"I am afraid I am the cause of your little son's leaving his seat. He had sat very still till I spoke to him; and I believe I ought to take all the blame."
The parents were evidently uncultured, shallow people. Their irritation with him was merely a surface vexation, which had no real foundation in a deep principle. They became complaisant and smiling at my first word, and Boy escaped with a look of great relief to another seat, where they gave him a simple luncheon of saleratus gingerbread. "Boys not allowed" to go in to dinner at the Massasoit, thought I to myself; and upon that text I sat sadly meditating all the way from Springfield to Boston.
How true it was, as the little fellow had said, that "it don't make any difference whether they put the sign up or not!" No one can watch carefully any average household where there are boys, and not see that there are a thousand little ways in which the boys' comfort, freedom, preference will be disregarded, when the girls' will be considered. This is partly intentional, partly unconscious. Something is to be said undoubtedly on the advantage of making the boy realize early and keenly that manhood is to bear and to work, and womanhood is to be helped and sheltered. But this should be inculcated, not inflicted; asked, not seized; shown and explained, not commanded. Nothing can be surer than the growth in a boy of tender, chivalrous regard for his sisters and for all women, if the seeds of it be rightly sown and gently nurtured. But the common method is quite other than this. It begins too harshly and at once with assertion or assumption.
"Mother never thinks I am of any consequence," said a dear boy to me, the other day. "She's all for the girls."
This was not true; but there was truth in it. And I am very sure that the selfishness, the lack of real courtesy, which we see so plainly and pitiably in the behavior of the average young man to-day is the slow, certain result of years of just such feelings as this child expressed. The boy has to scramble for his rights. Naturally he is too busy to think much about the rights of others. The man keeps up the habit, and is negatively selfish without knowing it.
Take, for instance, the one point of the minor courtesies (if we can dare to call any courtesies minor) of daily intercourse. How many people are there who habitually speak to a boy of ten, twelve, or fourteen with the same civility as to his sister, a little younger or older?