficial. Do
not, either by rule or ridicule, drive the boy from his home to seek
it, but stay with him and guide him through it. Keep him well supplied
with good books and good magazines that approach, as nearly as you can
judge, the requirement of his fancy. Watch him, but do not worry him.
Have the better things at hand and accessible and point the way to
them. Rest assured that in due time Cut-Throat Charley will have lost
his charm, and a hero more worthy of emulation will stand in his shoes.
VI
THE SIN OF SEX SECRECY
Let us suppose that our country has become involved in a war. At the
edge of your town a battle rages. You can hear the roar of cannon and
clash of steel as columns of men fall in their blood, cut down by the
flashing sabres and flying canister. Re-enforcements are hurrying
to the scene. Up the street comes a regiment of soldiers with flags
waving, drums beating and arms gleaming in the sunshine. Your son, your
boy, standing in the doorway, laughs and cheers as they approach. The
band strikes up a lively air. The boy beats time with his feet, starts,
hesitates and then, with a wave of his cap, falls in line with the gay
procession and marches joyously toward the scene of death and carnage.
Madam, at such a moment what would you do? Would you sit calmly at your
window and see him go innocently, blindly on to the danger that you
knew lay just beyond the turn of the road?
Would you not fly to his side and draw him back and hold him tight in
your arms? And if he were big and strong and insistent, though still
your boy, would you not at least tell him that war is not all music and
drum-beats and bright uniforms? Would you not warn him of its dangers,
of its horrors? If he must go and you could not hold him, would you let
him go unwarned of its realities--and unarmed?
Well, there is a war in progress--in our country, in your town; a war
more terrible, more revolting than any chronicled in history. The youth
of America are marching toward the battleground, and the splendid
column is passing your window now, to-day and every day. Perhaps you
do not see the conflict yourself, for the battlefield is always just
around the corner.
As sure as you have a son, just so sure will he some day turn that
corner. Just so sure will he some day stand on your doorstep, and feel
the lure of the passing show, and just so sure will he some time be
drawn into the conflict, when he will have to fight his way through as
best he can. At six he is in your arms; at sixteen he will be on the
firing-line; at twenty-six the ordeal will have passed and the battle
will have been lost or won. Can you then look backward into the past
and feel that you had warned and fortified him?
I can. Whatever may be in store for my boy, he goes to meet it with
more than my prayers--he has, also, a full knowledge of life’s
mysteries. He shares with me a thorough understanding of the evils
that may beset him. If my affectionate admonitions can help him, he
has them; if my mistakes of the past serve as danger signals along
his pathway, he knows of them; if my longer experience and broader
knowledge of the world’s ways can save him, he shall escape the snares
and pitfalls that await the heedless step of the untaught and untold
young.
Before he was seven I had told him whence we come. Scraps of
conversation overheard on the street between his own playfellows warned
me that the time had come and made my duty clear. I saw the pity of it!
My boy, whom I had taught to look trustfully to me for the truth at all
times and about all things; my boy hearing distorted and vulgarised
bits of knowledge that should have come to him solemnly and sacredly
from the parent whom he had learned to look upon as the fountainhead!
This is what I told him:
“God made everything, as you know. He made the sea and the land, the
sky and the stars and the sun and the moon. He makes the trees and the
plants and the animals and the boys and the girls who grow to be men
and women. But when I say God makes these things I do not mean that
He makes them with tools, as you would make a playhouse, or with His
hands, as you would make a snow-man. He makes all of these things by
a great plan which He has laid out and by which all things, with His
help, spring up and grow, over and over again, so that the world may go
on just as it is for years and years. By this plan all living things
come from a seed. This seed is within all grown-up plants and grown-up
animals. When a new plant is needed, a seed falls from the grown-up
plant and falls into the soil, where it sprouts and becomes a young
plant. Every kind of animal is composed of two sexes, the male sex and
the female sex. The fathers are of the male sex; the mothers of the
female sex. As the seed of plants is within the flower, so the seed of
animals is within the mother animal. When a new animal is needed the
seed within the mother slowly grows into a young animal like the father
or mother, and while it is still very small it comes out into the light
and sunshine; and that is what we mean when we say it is born. Men and
women are animals. They are different from all other animals in that
they can talk and think and are much higher and better in every way.
But the seed forms within the mother just as it does within the plants
and birds and animals of all kinds. And when another child is needed
the seed begins to grow and takes the form of a little child and after
awhile it comes into the world to be dressed and fed and cared for;
that is what we mean when we say that a babe has been born. That is how
you came into the world and how I came and how all of us came. It is
all a part of God’s wonderful plan to keep the world growing greater
and better and more beautiful. It is not good for boys to talk about
these beautiful things in a rough way, and I hope you will not do so.
I tell them to you because I want you to know the truth. If there is
anything you do not understand, ask me and I will explain it. Whatever
you may hear, no matter whether it is good or bad, if you want to know
the truth about it come to me and I will tell you.”
That was all. Science in words of two syllables. Science is truth, and
truth is what your boy demands.
My boy took me at my word. He came back for further enlightenment
more than once. But every time I answered him soberly, freely and
truthfully. And when he knew everything he was immune to that
contamination which mystery breeds. And what is more, the parent
had measured up to the child’s ideal. The father was still the
fountainhead; and no boy will drink from the stagnant pool of vulgarity
when the clear crystal water of truth is close at hand.
* * * * *
Revealing the science of propagation to the child-boy is, after all,
only the first step toward unfolding the many facts of sex--facts that
are made mysteries through the inexcusable selfishness--or modesty,
if you prefer to call it that--of mothers and fathers. If sealing the
secrets of sex is an injustice to the boy of six, it is a scarlet sin
against the youth of sixteen. At six he is looking at life curiously
from the family dooryard--within the mother’s call; but at sixteen
or soon thereafter, he strides out into the street, marches down the
highway and turns the corner. He is on the firing-line. Now comes a
crisis in the boy’s life so acute, so grave that I approach the subject
with trepidation. My poor pen, tempered by that delicacy demanded of
printed words, seems incapable of the task before me. And I approach
it also with reverence because I look upon it as an almost divine
privilege to be permitted to discuss with an army of mothers a problem
which I regard as the great tragedy of American youth.
* * * * *
Nature is good, Nature is provident, but above all Nature is
self-preservative. Go to your naturalists, your entomologists, and they
will all tell you that the law of perpetuation is first and foremost
among all living things. Man is no exception. Your boy, just coming
into his maturity, is in this respect like unto all other growing
things that God has made. As he ripens toward manhood this instinct
becomes more manifest within him. Vaguely, perhaps, he recognises its
import, but in the main it is a mystery. In a general way he may reason
out its purpose; but how can he know its humanised limitations? How
can he know that the refining process of civilisation has demanded a
check upon the exercise of Nature’s functions? And--here is the vital
issue--how shall he know of the dread penalties Nature sometimes exacts
when these restraints are violated? Why is it that the loving father
and mother, who labour with him and watch over him and shield him
through childhood, decline to raise a finger of warning against the
grim spectre of disease that stalks behind the painted faces of the
underworld? Must it be written, to the shame of human parenthood, that
the very horror of this evil stays the warning hand? Or does the mother
fall into that too common error of thinking that this evil of evils is
open to every boy but her own? Then listen to this, which I quote from
an eminent authority:
“Take a group of one hundred young men--those from eighteen
to twenty-five years of age--and seventy-five of these will
be found to be suffering either from the effects of venereal
diseases or still in an acute stage of one of them.”
Mothers, let not your eyes be blinded to a condition that medical
records have proven to be a fact. It may be your boy and it may be mine.
The chances of its being mine are reduced to the minimum--_because my
boy will know_. The revelation, as I make it, is so simple and yet so
complete, that it could be accomplished with equal ease by mother or
father. When he is about sixteen I place in his hand a book that tells
him all, and I say to him: “My boy, when you are alone, read this.[1]
There are truths in it which you should know.” From that hour the
“great social peril” must fight my son in the open. He knows all that
science can teach--all that parents can tell.