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Page 5
God grant that, in view of the tremendous responsibilities that devolve
upon us women in these latter days, we may cry from our hearts:
"Let not fine culture, poesy, art, sweet tones,
Build up about my soothed sense a world
That is not Thine, and wall me up in dreams.
So my sad heart may cease to beat with Thine,
The great World-Heart, whose blood, forever shed,
Is human life, whose ache is man's dull pain."
CHAPTER II
"WHY SHOULD I INTERFERE?"
I am, of course, aware that at the very outset I shall be met by the
question--far less frequently urged, however, by thoughtful mothers than
it used to be--"Why need I interfere at all in a subject like this? Why
may I not leave it all to the boy's father? Why should it be my duty to
face a question which is very distasteful to me, and which I feel I had
much better let alone?"
I would answer at once, Because the evil is so rife, the dangers so
great and manifold, the temptations so strong and subtle, that your
influence must be united to that of the boy's father if you want to
safeguard him. Every influence you can lay hold of is needed here, and
will not prove more than enough. The influence of one parent alone is
not sufficient, more especially as there are potent lines of influence
open to you as a woman from which a man, from the very fact that he is a
man, is necessarily debarred.
You must bring the whole of that influence to bear for the following
considerations.
Let me take the lowest and simplest first. Even if you be indifferent
to your boy's moral welfare, you cannot be indifferent to his physical
well-being, nay, to his very existence. Here I necessarily cannot tell
you all I know; but I would ask you thoughtfully to study for yourself a
striking diagram which Dr. Carpenter, in one of our recognized medical
text-books, has reproduced from the well-known French statistician,
Quetelet, showing the comparative viability, or life value, of men and
women respectively at different ages.
[Illustration: DIAGRAM REPRESENTING THE COMPARATIVE VIABILITY OF THE
MALE AND FEMALE AT DIFFERENT AGES.]
The female line, where it differs from the male, is the dotted line, the
greater or less probability or value of life being shown by the greater
or less distance of the line of life from the level line at the bottom.
Infant life being very fragile, the line steadily rises till it reaches
its highest point, between thirteen and fourteen. In both cases there
is then a rapid fall, the age of puberty being a critical age. But from
fifteen, when the female line begins to right itself, only showing by a
gentle curve downwards the added risks of the child-bearing period in a
woman's life, the male line, which ought, without these risks, to keep
above the female line, makes a sharp dip below it, till it reaches its
lowest point at twenty-five, the age when the excesses of youth have had
time to tell most on the system.[1] Here, at least, is evidence that
none can gainsay. The more you ponder that mysterious sharp dip in the
man's line of life at the very age which Nature intended should be the
prime and flower of life, the more deeply you will feel that some deep
and hidden danger lies concealed there, the more earnestly you will come
to the conclusion that you cannot and will not thrust from you the
responsibility that rests upon you as the boy's mother of helping to
guard him from it. Keep him from the knowledge of evil, and the
temptations that come with that knowledge, you cannot. The few first
days at school will insure that, to say nothing of the miserable streets
of our large towns. As Thackeray long ago said in a well-known passage,
much animadverted on at the time:
"And by the way, ye tender mothers and sober fathers of Christian
families, a prodigious thing that theory of life is, as orally
learnt at a great public school. Why! if you could hear those boys
of fourteen who blush before their mothers, and sneak off in
silence in the presence of their daughters, talking among each
other, it would be the woman's turn to blush then. Before Pen was
twelve years old, and while his mother thought him an angel of
candour, little Pen had heard enough to make him quite awfully wise
upon certain points; and so, madam, has your pretty rosy-cheeked
son who is coming home from school for the ensuing Christmas
holidays. I don't say that the boy is lost, or that the innocence
has left him which he had 'from heaven, which is our home,' but
that the shades of the prison house are closing very fast round
him, and that we are helping as much as possible to corrupt
him."[2]
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