My own childhood was moderately
happy, and yet I recall now the sense of burning indignation I sometimes
suffered at wrongs done me, which the child's sense of justice told me
were wrongs, and which I now know to have been so. Children are
themselves one of the aggravations of living, but it is because we do
not know how to treat them. I look for a time when every father shall be
just, every mother reasonable as well as loving; when children shall
neither be flogged up the way of life as in times past, or coaxed up
with sugarplums as in times present, but, seeing with clear eyes the
straight path, shall walk in it with joy, and finish their course with
rejoicing.
Another aggravation, and not a minor one either it strikes me, is the
summary way in which youth is put down by middle-aged and aged people.
Youthful emotions are 'bosh and twaddle,' youthful ideas, 'crude, sir,
very crude!' and youthful attempts to be and to do something in the
world frowned at, as if action of any sort, save inaction, before forty,
were an outrage on humanity, and an insult to the Creator.
How fares it with young professional men during the first ten years of
their career? They hope and wait, doubt and wait, curse and wait, labor
to wait, and in the mean time a wheezing old lawyer, with no more
enthusiasm than a brickbat, takes the cases which Justice, if she were
not blind, would have sent to his starving younger brethren, and pockets
fat fees, a tenth of which would have lifted loads from many a heavy
heart.
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