This is a mighty task, one that in the United States of America, with
its cosmopolitan population, and its multitude of people with a
smattering only of education or culture but with economic ability to
gratify their undeveloped tastes, is more vast and more pressing than
any nation has yet tried to accomplish. While we are working at it we
may well comfort ourselves by remembering that each generation has to
meet new problems, and that somehow, even when the young start wrong
or meet with overwhelming temptations or fail to get at the right time
the impulse toward the best which they need, life has them in hand and
teaches by experience much which helps them onward. The tendency of
life is toward strength and health and goodness and idealistic aims
and choice of the best each person knows. It is true, and the best
thing in human experience, that what parents cannot do for those they
love, life itself does for them, perhaps with needless suffering that
the wise and loving parent would have saved them had they but heeded,
but with a thoroughness which experience alone can give.
=Parental Love for the Black Sheep.=--The attitude of parents toward
the black sheep who does not change his ways of evil and does not
become a comfort but remains always a burden and sorrow, is one of the
saddest and one of the noblest of human exhibits in sympathy and
affection. A woman of the finest nature who as a girl was captured in
imagination by a man of brilliant quality but of peculiar cruelty and
wickedness of nature, and guilty, after their marriage, of many
crimes, had two sons. One was like herself and became a man honored by
all, and of the greatest help to his mother. The other seemed the
image of his father in all ways, personal beauty, brilliant talent,
and a naturally depraved character. He landed in prison, sentenced for
many years for forgery and long-sustained robbery of a bank. His
mother said with truth that she never had had a moment's relief from
the most wearing anxiety until he was safely behind prison bars, where
he could no longer torture his young wife or hurt anyone else by his
wrong actions. Yet that mother, when he was breaking her heart by his
actions and most willing to do it, never failed in love, in patience,
in deep understanding of his moral twist and incapacity.
A girl born of ordinarily intelligent and moral parents became a
prodigy of sex perversion and the accomplice of thieves and murderers.
She gave untold misery to all her family, but the father never gave up
his search for her when she left the home and never failed to give her
succor and the most tender care when she came back worn and ill, and
at last left all other interests in life to snatch her away from bad
companions and try to establish her in a new place and a better
surrounding.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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