I gave a lecture in the village hall on Friday night, and many parents came out to hear what I had to say on the subject of Children and their Parents. After the lecture I invited questions.

"What wud ye hae a man do if his laddie wudna do what he was bidden?" asked Brown the joiner.

"I would have the man think very seriously whether he had any right to give the order that was disobeyed. For instance, if you ordered your Jim to stop singing while you were reading, you would be taking an unfair advantage of your years and size. From what I know of Jim he would certainly stop singing if you asked him to do so as a favour."

"Aw dinna believe in askin\' favours o\' ma laddies," he said.

I smiled.

"Yet you ask them of other laddies. You don\'t collar Fred Thomson and shout:[Pg 151] \'Post that letter at once!\' You say very nicely: \'You might post that letter like a good laddie,\' and Fred enjoys posting your letter more than posting a ton of letters for his own father."

The audience laughed, and Fred\'s father cried: "Goad! Ye\'re quite richt, dominie!"

"As a boy," I continued, "I hated being set to weed the garden, though I spent hours helping to weed the garden next door. A boy likes to grant favours."

"Aye," said Brown, "when there\'s a penny at the tail end o\' them!"

"Yes," I said after the laughter had died, "but your Jim would rather have Mr. Thomson\'s penny than your sixpence. The real reason is that you boss your son, and nobody likes to be bossed."

"Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, I think that the father is the curse of the home. (Laughter.) The father never talks to his son as man to man. As a result a boy suppresses much of his nature, and if he is left alone with his father for five minutes he feels awkward, though not quite so awkward as the father does. You find among the lower animals that the father is of no [Pg 152]importance; indeed, he is looked on as a danger. Have you ever seen a bitch flare up when the father comes too near her puppies? Female spiders, I am told, solve the problem of the father by eating him." (Great laughter.)

"What aboot the mothers?" said a voice, and the men cackled.

"Mothers are worse," I said. "Fathers usually imagine that they have a sense of justice, but mothers have absolutely no sense of justice. It is the mother who cries, \'Liz, ye lazy slut, run and clean your brother\'s boots, the poor laddie! Lod, I dinna ken what would happen to you, my poor laddie, if your mother wasna here to look after you.\' You mothers make your girls work at nights and on Saturdays, and you allow your boys to play outside. That is most unjust. Your boys should clean their own boots and mend their own clothes. They should help in the washing of dishes and the sweeping of floors."

"Wud ye say that the mother is the curse o\' the hame, too?" asked Brown.

"No," I said, "she is a necessity, and in spite of her lack of justice, she is nearer to the children than the father is. She is less aloof[Pg 153] and less stern. You\'ll find that a boy will tell his mother much more than he will tell his father. Speaking generally, a stupid mother is more dangerous than a stupid father, but a mother of average intelligence is better for a child than a father of average intelligence.

"This is a problem that cannot be solved. The mother must remain with her children, and I cannot see how we are to chuck the father out of the house. As a matter of fact he is usually so henpecked that he is prevented from being too much of an evil to the bairns.

"The truth is that the parents of to-day are not fit to be parents, and the parents of the next generation will be no better. The mothers of the next generation are now in my school. They will leave at the age of fourteen—some of them will be exempted and leave at thirteen—and they will slave in the fields or the factory for five or six years. Then society will accept them as legitimate guardians of the morals and spiritual welfare of children. I say that this is a damnable system. A mother who has never learned to think has absolute control of a growing young mind, and an almost absolute control[Pg 154] of a growing young body. She can beat her child; she can starve it. She can poison its mind with malice, just as she can poison its body with gin and bitters.

"What can we do? The home is the Englishman\'s castle! Anyway, in these days of high explosives, castles are out of date, and it is high time that the castle called home had some airing."

*         *         *

I cannot flatter myself that I made a single parent think on Friday night. Most of the villagers treated the affair as a huge joke.

I have just decided to hold an Evening School next winter. I see that the Code offers The Life and Duties of a Citizen as a subject. I shall have the lads and lasses of sixteen to nineteen in my classroom twice a week, and I guess I\'ll tell them things about citizenship they won\'t forget.

It occurs to me that married people are not easily persuaded to think. The village girl considers marriage the end of all things. She dons the bridal white, and at once she rises meteorically in the social scale. Yesterday she was Mag Broon, an outworker at[Pg 155] Millside; to-day she is Mrs. Smith with a house of her own.

Her mental horizon is widened. She can talk about anything now; the topic of childbirth can now be discussed openly with other married wives. Aggressiveness and mental arrogance follow naturally, and with these come a respect for church-going and an abhorrence of Ath............