Chapter VI: Part 6

You would think that she would ground him, from his infancy up, in the knowledge of all the little things that make a marriage a failure or a success to a woman—the little attentions, the little treats, the word of praise, the compliment on a new dress or hat, the little things that make a woman’s heart sing with joy, and that makes marriage worth while to her. The great majority of women, however, never even so much as think of training their sons to be good husbands. Nor do they train their daughters to be good wives. Very few mothers would be willing to see their sons marry the kind of girls their daughters are.

Mother has raised her daughters up to be selfish and spoiled and lazy and extravagant, and she is ready to foist them without mercy on any poor young fellows who are taken with their pretty faces. But Heaven defend her own boys from marrying girls who have never considered any other human being in the world but themselves, and whose only law is their own pleasure! You even hear mothers boast that they have never taught their daughters how to cook, or sew, or keep house, yet the very foundation of domestic happiness and the prosperity of the family depend upon the wife being a thrifty manager and making a comfortable home.

Nor do women instil into their daughters’ minds the truth about marriage—that it is an obligation that they take upon themselves, and that they have no right to throw it up and quit because it is full of hardships and self-sacrifice instead of being the joy-ride they thought it would be. Neither do mothers pass on to their daughters their own hardly won knowledge of how to get along with a husband, how to bear with him and forbear, how to jolly him and handle him with tact and diplomacy, yet that precious bit of information would save many a marriage. Believe me that the most important question that any mother can ask herself is this: “Am I raising up my son and daughter to bless or curse the woman and man who marry them?”

XXXVIII

HOW TO BE A GOOD HUSBAND

A young man said to me the other day: “I am going to be married, and I earnestly and honestly desire to make my wife happy, but beyond a vague and rudimentary impression that I must not beat or starve her, I haven’t an idea of how to go about the good-husband job. What should a man do to keep a woman blessing her lucky stars that she married him, instead of wondering what on earth the fool-killer was doing that she survived her wedding day?”

“Well, son,” I replied, “your theoretical ground work for being a good husband is a sound foundation on which to build, tho refraining from beating your wife is not the matter of course thing that you seem to think it is. There will be plenty of times when you will want to do so, and bitterly regret that no perfect gentleman can lay his hands upon a woman save in the way of kindness, no matter how much she needs a thrashing or he yearns to give her one.

“While as for giving a wife sustenance and raiment, believe me, that to be a good provider is one of the brightest jewels in the crown of a good husband. No matter what other charms and virtues a man may have, he is a poor makeshift of a husband if he cannot give his wife a comfortable living. And, on the other hand, no man is a total failure as a husband if he laps his wife in luxuries. Jewels, and motorcars, and fine houses, and fine clothes are a consolation prize that takes the curse off many a woman’s disappointment in marriage.

“Having, then, accorded your wife considerate treatment and given her a good home, the next step in being a good husband is to play fair with her on the money question. Get off on the right foot there and you will save yourself endless bickerings and prevent her from feeling a bitterness toward you that will grow and grow until it will kill out all of her affection for you. The first disillusion that many a bride gets is when she finds out that the prince of her dreams is a tightwad, who haggles with her over the market money and who is so stingy that he never gives her a penny of her own. There isn’t a woman in the world who is enough of a worm of the dust not to resent having to ask her husband for the money she knows she earns as a housewife. So go fifty-fifty with your wife on the money proposition. Give her as big an allowance as you can afford and be decent enough not to ask her what she does with it.

“The next item in being a good husband is to be affectionate to your wife. Don’t expect her to take it for granted that you still love her because you haven’t applied for a divorce from her. You handed her a fine and convincing line of love talk while you were courting her, and there is no excuse for your cutting it off and becoming as dumb as an oyster just as soon as you’ve got her. No normal woman can live without love and be happy. It is just as necessary to her well-being as food and drink, and if she is deprived of it she suffers all of the agonies of soul starvation, which are worse than those of the body. When you marry a woman you isolate her from the love-making of other men, and so you are in honor bound to provide her with an ample supply of soft talk yourself.

“Therefore, make it a rule of your life to give your wife at least one kiss every day that has in it some thrill of love and passion, and that isn’t flavored with ham and eggs like the perfunctory peck on the cheek or the back of the ear which is all most men hand their wives in the osculation line. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t neglect to pay your wife compliments. When she has on a new dress tell her how pretty she looks and how becoming it is, instead of grunting or demanding to know how much it costs. If you have eyes enough to see other women’s pretty clothes and intelligence enough to say the right things about them, why not about your wife’s, when it will please her to death and make her think what a wonderful man she has married?

“The next point in being a good husband consists in doing something actively to make your wife happy and showing a human interest in her. Many men think they have done their whole duty as husbands when they furnish their wives with food and shelter and plenty of money. I have heard men excuse themselves for never remembering an anniversary or giving their wives a little present by saying that they didn’t know what Mary or Sally wanted, and that they had charge accounts at the best jewelers and department stores and could buy themselves whatever they wanted.

“That kind of thing doesn’t make a woman happy. There isn’t a wife in the world who wouldn’t get more thrill out of a dollar string of blue beads that her husband bought because they matched her eyes than she would out of a pearl necklace that she bought herself on her wedding anniversary because her husband had forgotten they were ever married. It is the personal touch that counts with women. The sentiment. The knowledge that her husband is concerned about her, that he notices when she is tired, that he appreciates all that she does, that he tries to make her happy and wants to give her every pleasure that he can.

“If you want to be a good husband, son, remember to do the little things, and the big things will do themselves. Be affectionate, be kind, be appreciative, jolly her instead of finding fault with her. Be liberal in the use of flattery and take her to some place of amusement at least once a week, and she will thank God on her knees for having given you to her for a husband.”

XXXIX

GIVING CHILDREN ADVANTAGES

Among my acquaintances is a woman who is always bemoaning the fact that she cannot give her children “advantages.” She sheds barrels of tears over their not having the “advantages” that the children of the rich have. She beats upon her breast and laments that she cannot send her boys to college, and give them high-powered motorcars, and when she thinks of not being able to dress her daughters like fashion plates and send them off to summer and winter resorts, she melts down into a perfect pulp of self-pity. After listening to this wail for a number of years, I grew exasperated, and said to her:

“What are the advantages that you cannot give your children? Let us sit down and consider them dispassionately, and see if your children really are so unfortunate, and so handicapped in life as you think they are. Let us begin with your not being able to send your boys off to college. I grant you that we would all like to give our children every possible opportunity to acquire a good education. But not all knowledge comes put up in school-book packages. Furthermore, the degree a man takes who graduates from the University of Hard Knocks has a lot of practical, available information, and a working knowledge of life that is worth a bushel of M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s, and that it will take the college graduate ten or fifteen years to acquire. Many of the best-informed, best-read men that I know never saw the inside of a college. In these days of cheap books, and magazines, and newspapers, if a man wants an education he will get it.

“Nor is the lack of a college education any bar to success. The men who are running things in America to-day spent their formative years, from 18 to 24, in learning about mines, and railroads, and stores, and banking, instead of being grounded in Greek and Latin. And they are hiring college graduates to work for them. Moreover, while you can lead a boy to the Pierian spring, you cannot make him drink from it, and you know well enough that the great majority of boys who are sent off to college idle away their time, and come back with nothing but a college yell, the latest thing in Klassy Kut Kollege Klothes, and a maddening air of superiority. So comfort yourself with the knowledge that if your son has it in him to take an education he will get it. If he yearns for culture he will acquire it, but if he is just a boy who has good hard horse sense, and is not intellectual, the sooner he gets to work after his high-school days the better for him. Of course, mother-like, you want your children to have everything that multimillionaires have, but in your heart you must know that money is a curse to a boy instead of a blessing. To begin with, wealth paralyzes ambition. We are all poor, weak creatures who take the line of least resistance, and when we don’t have to do things we become slackers. We have to have necessity to spur us on to achievement.

“Call over the roll of the rich men of to-day, of the men who sit in high places, from the President down, of the men who are famous inventors, and writers, and artists. They were almost all poor boys. There is scarcely the name of a millionaire’s son in the whole list. And riches lead a boy into temptation from which the poor boy is safe. The boy who has to work for his daily bread has his mind and his hands occupied. He has something interesting and exciting always to do. The idle rich boy must make his own diversions, and find some way of killing time, and he does it only too often by the booze and the gambling route, and in the company of wild women. For adventuresses and grafters fasten themselves like leeches on the man with a fat pocketbook. There is nothing like lacking the price as a first aid to virtue.

“As for not being able to give your girls advantages, do you really think it is any advantage to a girl to be brought up to be nothing but a fashion plate, to have no duties and responsibilities, to have no object in life except amusing herself and to be taught merely to be a waster and a spender? Do you think that the woman who has a dozen homes in this country and Europe, between which she vibrates with no more local attachments than a transient guest has in a hotel, gets the pleasure out of them that the woman does out of her little bungalow, whose every plank has been paid for by some sacrifice and where every chair and plate is the result of weeks of saving and planning? Do you think the girl who buys herself a European title is as happy with the _roué_ husband she has purchased as the girl who marries some clean, honest young chap she loves and works up with him to prosperity? Do you think that the woman who bears children and then turns them over to nurses and governesses gets the benediction out of motherhood that the woman does who cradles her children on her breast and rears them up at her knee?

“You lament that you cannot give your daughters the chance to make fine marriages. Why, the working girl has ten times as good chance to make a good marriage as the society girl has, because she is thrown with more men. She works side by side with the go-getters and the coming men, and she has the pick of them all. So,” I said to my lachrymose friend, “stop whining because you aren’t rich and can’t give your children ‘advantages.’ You are giving them the necessity of standing on their own feet and fighting their own battles, of developing all that is best in them, and that is the greatest advantage that you could possibly give them.”

XL

SELL YOURSELF TO YOUR CHILDREN

Did you ever contemplate trying to “sell” your children, as the advertising experts say, the things you wish them to be and do? Did you ever try selling them yourself? Of course, the old idea is that the proper way to rear children is by forcing on them a system of do’s and don’ts. We tell our children that they must do this, and they mustn’t do that. We try to coerce them along the straight and narrow road because that is the proper path for them to travel, but we never take the trouble to artfully entice them into it and make them think that they have chosen it of their own free wills.

We want our children to love us, to admire us, to consider us their best friends; but we expect them to do this because we believe it the duty of children to honor their parents. Not ten fathers and mothers in a thousand ever deliberately try to make themselves attractive to their children or win their confidence. Perhaps this is why there are so many boys and girls hurtling down the broad highway to destruction; why parental influence amounts to so little, and why the average child feels that it has less in common with its own father and mother than it has with any other man and woman it knows.

We have just begun to realize that propaganda is one of the greatest and most insidious forces on earth. We have seen it lift men up to the skies and make gods of them, then turn and pull them down, and trample them into the dust. We have seen it exalt a nation into sainthood and turn it into a howling mob, crying for blood. And if it can thus sway and move grown-up people, what a weapon it is to use upon the plastic mind of a child! This being the case, why should we not “sell” our children the ideals we wish them to have? Why should we not feed them on the right propaganda from their cradle up? Why should we not advertise the good things of life until we make them so alluring that the child will want them?

Why should we not sell righteousness to our children? It is one thing to preach and nag at them about drink, and gambling, and associating with bad men and women until you bore them to tears and make them wonder what is the fascination of the evil that they are so warned against. And it is another thing to make clean living the symbol of health, and strength, and length of days; the respect of one’s fellow men and, above all, the thing that sets one right with one’s own soul.

Why not sell our children education? We scourge them to school, which most of them regard as a place of penance, and where, dull and bored, they sit in stolid indifference, while the dull and bored teachers go through the perfunctory routine of hearing them recite lessons in which they do not pretend to take the slightest interest. But suppose we could really sell these children the idea of education? Suppose we could get them as interested in history as they are in stories of adventure? Suppose we could make them see that spelling and arithmetic are not tasks; that they are the tools with which they will work when they get their first jobs as stenographers and bookkeepers, and that the better they spell and the quicker they are at figures the bigger their pay envelopes will be! Suppose we could make them see that knowledge is power, and that whether they stay at the foot of the ladder or climb to the top is going to depend on how well their brains are trained! Why, if we could make children see the advantages of an education we would not have to force them to go to school. They would be eager and anxious to go.

Suppose we sold our children good manners. We are always correcting Johnny at the table about the way he eats, and he is so used to our don’ts about walking in front of people and keeping his hat on that he has long since ceased to listen when we speak. But suppose, from his earliest infancy, Johnny had heard boors ridiculed, and knife swallowers, and cup cuddlers, and audible soup-eaters held up to scorn as figures of fun. Do you not know that Johnny would as soon think of committing murder as one of these offenses? And suppose Johnny has had it impressed on him by precept and example that good manners are a letter of credit that is honored the world over; that they will take you farther than anything else on earth. Don’t you know that Johnny would be incapable of loutishness, because good manners had simply been bred into him?

Why should we not sell our children industry and thrift? Propaganda again. You can make work the most thrilling of all games. You can make a child feel that his job is of great importance. You can form in childhood an unbreakable habit of industry. You can teach the child how to deny itself little things in order to save the money for big things. You can make it feel the independence of having its own little bank account. You can set a goal before it and light the fires of ambition in its soul.

Finally, why not sell yourself to your children? Why not make as much effort to ingratiate yourself with your children as you would with a stranger? Why not try to impress your children with your ability, your wisdom, your up-to-dateness, as you would any man or woman with whom you are trying to do business? If parents could only convince their children that they are not back-numbers and incarnate killjoys it would do more than any other one thing to improve the family relationship. Believe me, it pays to advertise—especially with your children.

XLI

TAKING HUSBANDS “AS IS”

I wish that I could make every young girl who gets married a present of a handsomely framed motto to hang on the wall above the mirror of her dressing table, where she would be compelled to see it every time she put on or took off her complexion, or repaired the Cupid’s bow of her lips. On this motto in gorgeously illumined letters would be these sapient words of Grover Cleveland: “It is a condition and not a theory that confronts you.” I can think of no other advice in the world that would be such a lamp to guide the feet of any young woman who is starting to blunder down the rough road of matrimony, as this cold, hard, unimaginative assertion of a simple fact. It brushes away with one gesture of common sense all the dreams and romances and fairy tales of courtship, and leaves a woman facing the reality of matrimony, which is never as she thought it would be. It just is as it is.

If women would only abandon their theories about what matrimony should be, and how husbands should act, and deal with them as they are, it would save floods of tears, innumerable broken hearts, hundreds of cases of nervous prostration, and put the divorce courts out of business. Furthermore, that women are mostly right in their contentions, and have logic and justice on their side, doesn’t alter this aspect of the situation at all. For instance, woman’s perpetual grievance against her husband is his indifference. She wails out that he inveigled her into matrimony under false pretenses because from the ardor with which he wooed her, he led her to believe and expect that he would be an eternal lover and would spend a large part of his time telling her how beautiful and wonderful she was, and how he adored her. Instead of making good on this antenuptial propaganda, however, he stopped all of his love-making at the altar with a suddenness that jarred her wisdom teeth loose, and in place of being a ladylove, she finds herself merely a household convenience.

Millions of women make themselves miserable because their husbands never make love to them, never pay them a compliment, never give them any sign of appreciation, never take them to any place of amusement, never give any indication that they still care for them and want them to be happy. These suffering sisters could save themselves nearly all of their woe if they would just throw their rosy dreams of how a husband should treat a wife into the discard, and accept the truth that very few men are sentimentalists. Most of them feel like fools when they are love-making, and so they get the ordeal over with as quickly as possible. They consider that when a man marries a woman, and undertakes her board bill and shopping ticket, that he has given a proof of devotion strong enough to draw money on at the bank, and there is no use in saying anything more about it. Also they feel that the fact that they selected the women they did for wives showed that they admired them above all other women, so why harp on that string? And, of course, they want their wives to be happy. What else do they toil for except to doll their wives up, and give them cars and houses and trips to Palm Beach?

So the wife may be very happy and contented who has philosophy enough to take her husband as he is, good, kind and generous, even if he is a dumb lover, apparently more interested in his business than he is in her. She realizes that he says it with checks instead of with flowery phrases, and that if she is starved emotionally she is sure of her daily roast beef and potatoes. Then there is the matter of adjustment between a man and a woman. Every bride dreams an impossible dream of a husband who is chilled steel to all the balance of the world, but putty in her hands. Experience blows this fair dream to the ends of the earth, and she finds that she can no more alter her husband’s habits and prejudices than she can the laws of the Medes and the Persians. He has his ways, and she can either give in to them or fight over them. He has his set opinions, and she can sidestep them or fight with him about them.

She can either use tact and diplomacy in handling him, or else be in a perpetual quarrel with him, and she protests that this isn’t fair or just. She says that it is as much his place to give in to her as it is hers to give in to him. That it is just as much his business to deal subtly with her, as it is her business to deal subtly with him. Of course, the woman is right, but being right doesn’t help her a bit in getting along with her husband. It is a condition and not a theory that confronts her. If any harmonious relations exist between her and her husband, she has to furnish the harmony. If there is any adapting, it is the wife who must do the adapting.

Women likewise complain that it is unjust that they should have to do practically all of the work of making a happy home. They say that it is just as much a man’s business to be a little ray of sunshine in the home as it is a woman’s; that it is just as much up to a husband to wear the smile that won’t come off as it is the wife’s. They say that there is no more reason why they should read up on subjects that interest their husbands, so as to be able to hand out a good line of conversation, than why their husbands shouldn’t read up on fashion journals so as to be able to discuss intelligently with them the length of skirts and the latest hair bob. True. But again it is the condition and not the theory of matrimony that confronts them, and unless the wife makes the happy home it isn’t made. It is when women forget what matrimony should be, and deal with it as it is, that they make a success of it.

XLII

BEING A GOOD WIFE

“I want to be a good wife, the kind of a wife like that lady in the Bible whose price was above rubies,” said a little bride to me the other day. “What shall I do to be a real helpmeet to my husband?”

“Well, my dear,” I replied, “there are three general counts on which every wife must make good in order to help her husband, and then the job becomes the work of an expert, and varies according to the temperament of the man. To begin with, every woman who is an asset instead of a total loss to her husband, must make him a comfortable home and feed him properly. When a man marries, he practically turns over his stomach and his nerves and his brains to his wife’s care, and she can keep him at the peak of efficiency by giving him a quiet, restful place to come to at night, and a good dinner to eat, or she can sabotage the whole works by throwing in quarrels and heavy biscuit and tough meat.

“There is practically no limit to the amount of work a man can do whose wife takes care of him, and who has a happy home life. The men who break down with nervous prostration are the men who, after the struggle and anxiety and worries of a business day, go home to strife and wrangles and recriminations and nagging and to food that would kill an ostrich. No nerves and no digestion will stand it. A breakfast of flabby cakes and muddy coffee, that make him take a dyspeptic and despairing view of things, and see the world through blue spectacles, has made many a man turn down a good proposition that would have carried him on to fame and fortune. A spat with his wife that left his nerves on edge, and his soul filled with bitterness, has made many a man quarrel with his partner and insult his best client or customer.

“So, my dear, if you want to help your husband succeed, you must begin by making him a home wherein his tired body and frazzled nerves may refresh themselves, so that he may go forth with new strength to battle with the world. You must make him happy, for there is nothing that happy people may not achieve. The next item is to keep on cutting bait. Don’t deceive yourself into thinking that because you have captured your man he will stay captive. It is a job that has to be done over again every morning.

“You know the arts and wiles with which you lured him into matrimony. You recall the pretty dresses you wore, the glad, sweet smile with which you met him. The pleasure you showed you took in his society. A man doesn’t put on blinders when he gets married. He still has an eye out for a pretty woman in a gay frock, and he likes to feel that his wife still cares enough for him to want to make herself attractive to him and that his coming home is the big event of the day to her.

“Item three in being a good wife is to be a loving wife. Women are always talking about being heart-hungry and seem to think that it is an exclusively feminine complaint, but there are just as many men starving for affection as there are women. Don’t expect your husband to take it for granted that you still love him because you haven’t applied for a divorce. Tell him so. Give him a kiss now and then that isn’t just a peck on the cheek. But love with discretion. Don’t smother your husband with affection. Don’t surfeit him on it. Keep your love as a sweetener for matrimony. Don’t make it the whole diet. Remember that the most-loved husband in the world said: ‘Feed me with apples, stay me with flagons, for I am SICK of love.’

“The fourth item in being a good wife is not to expect the impossible of your husband. Don’t demand that he be a demigod. Accept him as a poor, faulty human being, even as you are. Don’t have hysterics every time he topples off of the pedestal on which you have placed him. Help him up, dust him off and give him a seat beside you. Humor him in his funny little ways. Sidestep his little prejudices. Don’t argue with him when your opinions clash. Laugh at his blunders and sympathize with him when he makes mistakes, and he will make you his confidant and tell you the truth, which is the finest tribute that any man ever pays his wife.

“Item five in being a good wife is to be appreciative. When the average man gets married he sells himself into bondage to his family. The remainder of his life he spends toiling to keep his wife and children soft and safe. And whether all this work and sacrifice is worth the price and is a glorious reward depends altogether on his wife’s attitude. If she takes it as nothing but her due, it is slavery. But if she lets him see every day in every way that she thinks that he is the finest and noblest man that ever lived, and that no be-medaled warrior has anything on him in heroism, it makes it all worth while and causes him to feel that being a husband and father is the finest career on earth.

“Item six in being a good wife is to keep yourself good-natured. Tho you have all other virtues, yet are a high-tempered virago or a nagger, you will be a failure as a wife and your husband will curse the day he married you.

“Item seven is to be a good sport. To take the bad with the good of matrimony without whining. Not to welch on your part of the work and sacrifices. To be willing to go where your husband’s fortunes call him. To fight the battle with him shoulder to shoulder and never to give up the ship.

“The next way to help your husband is by keeping yourself cheerful and optimistic. Nothing breaks down a man’s morale so quickly as having a wife who is whining and complaining, who reproaches him with not making as much money as other men do, and who lets him see that she does not believe in him. Now we can only do the things we think we can do, and when we kill a man’s faith in himself we have slain his ability to succeed. Ninety-nine husbands out of a hundred live up to their wives’ expectations of them. If their wives are always knocking them and discouraging them and wet-blanketing their every plan and prophesying failure, they fail. But if their wives are cheerful and optimistic; if they encourage them; if they believe in them, and make them believe in themselves, they succeed. They simply have to make good because their wives expect it. Most wives write their husbands’ price tags. Price yours high, and your husband will deliver the goods.

“The next point in being a good wife is for the wife deliberately to make herself her husband’s best friend. That means that you must interest yourself in whatever interests him. First and foremost, you must take an interest in his business. Practically all men like to talk shop, but they can’t do it to women who yawn in their faces and who never take the trouble to learn the technique of the business out of which they get their living. A woman can help her husband not only by taking an interest in his business, but by making friends for him. Many a man is advertised into success by his charming wife, and many a man is bankrupted by his disagreeable and ill-mannered spouse. A woman can help her husband by using a little common sense in her attitude toward his business, and by being willing to make the sacrifices necessary to his success.

“The woman who always speaks of her husband’s office as ‘that old office,’ and who resents his interest in his business and the time he devotes to it; the woman who will not let her husband leave a poor job with no future to it, to take a better one in which he could make his fortune, because it would take her away from mother and the girls and Main Street; the doctors’ and dentists’ wives who are jealous of their husbands’ patients, and the lawyer’s wife who blabs, are all first aids to their husbands’ failure. Only a man of superhuman talent can succeed against the handicap of such a wife.

“Then come the two specific ways in which a wife can help her husband, and which depend on the individual man. Some men have talent, but lack backbone. They are brilliant but weak. They get easily discouraged and need to be bucked up and flattered and admired continually. They are prone to give up, and they need a wife who will hold them to their purpose when they falter and waver. A wife can help this type of man best by being a little hard and very ambitious, by bracing him up with her own strength and literally pushing him on to success. The clinging vine, helpless sort of women bring out the best that is in other men. If their wives could stand on their own feet, their husbands would let them do it, but because their wives can do nothing but hang around their necks, they feel that they must fight to the death for them.

“This is the reason that for the wife to be thrifty and saving is not always the best way to help a man. Because many a man has had to hustle to meet the demands of an extravagant wife he has made the effort that turned him into a millionaire.

“But mostly, my dear, if you want to help your husband, just love him enough. Perhaps that is the best way of all.”

XLIII

INVALIDISM A GRAFT

Do you ever think that it is dishonest to be sick when you might be well? It is just plain stealing. And it is the most despicable form of petty larceny, because it is robbing those who love you, and trust you and who are defenseless against you. They cannot lock up their sympathies, their peace of mind, their personal service, their money, safely away from your pilfering. Of course, there are many people who are really ill. Through no fault of their own, they are smitten by some terrible disease, and they deserve all that we can give of pity and help as they go stumbling down the agonized way to the grave.

These words are not for them, but for that multitude of men and women with whom sickness is merely a graft, a camouflage for selfishness, and a blanket excuse with which they cover up all their sins of omission and commission, and that furnishes them a perfect alibi for doing everything they want to do, and leaving undone those things which they do not wish to do.

Ninety per cent of all the sickness in the world is voluntary, or at least comes through contributory negligence. People are sick because they are not willing to make the sacrifices to keep well.

And curiously enough they justify themselves by claiming that their own health is a personal matter. “If I make myself sick, I am the one who has to suffer,” they say. If this were true, far be it from the rest of us to interfere with their pleasures. But it isn’t true. No man or woman is sick to himself or herself alone. We have to listen to their groans. We have to minister to them. We have to do their work. We have to pay their doctor’s bills. We have to put up with their irritability and unreason because sickness is supposed to give people _carte blanche_ to do and say all the things that well people do not dare to do. When ill health is an act of God, as shipping manifests say, and therefore beyond our control, it is one thing. When it is the result of weak self-indulgence it is another thing. Our sympathies and our assistance go out to the victim of tuberculosis or cancer, but we have nothing but contempt for the glutton who keeps himself sick from overeating.

In every business house where women are employed there is such a large percentage of them absent from work on account of sickness, especially during the winter, that the question is often raised whether the delicate feminine constitution can stand the strain of commercial life. Stuff and nonsense! It isn’t the work that is hurting the girls. It is the way they dress and live.

They feel that they have a perfect right to risk bad colds and pneumonia by coming to work on rainy, sloppy, sleety days in paper-soled satin pumps and chiffon stockings, and with not enough clothes on to keep an icicle warm. They consider it their own affair if they prefer to spend their money on an imported hat instead of on nourishing food. They think if they come to the office with a nervous headache that makes them blind and stupid with pain, and was brought on by too many nights of successive jazzing, it is a matter between them and the aspirin bottle alone. But it isn’t. They are not giving their employers a square deal. They are not giving them the services they pay for. They are upsetting the routine of the office, and laying the burden of their work on the shoulders of other people.

Look at the invalid wives you know! Dozens of them who have brought nervous prostration on themselves by overwork, or too many clubs and causes, or too much society. Don’t we all know women who go on orgies of housecleaning, or dressmaking, though they know perfectly well that every such debauch is going to end up in a spell of sickness which will call for doctors and trained nurses? Don’t we know women who wear themselves to tatters over church fairs and club campaigns? Don’t we know women who play bridge every day until they are so nervous that they become unbearable at home and their husbands have to send them off to sanatoriums to get a little peace and rest themselves? We do.

We marvel that these women never stop to consider how they are defrauding their families. They never consider what a wickedly dishonest thing it is to deprive a husband and children of a healthy, strong wife and mother, and give them a neurotic, irritable, cross, nerve-wrecked creature who makes the home about as cheerful as a grave-yard, and in which they have always to walk softly and speak in whispers for fear of disturbing the lady who has just gone to bed with a neuralgia headache.

Then there is the large army of women who enjoy poor health, who are professional invalids for the simple reason that they are too lazy and indolent to make the effort to be well. They are quitters who literally take life lying down. They cultivate small ailments. They acquire the sanatorium habit, and they expect to be pitied and babied instead of being ostracized as dishonest grafters who snatch the very bread out of the mouths of their families to pay their unnecessary doctor’s bills. We all know dozens of these women who suffer from imaginary complaints, and we have seen many of them cured by their husband’s death, when they had to quit being sick, and go to work and support themselves.

That is why I say that it is dishonest to be sick when you might be well.

XLIV

SELFISHNESS MADE TO ORDER

“My daughter is so selfish toward me,” wailed a mother to me the other day, “she never considers my comfort or happiness in any way whatever. Since the day she was born I have never had a thought except for her. I have given her the best of everything. I have worn old clothes in order that she might have fine new ones. I have done without the things I wanted that she might indulge her every desire. I have gone to the places that she wished to go to, instead of the places where I wished to go. I have cooked and sewed and waited upon her like a slave, but instead of appreciating all that I have done for her she takes it as a matter of course. She thinks any old cast-off is good enough for mother and never dreams of doing anything she doesn’t want to do for my pleasure. And that is my reward for all the sacrifices I have made for her!”

“Say rather that, as the result of all the sacrifices that you have made for your daughter,” I replied, “your girl is just exactly what you have made her. You have put in twenty-two years of conscientious work in erecting a monument of selfishness, and you have no right to complain. You wouldn’t build a house of mud and garbage cans and expect it to be a white marble palace. How, then, can you expect to build up a child’s character with all the meanest characteristics of human nature and expect it to be fine and noble? Impossible. And that is the sort of miracle that you parents expect from your children when you demand that they shall be something totally different from the thing into which you have made them.

“When your daughter was born, she was as plastic as clay in your hands. It was your privilege to mold her into any shape you pleased. You could have taught her to be unselfish, to be considerate, to think of other people, to love and honor and respect you. Instead of that, from her first conscious moment, you taught her to despise you, to think you of no account and not worth considering. You taught her to think only of herself, of her own pleasures and desires, and to get what she wanted at any cost to others. Now you whine because your teaching has borne fruit. You are unjust and unreasonable. What we sow, we reap inevitably. If you make yourself a doormat before your children, they will walk over you and kick you about, because they naturally think that you know where you belong in the household and have taken your proper place.

“They would just as naturally have looked up to you if you had placed yourself on a pedestal above them and demanded to be worshiped. Children don’t reason about their parents. They just accept them as they are and hold them cheap, or dear, according to the way the mother and father value themselves. I have no tears to shed over the sorrows of mothers who have selfish and ungrateful daughters, because every time it is the mother’s own fault. She is to blame, not the girl.

“If she had spent part of the clothes money on getting herself some pretty frocks, instead of lavishing it all on daughter, daughter would be proud of mother instead of being ashamed of her. If she had made daughter help with the housework and the sewing, instead of slaving over the cookstove and the sewing machine so that daughter might go free, daughter would think about saving mother and doing things for her. If she had asserted her rights to her own personal tastes and pleasures, instead of letting daughter’s tastes and pleasures rule the household, daughter would show her some consideration and remember mother’s likes and dislikes, and cater to them. There are mothers who are queens in their families, just as there are mothers who are nothing but the maid-of-all-work in their homes, and it rests with every mother to decide which she will be. It is the queen mothers who are loved and appreciated, and who have dutiful, unselfish children. The drudge mother gets only the wages of the drudge from her children.

“In reality, the mother who rears her children up to be monsters of selfishness has no right to expect appreciation and gratitude from them because she has done them as ill a turn as one human being can do another. She has warped their characters. She has developed in them traits that mar their happiness and are a handicap to success. She has made them egotists, and they are never satisfied and continually at variance with those about them. In particular is selfishness a blight upon a woman’s life, for the selfish woman finds it almost impossible to make the sacrifices that wifehood and motherhood demand of her. One of the main reasons why divorce is so prevalent is because when so many selfish girls find that they can’t treat their husbands as they did their mothers, they throw up their hands and quit.

“And so,” I said to the mother of the selfish daughter, “you are unfair to your daughter. Don’t blame her for being what you made her. What else could you expect?”

XLV

SELF-CONTROL

If I were to go to a mother who was cradling her babe on her breast, and tell her that I knew a magic formula by which she could insure power, and prosperity, and happiness to her child, she would impoverish herself to purchase this knowledge from me, and fall on her knees and bless me for having given it to her.

Yet I know just such a bit of white magic. In her secret soul every mother herself knows it, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred she is either too weak or too lazy to use it.

This charm that would have changed all life for innumerable people; that would have kept men out of prisons, and women out of brothels; that would have turned paupers into rich men; made the unsuccessful successful and stopped the wheels of the divorce court—consists simply in teaching children self-control.

Almost every misfortune under which humanity suffers goes straight back to that. There is hardly a derelict in the world who cannot say: “I would not be what I am if my mother had taught me to control myself.”

For it is lack of self-control that is at the bottom of most of our sins of omission and commission.

Look at the murderer going to the death chair. Not once in a thousand times is he a cold-blooded murderer; but he was a high-tempered child whose mother never taught him to control himself. There came a day when something irritated him more than usual and, aflame with anger, he took a fellow creature’s life. It is the supreme manifestation of the same spirit that made him kick the chair against which he stumbled as a child and beat with impotent little fists all who thwarted him.

Look at the drunkard wallowing in the gutter. He is there because his mother never taught him to control his appetites. He is the logical outgrowth of the greedy little boy who was permitted to gorge himself on cake and candy until it made him ill.

Look at the poor, shabby, out-at-elbows man who has drifted from job to job all his life, and has never been able to make a decent support for himself and his family. He is his mother’s handiwork. She put the curse of incompetence on him when she let him give up every undertaking the moment he struck the hard sledding in it.

He changed from one school to another because the lessons were too difficult, or the teacher was too strict. When he started to work, he left one place because the hours were too long, another because his boss was too exacting. He tried a dozen different occupations that he left because he found they had unpleasant features and involved doing uncongenial tasks. He is a down-and-outer because his mother never taught him the self-control that makes a man set his teeth and go through with the business to which he has put his hand.

Look at the girls who go astray. Not one of “the sorrowful sisterhood” as the Japanese pitifully call them, but who is what she is because her mother did not teach her self-control. Did the girl sin because she was so weak and so in love with some vicious libertine that she listened to her heart instead of her head? Her mother could have saved her from a fate worse than death if she had taught her to control her emotions, instead of being ruled by them.

Did the girl sell her soul for fine clothes, and good times? Again the mother’s fault for not teaching the girl self-control, and to do without the things that she could not honestly get.

Look at the poor old people who are dependent on their children, or the grudging charity of relatives and friends. In how many cases is their unhappy fate simply the result of their lack of self-control! They have had their chance of fortune. As long as the man was able to work he made plenty of money, and they lived luxuriously, but they spent everything as they went along. They laid up nothing for their rainy day, and when it came, it found them paupers and parasites. The difference between dependence and independence, between comfort and misery in your old age depends upon how much self-control you have had in your youth.

Look at the ever increasing number of divorces. Look at the forlorn half-orphan children, and broken up homes. Look at the unhappy married couples you know. What is the real cause of all this domestic trouble? Merely that mothers do not teach their children self-control. They raise up spoiled, selfish daughters who never consider a thing in life but their own pleasure.

They raised up spoiled, selfish sons who have never considered another human being but themselves. These two, with undisciplined wills, unrestrained tempers, undirected impulses, marry each other, and they fight like cats and dogs. Observation shows that either a husband or a wife who controls himself or herself can save almost any marriage, and it takes no prophet to foretell that mothers could insure their children’s domestic happiness by teaching them iron bound self-control.