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Show KEEPING THE PEACE. This little essay has not wider scope than the discussion of some of the difficulties in the way of keeping the peace in families, and some of the methods by which these difficulties may be removed. If, however, it should appear that the same difficulties are at once in the way of the peace of nations as well as that the same methods which promote family peace may be successfully employed to harmonize nations, there need be no surprise. Each individual is a world in himself. He has needs, desires, preferences, tastes; and the satisfying of these he instinctively seeks without regard to the welfare of any other individual. But he soon learns that every other person he comes in contact with is a unit just like himself, with like needs, and it may be with like desires, preferences and tastes, and that compromise of some sort between clashing interests is a necessity. The family is the chosen field where these compromises should be adjusted, where brethren shall learn to dwell together in unity, where the strong shall not by reason of their strength oppress the weak, where love shall neutralize selfishness and where the common good shall be the supreme law. To the mother ?? is intrusted the responsibility of keeping the family peace, and sometimes she finds she has a pretty large contract on her hands. Some children are born inordinately selfish, others have this trait developed by excessive indulgence. Some children are born with an arbitrary disposition, and from their cradles impose laws on all about them. We do not propose here to discuss prenatal influences and show how many a child is simply the victim of misfortune in coming into the world loaded with traits fastened on him by the errors and crimes of his progenitors. It is enough to point out the fact and then try to make the best of it, or rather make the most and the best of a child suffering for faults not in any just sense his own. And here we may remember with profound satisfaction that He who "knoweth our frame and remembereth that we are dust" is the final Judge of us all. The mother, holding from its inception the life of her child within her own, had opportunities vouchsafed to no one else to first form the character of her child and then study the unfoldings of this character from the very beginning onward. She has it in her power to check the budding of selfishness, to guide the will, to restrain the passions, to direct the current of its activities, and to throw around it an atmosphere which "seeming to be nothing shall contain the substance of all things," in which her child shall grow in beauty and symmetry as flowers grow in balmy climates. As one by one others begin to move in orbits about her as the planets around the sun, the harmonious adjustment of these orbits occupies her no less than the holding of each separate planet to its separate orbit. And in addition to this she must be herself in constant equipoise. Clouds on her face, disturbances of her "photosphere" are followed by climatic rigors and "electric storms" on all the orbs that encircle her. The laws of physical life and of spiritual life are alike. It is impossible to avoid differences in families. They spring up of themselves as naturally as flowers and weeds and all vegetable growths spring from the soil. Sometimes they flow from similarity of dispositions and tastes, and quite as often from dissimilarity. "It matters not," said a mother in our hearing not long ago, "how many or what variety of playthings I get for my children, they all struggle for the same toy." Children, like grown people, often do not know what they want till they see some one else apparently happy with a possession; then it becomes clear to them that they want that alone. With children as with grown people the life does not consist in the abundance of things they possess, and it is well to let them learn this lesson early. No children are so restless and unhappy as these who have everything done for them and are never called upon to forget and even sacrifice their own inclinations to secure the happiness of others. Pleasant varied occupation is very potent in preventing differences in families. Absorbed in music, in painting, in embroidery, in fretwork, in knitting, in crocheting, in reading, in studying, the young mind has no time to indulge in all humors. It is, according to the old rhyme, "Satan" who always "finds some mischief still for idle hands" and idle hearts to do. As a means of preserving harmony among small children, the Kindergarten methods are the consummation of wisdom, and when these are employed with the spirit that should accompany them, every ill regulated pulse is brought into quiet and happy rhythm. Love is the great bond of peace. Where each seeks not his own but the good of every other, where the burden of each is borne by all in common, where the joy of one is the joy of all, and the grief of one is the grief of all, how can discord and strife and jarring enter there? This is the ideal home. This is the millennium. This is what we hope and expect to find in heaven. Where this idea of fusion in interest, oneness in hope, unity of aim, takes possession of the united head of a family and is engrafted upon all the members, there is a bond of peace that cannot be broken. There the whole body rejoices together and reaches the maximum of prosperity, vigor and success.-N. Y. Tribune. |