On the other hand, let a child ask for any thing without saying “please,” receive any thing without saying “thank you,” sit still in the most comfortable seat without offering to give it up, or press its own preference for a particular book, chair, or apple, to the inconveniencing of an elder, and what an outcry we have:  “Such rudeness!” “Such an ill-mannered child!” “His parents must have neglected him strangely.”  Not at all:  they have been steadily telling him a great many times every day not to do these precise things which you dislike.  But they themselves have been all the while doing those very things to him; and there is no proverb which strikes a truer balance between two things than the old one which weighs example over against precept.

However, that it is bad policy to be rude to children is the least of the things to be said against it.  Over this they will triumph, sooner or later.  The average healthy child has a native bias towards gracious good behavior and kindly affections.  He will win and be won in the long run, and, the chances are, have better manners than his father.  But the pain that we give these blessed little ones when we wound their tenderness,—­for that there is no atoning.  Over that they can never triumph, either now or hereafter.  Why do we dare to be so sure that they are not grieved by ungracious words and tones? that they can get used to being continually treated as if they were “in the way”?  Who has not heard this said?  I have, until I have longed for an Elijah and for fire, that the grown-up cumberers of the ground, who are the ones really in the way, might be burned up, to make room for the children.  I believe that, if it were possible to count up in any one month, and show in the aggregate, all of this class of miseries borne by children, the world would cry out astonished.  I know a little girl, ten years old, of nervous temperament, whose whole physical condition is disordered, and seriously, by her mother’s habitual atmosphere of rude fault-finding.  She is a sickly, fretful, unhappy, almost unbearable child.  If she lives to grow up, she will be a sickly, fretful, unhappy, unlovely woman.  But her mother is just as much responsible for the whole as if she had deranged her system by feeding her on poisonous drugs.  Yet she is a most conscientious, devoted, and anxious mother, and, in spite of this manner, a loving one.  She does not know that there is any better way than hers.  She does not see that her child is mortified and harmed when she says to her, in the presence of strangers, “How do you suppose you look with your mouth open like that?” “Do you want me to show you how you are sitting?”—­and then a grotesque imitation of her stooping shoulders. “Will you sit still for one minute?” “Do take your hands off my dress.”  “Was there ever such an awkward child?” When the child replies fretfully and disagreeably, she does not see that it is only an exact reflection of her own voice and manners.  She does not understand any of the things that would make for her own peace, as well as for the child’s.  Matters grow worse, instead of better, as the child grows older and has more will; and the chances are that the poor little soul will be worried into her grave.