| Show IGNORING THE FIFTH Al the risk of being considered old although I am sure there should be nothing of reproach In such a termI want to raise my voice in protest pro-test against the lax methods parents In the treatment of their children said a whilehaired sweetfaced lady at an Informal gathering of women the other day The youngster is given entirely too much liberty continued the old lady while the others listened lespectttilly Why the papers are filled with the most shocking accounts of happenings In which the parents of children must have been responsible for the wrongdoing wrong-doing Think or a chit of 16 eloping with a married man and knowing all the time that he was a married man Think of a small boy scarcely out of kneebreeches shooting another through Jealousy Surely I It Js enough to cause us to say the times are out of jointThe The direct cause of things such as these is the freedom and lack of restraint re-straint which the children of today enjoy en-Joy I dont mean the children of the slums who not having proper advantages advan-tages might naturally be expected to be less particular In their morals I mean the eons and daughters of what wo call the better classes Why they are simply allowed to do as they please They have eliminated the Fifth Commandment Com-mandment and they follow entirely tho devices and desires of their own unformed un-formed and unreliable inclinations When I was a little girl these things were not allowed lobe Children were children then and not little men and little women as they are today We were put to bed fU a certain hour We had to render to our parents an account ac-count of our goings and comings tell the names and characters of our little associates and behave ourselves generally gen-erally Now It Is all different The records of the Police courts are filled with Instances of youthful misdoing and we dont have to go to the courts either to find evidences of the lack of restraint hyI was walking through the street the other day when I noticed a crowd collected on a corner I went to the edge of It and saw that a policeman and a youngster of say 15 or 16 were the central figures The boy was In the uniform of an expensive and fashionable fashion-able military school of this city He was making a forcible and insolent protest pro-test agnlnat the presence of the policeman police-man who kept his temper admirably and appeared to be waiting One of the men In the crowd explalned to me that the boy had been In the habit of grossly annoying a little girl of the neighborhood neighbor-hood whenever he passed through the str etmd that on this occasion the child had called a policeman and caused his detention They were waiting for the mother of the girl to appear and make a complaint This Is only an everyday Instance That boy was bad and he had bad associates as-sociates But it Is his parents who are responsible for his course They send him to school and dismiss him from their thoughts It was not so when I was a child |
