Title:  The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864

Author:  Various

Release Date:  May 23, 2005 [EBook #15880]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A magazine of literature, art, and politics.

Vol.  XIII.—­April, 1864.—­No.  LXXVIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by Ticknor and
fields, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

* * * * *

Fighting facts for fogies.

Young people are often charged with caring little for the past.  The charge is just; and the young are right.  If they care little for the past, then it is certain that it is in debt to them,—­as for them the past cared nothing.  It is wonderful, considering how children used to be treated, that the human race ever succeeded in getting established on earth.  Humanity should have died out, there was so little that was humane in its bringing up.  Because they had contrived to bring a helpless creature into a world that every one wishes he had never known at least twenty-four times a day, a father and mother of the very old school indeed assumed that they had the right to make that creature a slave, and to hold it in everlasting chains.  They had much to say about the duty of children, and very little about the love of parents.  The sacrificing of children to idols, a not uncommon practice in some renowned countries of antiquity, the highest-born children being the favorite victims,—­for Moloch’s appetite was delicate,—­could never have taken place in any country where the voice of Nature was heeded; and yet those sacrifices were but so many proofs of the existence of a spirit of pride, which caused men to offer up their offspring on the domestic altar.  Son and slave were almost the same word with the Romans; and your genuine old Roman made little ado about cutting off the head of one of his boys, perhaps for doing something of a praiseworthy nature.  Old Junius Brutus was doubly favored by Fortune, for he was enabled to kill two of his sons in the name of Patriotism, and thereby to gain a reputation for virtue that endures to this day,—­though, after all, he was but the first of the brutes.  The Romans kept up the paternal rule for many ages, and theoretically it long survived the Republic.  It had existed in the Kingdom, and it was not unknown to the Empire.  We have an anecdote that shows