By FRANCES POWER COBBE.

This eminent lady is the daughter of the Archbishop of Dublin, and one of the most distinguished philanthropists in England. In the following pages will be found some timely thoughts she has uttered in a lecture on

SOCIAL DUTIES IN THE FAMILY.

A mother’s love ought to be attuned to the very note of the love divine,—to be, in fact, its echo from the deep cave of her heart.

But, with super-earthly love to light her way what does she see before her? There is, first, the duty of conducing to her child’s moral welfare, the highest of all her duties; secondly, of securing his bodily health; thirdly, of giving him that intellectual training which will enlarge his being and make his moral nature itself more robust and capable of fulfilling his duties in life; and lastly, of making him as happy as she may. These are each and all most complicated problems to many a good mother, working perhaps against wind and tide, with feeble health or limited means, or possibly with a husband who thwarts and opposes her endeavors. It would require not half a lecture, but a whole treatise, to deal with such a subject fitly, even if I possessed the experience or insight needful for the task. There is only one point on which I think ethical science may be of some utility. That point is the problem of obedience. How far ought it to be enforced?

Three things are commonly confounded in speaking of filial obedience—

First—The obedience which must be exacted from a child for its own physical, intellectual, and moral welfare.

Second—The obedience which the parent may exact for his (the parent’s) welfare or convenience.

Third—The obedience which parent and child alike owe to the moral law, and which it is the parent’s duty to teach the child to pay.

If mothers would but keep these three kinds of obedience clear and distinct in their minds, I think much of the supposed difficulty of the problem would disappear. And, if children as they grow up would likewise discriminate between them, many of their troubles would be relieved.

For the first, the excellent old Dr. Thomas Brown lays down (Lectures on Ethics, p. 287) a principle which seems to me exactly to fit the case. He says that parents “should impose no restraint which has not for its object some good greater than the temporary evil of the restraint itself.” For an infant, the restraint is no evil; and at that age everything must be a matter of obedience, the babe possessing no sense or experience for self-guidance. But, as childhood advances, so should freedom advance; and, even if the little boy or girl does now and then learn by sharp experience, the lesson will generally be well worth the cost: whereas the evils of over-restraint have no compensation. Each one is bad in itself, checking the proper development of character, chilling the spirits, and also in a cumulative way becoming increasingly mischievous, as the miserable sense of being fettered becomes confirmed.

In all this matter of the child’s own welfare, the mother’s aim ought to be to become the life-long counselor of her child; and a counselor is (by the very hypothesis) one who does not persist in claiming authority. Nobody thinks of consulting another who may conclude their “advice” by saying, “And now I order you to do as I have advised.” To drop, as completely and as early as possible, the tone of command, and assume that of the loving, sympathetic, ever disinterested guide and friend,—that is, I think, the true wisdom of every mother, as it was that of my own. Of course, there are cases so grave (especially where girls who little understand the need of caution are concerned) that it is absolutely necessary, nay, the mother’s pressing duty, to prohibit her daughter from running into danger. To apply Brown’s rule, the evil of the restraint is more than counter-balanced by immunity from deadly peril. Perhaps it is one of the principal causes of the dissatisfaction of young girls with parental control that they do not and can not understand what horrible dangers may overtake them in the still foul condition of society.

Second—It is too little remembered that a parent has a moral right to exact obedience as a form of service from his child. The parent has, in strictest ethical sense, the first of all claims on the child’s special benevolence; i. e., on his will to do good. The double ties of gratitude and of closest human relationship make it the duty of the child to pay that sacred debt from first to last; and it is entirely fit and greatly for its benefit that the parent should claim that duty. The parent’s direction in such cases, properly translated, is not a command, to which the response is blind obedience, but an indication of the way in which the person to whom the debt is due desires that it should be paid. There ought to be nothing in the slightest degree harsh or dictatorial in such direction. On the contrary, I can not but think that the introduction by parents of much greater courtesy to their children would be an immense advantage in this and other cases. We all ask our servants politely to do for us the services which they have contracted to do, and for which we pay them. How much more kindly and courteously ought we to ask of our children to perform services due by the blessed and holy debt of nature and gratitude, and which ought, each one, to be a joy to the child as well as to the parent! When it is rightly demanded and cheerfully paid, how excellent and beautiful to both is this kind of filial duty! When, for example, we see little girls of the working classes taught to carry their father’s dinner to the field as soon as they can toddle, and helping their mother to “mind the baby,” even if it be a “little Moloch” of a baby, we witness both the fulfillment of a legitimate claim on the part of the parents, and a most beneficent moral training for the child. I think this sort of service of the child is sadly lacking among the richer classes, and that it would be an excellent thing if mothers, however wealthy, found means of making their children more useful to themselves. Nothing can be worse for a child than to find everything done for her, and never to be called upon to do anything for anybody else. Indeed, any fine-natured child, like a dog, will find much more real pleasure in being of use, or fancying it is so, than in being perpetually pampered and amused. Of course there would be moral limits to such claims on the parent’s part, as, e. g., when they would interfere with the child’s health or education. But there is no natural termination in point of age to the parent’s right to give such directions for his own service. On the contrary, the time when the adult son or daughter has come into the full possession of his or her faculties, while the parent is sinking into the infirmities of age, is the very time when filial duty is most imperative in its obligation; and the fact that aged parents rarely attempt to give to adult sons and daughters the same directions for their comfort as they gave them when children shows how little the real nature of these sacred rights and duties is commonly understood.

Third—There is the obedience which both parent and child owe to the eternal moral law; and this obedience again ought to be kept perfectly distinct from that which is exacted either for the child’s personal welfare or the parent’s convenience. The old and most important distinction between a thing which is malum in se and a thing which is only malum prohibitum ought never to be lost sight of. Even in a very little child, I think, a moral fault, such as a lie, or cruelty to an animal, or vindictiveness toward its companions, ought to be treated with gravity and sadness; and, as the child grows, an importance ought to be attached to such faults wholly incommensurate with any other sort of error, such as indolence about lessons or the like. The one aim of the parent must be to make profound impression of the awfulness and solemnity of moral good and moral evil.

But even here the difficulty haunts us, when is this enforcement of obedience to moral laws to cease? So long as a child is absolutely compelled to do right by sheer force and terror of punishment, its moral freedom can have no scope, and its moral life consequently can not even begin. It can not acquire the virtue which results from free choice. All that the parent can do (and it is an indispensable preparation for virtue, though not virtue itself) is first to teach the child what is right,—to draw out its latent moral sense, and inspire it with the wish to do right,—and then to help its steps in the path which has been pointed out. Once a child grasps the idea of duty, and begins in its little way to try to “be good,” and displays the indescribably touching phenomena of childlike penitence and restoration, it becomes surely the most sacred task for the mother to aid such efforts—silently, indeed, for the most part, and too reverentially to talk much about it—with tenderest sympathy. It would be no kindness, of course, but cruelty, to open up hastily ways of liberty before moral strength has been gained to walk in them. The “hedging up the way with thorns” is a divine precaution, which a mother may well imitate. But the principle must be, as in the case of directions in matters not moral, gradually and systematically to exchange directions and orders for counsels and exhortations.

And here, in closing these, perhaps, too tedious remarks on the moral training of children, I shall add a word which may possibly startle some who hear me,—Beware that, in earnestly seeking your child’s moral welfare, you do not force the moral nature with hot-house culture. To be a sturdy plant, it must grow naturally, and not too rapidly. It seems as if it were not intended by Providence that this supreme part of our human nature should be developed far in childhood and early youth, lovely as are the blossoms it sometimes then bears,—too often to drop into an untimely grave, or wither away in the heat of manhood without fruit. Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, undoubtedly made a great mistake in this matter, as one of his very best disciples, Arthur Hugh Clough, was able in later years to see. Mothers should not be unhappy, if boys are honorable and kindly and affectionate, if they should, at fifteen, prefer a game of football to a visit of charity; and I should not blame at all severely any of my young friends, if such there be here present, who may be at this moment wishing that she were playing lawn-tennis, instead of sitting still to hear a dull dissertation on moral philosophy!

But, when all is done that can be done by human wisdom to help the moral growth of the young, there is a vast space left for the other and easier parental duty of providing for their happiness. Of course, to nine parents out of ten, high and low, it is the joy and delight of their lives to make their children as happy as possible. There is no virtue in this. Nature (or, let us say frankly, God) has so made us that in middle life nearly all direct pleasures to be enjoyed on our own account begin to pall. We are too busy or too indifferent to care much for a score of things which, when we were younger, we found quite entrancing.

“It is the one great grief of life to feel all feelings die.”

But, just as our sun goes down to the horizon, a moonlight reflection of pleasure, purer, calmer than the first, rises to give a sweet interest to the lives of all who are happy enough to have young creatures around them. The pleasures we can no longer taste for ourselves we taste in our children’s enjoyment. Their glee, their eagerness, their freshness of delight, stir our pulses with tenderness and sympathy. I do not know anything in the world which pulls one’s heartstrings so much as the sight of a little blue-eyed, golden-haired, white-frocked atom of humanity clapping its hands and crowing with ecstasy at the sight of a kite soaring up into the summer sky.

Are we to ask parents to deny themselves and their children in the stern old way, and turn their young lives into dreary rounds of duty and work, till they hate the very name of either one or the other? God forbid! Does God, the great Parent, Father and Mother of the World, lead us up to himself by any such harsh, stern tuition? Nay, but has he not made earth so beautiful, and planted flowers by every wayside, and gladdened our hearts by ten thousand delights of the intellect, the senses, the tastes, and the affections? Fear, my friends, to make your children unhappy, and to love them too little. But never fear to make them too happy or to love them too much! There is a great, deep saying, that we must all enter the kingdom of God as little children. Surely, the converse of it is true also; and we should prepare in our homes a kingdom of God,—of peace and love and tenderness and innocent pleasure,—whenever a little child is sent to us out of heaven to dwell in it.

We now come to speak of the duties of daughters. The ethical grounds of the duty of supreme benevolence toward our parents are clear. They are nearest to us of human beings. We owe them life and (nearly always also) endless cares and affection. In the case of a mother, her claims on her child—founded on the bodily agony she has borne on its behalf, and the ineffably sweet office of nursing (when she has performed it), her care in infancy, and love and sympathy in later years—make together such a cumulative title to gratitude and devotion that it is impossible to place on it any limitation.

This claim is, of course, happily usually admitted in the case of daughters who do not marry. It is understood that they are bound to do all they can for their mother’s and father’s comfort. But, may I ask, who absolved the daughters who marry from the same sacred obligation? In Catholic countries, young women often quit their aged parents, no matter how much they need them, to enter “religion,” as it is said; and we Protestants are very indignant with them for so doing. But, when it comes to our Protestant religion of matrimony, lo! we are extremely indulgent to the girl who deposits her filial obligations on what the Morning Post calls the “Hymeneal Altar!” The daughter practically says to her blind father or bed-ridden mother: “Corban! I am going off to India with Captain Algernon, who waltzes beautifully, and whom I met last night at a ball. It is a gift by whatsoever you might have been profited by me.”

Is this right or justifiable? Public opinion condones it; and the parent often consents out of the abundance of unselfish affection, thereby in a certain formal way releasing the daughter from her natural debt. But I do not think, if the parent really wants her services, that she can morally withdraw them, even with such consent, and certainly not without it.

We all see this remarkably clearly when the question is not of marriage, but of a girl of the higher class devoting herself to charity or art, or any kind of public work which requires her to quit her parents’ roof. Then, indeed, even if her parents be in the full vigor of life, and have half a dozen other daughters, we are pretty sure to hear the solemn condemnation of the adventurous damsel, “Angelina ought to attend to her father and mother, and not go here or there for this or that purpose.”

Surely there is a very obvious rule to cover all these cases. If either parent wants the daughter she ought not to leave him or her, either to marry or to go into a nunnery, or for any other purpose. If her parents do not want her, then, being of age to judge for herself, she is free either to undertake the duties of a wife, or any others for which she may feel a vocation.

This may sound very hard. It is undoubtedly the demand for a very high degree of virtue, where the sacrifice may be that of the happiness of a lifetime. But every duty may sometimes claim such sacrifices. Parental duty does so perpetually. How many thousands of mothers and fathers toil all their days and give up health and every enjoyment for their children’s interests! Why should not filial duties likewise exact equal sacrifice? The entire devotion to the parent when the parent really needs it, and the constant devotion of as much care as the parent requires,—this, and nothing short of this, seems to me to be the standard of filial duty.

A very difficult question arises in the case of the abnormal and scarcely sane development of selfishness which we sometimes sadly witness in old age. I think, in such deplorable cases, the child is called on to remember that, even in her filial relation, the moral welfare of the object of benevolence is before all other considerations, and that she is bound to pause in a course which obviously is tending to promote a great moral fault. Gently and with great care and deference, she ought to remind the parent of the needs of others.

The great difficulty in the lives of hundreds of daughters of the upper ranks just now lies in this: that they find themselves torn between two opposing impulses, and know not which they ought to follow. On one side are the habits of a child, and the assurance of everybody that the same habits of quiescence and submission ought to be maintained into womanhood. On the other hand there is the same instinct which we see in a baby’s limbs, to stir, to change its position, to climb, to run; to use, in short, the muscles and faculties it possesses. Every young bird flutters away from its nest, however soft; every little rabbit quits the comfortable hole in which it was born; and we take it as fit and right they should do so, even when there are hawks and weasels all around. Only when a young girl wants to do anything of the analogous kind, her instinct is treated as a sort of sin. She is asked, “Can not she be contented, having so nice a home and luxuries provided in abundance?” Keble’s fine but much-misused lines, about “room to deny ourselves” and the “common task” and “daily round” being all we ought to require, are sure to be quoted against her; and, in short, she feels herself a culprit, and probably at least once a week has a fit of penitence for her incorrigible “discontent.” I have known this kind of thing go on for years, and it is repeated in hundreds, in thousands, of families. I have known it where there were seven miserable, big, young women in one little house! It is supposed to be the most impossible thing in the world for a parent to give his son a stone for bread or a serpent for a fish. But scores of fathers, in the higher ranks, give their daughters diamonds when they crave for education, and twist round their necks the serpents of idle luxury and pleasure when they ask for wholesome employment.

Pardon me if I speak very warmly on this subject, because I think here lies one of the great evils of the condition of our sex and class at this time; and I feel intensely for the young spirits whose natural and whose noble aspirations are so checked and deadened and quenched through all their youth and years of energy that, when the time for emancipation comes at last, it is too late for them to make use of it. They have been dwarfed and stunted, and can never either be or do anything greatly good.

In short, the complaint we women make against men, that they persist in treating us as minors when we have attained our majority, is what daughters too often can justly make against both their fathers and mothers. They keep them in the swaddling-clothes of childhood, when they ought to set free and train every limb to its most athletic and joyous exercise. Dangers, of course, on the other side there are,—of over-emancipated and ill-advised girls who sorely need more parental guidance than they obtain; but, so far as my experience goes, these cases are few compared to those of the young women (ladies, of course, I mean, for in the lower classes such evils are unknown) whose lives are spoiled by over-restraint in innocent things. They are left free, and encouraged to plunge into the maelstrom of a fashionable season’s senseless whirl of dissipation and luxury. They are restrained from every effort at self-development or rational self-sacrifice, till, for the very want of some corrective bitter, they go and beat the hassocks in a church as a pious exercise, or perhaps finally lock themselves up in a nunnery. Small blame to them! Ritualist nunneries at present offer the most easily accessible back-door out of fine drawing-rooms into anything like a field of usefulness.

Now for sisters. That brothers and sisters should give one another in an ordinary way the first-fruits of their benevolence follows obviously from the closeness of their propinquity. Usually there has also been from childhood the blessed interchange of kindnesses which accumulate on both sides into a claim of reciprocal gratitude.

Miss Bremer remarks that “it is the general characteristic of affection to make us blind to the faults of those we love, but from this weakness fraternal love is wholly exempt.” Brothers are indeed terrible critics of their sisters, and, so far, irritating creatures. But otherwise, as we all know, they are the very joy and pride of our lives; and there is probably not one duty in our list which needs less to be insisted on to women generally than that of bestowing on their brothers not only love of benevolence, but also a large amount of love of complacency. It is usually also a truly sound moral sentiment, causing the sister to take profound interest in the religious and moral welfare of her brother, as well as in his health and happiness.

One mistake, I think, is often made by sisters, and still more often by mothers, to which attention should be called. The unselfishness of the sisters, and the fondness of the mother for her boy, and the fact that the boy is but rarely at home, all contribute to a habit of sacrificing everything to the young lad’s pleasure or profit, which has the worst effect on his character in after-life. Boys receive from women themselves in the nursery, and when they come home from school in the holidays, a regular education in selfishness. They acquire the practice of looking on girls and women as persons whose interests, education, and pleasures must always, as a matter of course, be postponed to their own. In later life, we rue—and their wives may rue—the consequences.

The duties of sisters to sisters are even more close and tender than those of sisters to brothers. I hardly know if there be any salient fault in the usual behavior of English sisters to one another which any moral system could set right. Perhaps the one quality oftenest deficient in this, and other more distant family relationships, to which we need not further refer,—uncles, aunts, cousins, and so on—is courtesy. “Too much familiarity,” as the proverb says, “breeds contempt.” The habit of treating one another without the little forms in use among other friends, and the horrid trick of speaking rudely of each other’s defects or mishaps, is the underlying source of half the alienation of relatives. If we are bound to show special benevolence to those nearest to us, why on earth do we give them pain at every turn, rub them the wrong way, and froisser their natural amour propre by unflattering remarks or unkind references? For once we can do them a real service of any kind, we can (if we live with them) hurt, or else please, them fifty times a day. The individual who thinks she performs her duty to sister or niece, or cousin, while she waits to do the exceptional services, and hourly frets and worries and humiliates her, is certainly exceedingly mistaken. Genuine benevolence—the “will to make happy”—will take a very different course.

It will not be necessary here to pursue further the subject of the duties arising from the ties of natural relationship, holy and blessed things that they are! I am persuaded that even the best and happiest of us only half-apprehend their beautiful meaning, and that we must look to the life beyond the grave to interpret for us all their significance.