July 10 — Are American Parents Selfish?
P—— overwhelmed us last night at dinner by declaring that American parents were selfish. We dropped our fish-forks and stared at him in amazement and disgust. H—— said, severely, “You are a foreigner.” P—— couldn’t truthfully deny it, and the bare statement seemed sufficient, but H—— likes to clinch any nail he drives and he went on:
“It is admitted by every unprejudiced person—excepting, of course, the ignorant and benighted foreigner—that the Americans are the people, and that wisdom and virtue will necessarily die with them; that all their customs and institutions, whether social or political, are the wonder, the envy, and despair of other nations, which makes an assertion like yours seem almost frivolous.”
“Selfish!” I struck in, “selfish—indeed! on the contrary, the American is blamed as the most indulgent of parents. Surely selfishness is the last charge that can justly be made.”
P—— tried to defend himself. He admitted that “if indulgence invariably implied unselfishness the American would certainly have nothing with which to reproach himself in his relations with his children.”
We fought the question over until late, and this is about what our discussion came to. There can be no doubt that a fond gentleness of rule is in this country, the law of the average household. So far as is compatible with common sense, the children have entire liberty of action, and, so far as the means of the parents permit, the children are provided with every advantage and pleasure. Indeed, to such lengths at one time did fondness go that it too often degenerated into a laxness that made the American child a lesson and a warning to other nations. Daisy Miller and her little, odious toothless brother were supposed to typify the results of this fatuous feebleness of rule in our family life, but neither Daisy nor her brother can now be held to be typical pictures, though their prototypes still exist here and there. The American parent of to-day rules more firmly and with greater wisdom. Such figures as those of the unhappy girl and the odious boy brought home to us the truth—forgotten in our passion for universal liberty—that a relaxation of wise, strong government by the parent was cruelty of the most far-reaching and irreparable sort.
No doubt Henry James’ mordant satire helped to inaugurate a salutary reform, and it is just possible that a new work of a similar nature is now needed to suggest further serious reflections to American parents; to rouse them to consider whether their whole duty is performed in seeing their children well fed, well educated, and raised to man’s estate. With most parents the sense of responsibility ceases when the boy begins to earn his own living, when the girl dons orange blossoms. Like the birds, the American parent works hard to feed the nestlings, carefully teaches them to fly, and then tumbles them out into the world to fend for themselves. So far in our history this elemental method has worked well, no doubt. The result of it has been to breed the most precocious, self-reliant, vigorous, irreverent race the earth has yet seen. One may see the whole situation epitomized in the orchard any pleasant June day—an astonished fledgling ruffling his feathers upon some retired bough, ruminating upon the sudden shocks and changes of existence, and afraid almost to turn his head in the large, new, lonesome world surrounding him. As the hours pass his melancholy reflections are pierced by hunger’s pangs. Heretofore, a busy parent has always appeared to assuage such poignant sensations, but now that hard-worked person may be seen—genially oblivious of obligations—refreshing himself with cherries, and the fledgling, with a squawk of wounded amazement, discovers for the first time that even parents are not to be depended upon. His hunger meantime grows. An opportune insect flits by and is snapped at involuntarily. It proves to be of refreshing and sustaining quality, and digestion brings courage. A hop and a flutter show the usefulness of wing and limb. More luck with insects demonstrates that the world belongs to the bold, and before the day is done the cocky young nestling of yesterday is shouldering his papa away from the ripest cherries.
All this is very well in a world where flies and cherries are free to all, but America is fast ceasing to be a happy uncrowded orchard in which the young find more than enough room and food for the taking.
In the past, the boy—inured to plain living and a certain amount of labour from childhood—had only to take the girl of his choice by the hand and go make a home out of virgin soil, wheresoever chance or fancy led, himself and his parents both confident he could not suffer in a land where only industry was needed to ensure conquest. These boundless possibilities relieved the parent of half the cares incident to the relation, and that sense of freedom from responsibility has remained, while conditions have altered. The bird-like fashion of refusing further liability once the child has made his first flight is still the rule.
To the European parent this seems a most flagrant abandonment of duty. There the anxious care for the offspring reaches out to the third and fourth generation, and every safeguard which law or custom can devise is thrown around the child. From the moment of its birth the parent of Continental Europe begins to save, not only for the education and upbringing, but for the whole future existence of the child. It is not alone the daughter who is dowered, but the son also has provision made for his married life, when, as his parents keenly realize, the greatest strain will be made upon his resources and capabilities.
In America it is the custom—very nearly the universal custom—for the parents to spend upon the luxuries and pleasures of the family life the whole income. The children are educated according to this standard of expenditure, and are accustomed to all its privileges. No thought is taken of the time when they must set up households for themselves—almost invariably upon a very different scale from the one to which they have been used. To the American parent this seems only a natural downfall. He remarks cheerfully that he himself began in a small way, and it will do the young people no harm to acquire a similar experience—forgetting that in most cases the children have been educated to a much higher standard of ease than that of his own early life. The parents do not consider it obligatory to leave anything to their children at death. They have used all they could accumulate during their own lifetime; let their children do the same. The results of the system are crystallized in the American saying: “There are but three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves.” The man who acquires wealth spends what he makes. His children, brought up in luxury, struggle unsuccessfully against conditions to which they are unused, and the grand-children begin in their shirt sleeves to toil for the wealth dissipated by the two preceding generations.
Europeans frequently and curiously remark upon the American’s prodigality of ready money. The small change which they part with so reluctantly the American flings about with a fine mediæval profusion. The manner of life of the average well-to-do person in this country permits of it. The average man who earns ten or twenty thousand a year invests none of it. He installs his family in a rented house in the city in winter. Several servants are kept; the children are sent to expensive schools. All the family dress well, eat rich food, and indulge in costly amusements. In summer they either travel abroad, live in a hotel at a watering place, or rent again. The man’s whole income is at his disposal to spend every year. None of it is deducted to be safely stored in property. When his daughters marry he expects their husbands to be solely responsible for their future, and if they do not succeed in marrying wealth, why so much the worse for them. When his sons begin their career he looks to them to be self-supporting almost from the first, and not to undertake the responsibilities of a family until they are able to bear such a burden without aid from him. He cannot assist them without materially altering his own scale of living, which he is naturally loath to do. At his death the income generally ceases in large part, and his widow, and such children as may still be unplaced in life, are obliged to relinquish the rented houses and the way of life to which they have been used.
To a Frenchman such an existence would seem as uncertain and disturbing as is generally supposed to be that of a person who has built upon the crust of a volcano. He could not contemplate with equanimity the thought of chaos overtaking the ordered existence of his family upon his demise. Après nous le deluge seems to him the insouciance of a maniac, or of a monster of selfishness. Daily expenditure is regulated within a limit which permits of a constant investment of a margin. When his daughter marries he insures in her carefully guarded dower that she shall continue her existence on somewhat the same scale to which she has been accustomed, and, in case of premature widowhood or accident of fortune, she and her children shall not be called upon to face the desperate strait of absolute pennilessness. He may deny her in her girlhood many of the indulgences common to her American prototype, but he denies himself at the same time in saving to insure the security and comfort of her future. The French father would think it terrible that a tenderly nurtured daughter should be suddenly thrust into abject dependence upon a husband who may possibly abuse the power given him by that circumstance, nor would he be more satisfied to think that she should, during her first years of married life, while still young and encountering the strain of motherhood, be called upon to face narrow means and a perilously uncertain financial condition.
When the son arrives at maturity the economies to which he, in company with his parents, has submitted, bear fruit in substantial aid in beginning his career, and he is not obliged to put out of his mind all thought of marriage during his youth, since his parents, and those of the woman of his choice, have provided for this very contingency through all the years of his minority.
The French—with the logical inevitableness of their mode of thought—carry this view of life to its extreme limit, but throughout all Europe, including England, the responsibility of the parent is more broadly conceived than in this country, where the excuse for an infinity of cheap flimsiness is the cynical phrase, “It will last my time.” Men build cheaply, and forbear to undertake work of which they cannot see the immediate result, because there is no sense of obligation to the coming generation. The democratic theory is that each man must fight for his own hand; no debt is owed to either ancestry or posterity. The mind is not shocked by sudden destruction of families, by the sharp descent in the social scale, or the flinging of women into the arena of the struggle for life. The parent is quite willing to share with the child the goods of existence as far as he can achieve them, but he is unwilling to deny either child or himself that the child may benefit alone, or after he is gone.
Conditions in America are constantly assimilating themselves more and more to those existing in the older countries, where the conflict for existence is close and intense, and where the prudent, the careful, and the far-sighted inevitably crowd out the weaker and more careless individuals and families. An almost unmistakable sign of “an old family” in America is conservatism in expenditure and modes of life. The newly rich, who set the pace of public luxury, are always amazed at the probates of the wills of these quiet citizens. They cannot believe that one who spent so little should have so much, not realizing that the simplicity of life made it possible to solidly invest a surplus. The heirs of this solid wealth have been bred to prudence and self-denial. Such a family survives, while in all probability the offspring of the other type may in two generations be hopelessly trodden into the mire.
There is in the breasts of many parents a half-resentful feeling that they should not be asked to sacrifice themselves to the new generation. They insist upon their own right to all that is to be got out of life, feeling that what they give to the children is never repaid. This selfish type forgets that in doing their duty they are but returning to their children what they themselves received from the past generation, and that the children will in turn pay to their descendants the inherited debt of honour with interest.