The modern Baby Show is a fruitful source of mischief—a degenerate
successor to that ancient display whose beneficent purpose was to
ascertain what ailing or deformed or merely puny infants might most
advantageously be flung off a cliff. The object of the modern Baby Show
is not improvement of the race by assisting Nature in “weeding out,”
nor is such the practical result. Prizes, we are told, are commonly
bestowed by a committee of matrons, and necessarily fall to the fattest
exhibit. In the matron’s ideal “scale of being” the pudgiest, the most
orbicular, babe holds the summit place, the first adiposition, so to
speak.
This is not as it should be; no true improvement in the race can be
effected by encouraging our young to bury their noses in their cheeks
and their knuckles under a mass of tissues overlying them like a
boxing-glove. The prize winners do not become better men and women than
their unsuccessful but more deserving competitors; while the latter,
beginning life in the shadow of a great disappointment, retain to the
end of their days a sharp sense of injustice incompatible with warm and
elevated sentiments. The effect on the characters of the beaten mothers
is even more deplorable. Every mother of a defeated babe is convinced
that her exhibit is incomparably superior, physically, intellectually
and morally, to the roly-poly impostors honored by the committee
of matrons. Her wrath at the unjust decision is deep, constant and
lasting; it embitters her life, sours her temper and spoils her beauty.
As to the fathers, the only discernible effect upon them of either
winning or losing is to make them a trifle more ashamed of their
offspring than they were before. “The proud and happy father” had never
the advantage of existing outside the female imagination, but if he
really existed the Baby Show would be fatal to both his pride and his
happiness.
In enumerating the manifold mischiefs that fly from that Pandora’s-box,
the Baby Show, we are perhaps not justified in mentioning the
desolating effect upon the committee of matrons whose action springs
the lid. It is doubtful if the disasters which themselves incur can
rightly be rated as evils in the larger sense of the word; and,
anyhow, the nature of these is imperfectly known; for after making
their award the unhappy arbiters commonly vanish from the busy haunts
of women. The places which knew them know them no more forever, and
their fate is involved in obscurities pervious only to conjecture.
In view of this regrettable but apparently inevitable fact, it is
desirable (if the Baby Show cannot be averted) that the lady judges be
selected early, in order that our citizens may bestow upon them before
they are taken from us some suitable testimonial of public esteem and
gratitude, attesting the popular sense of their heroism in accepting
the fatal distinction.