Dorothy Dix—her book

Among my acquaintances is a woman who is always bemoaning the fact that she cannot give her children “advantages.” She sheds barrels of tears over their not having the “advantages” that the children of the rich have. She beats upon her breast and laments that she cannot send her boys to college, and give them high-powered motorcars, and when she thinks of not being able to dress her daughters like fashion plates and send them off to summer and winter resorts, she melts down into a perfect pulp of self-pity. After listening to this wail for a number of years, I grew exasperated, and said to her:

“What are the advantages that you cannot give your children? Let us sit down and consider them dispassionately, and see if your children really are so unfortunate, and so handicapped in life as you think they are. Let us begin with your not being able to send your boys off to college. I grant you that we would all like to give our children every possible opportunity to acquire a good education. But not all knowledge comes put up in school-book packages. Furthermore, the degree a man takes who graduates from the University of Hard Knocks has a lot of practical, available information, and a working knowledge of life that is worth a bushel of M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s, and that it will take the college graduate ten or fifteen years to acquire. Many of the best-informed, best-read men that I know never saw the inside of a college. In these days of cheap books, and magazines, and newspapers, if a man wants an education he will get it.

“Nor is the lack of a college education any bar to success. The men who are running things in America to-day spent their formative years, from 18 to 24, in learning about mines, and railroads, and stores, and banking, instead of being grounded in Greek and Latin. And they are hiring college graduates to work for them. Moreover, while you can lead a boy to the Pierian spring, you cannot make him drink from it, and you know well enough that the great majority of boys who are sent off to college idle away their time, and come back with nothing but a college yell, the latest thing in Klassy Kut Kollege Klothes, and a maddening air of superiority. So comfort yourself with the knowledge that if your son has it in him to take an education he will get it. If he yearns for culture he will acquire it, but if he is just a boy who has good hard horse sense, and is not intellectual, the sooner he gets to work after his high-school days the better for him. Of course, mother-like, you want your children to have everything that multimillionaires have, but in your heart you must know that money is a curse to a boy instead of a blessing. To begin with, wealth paralyzes ambition. We are all poor, weak creatures who take the line of least resistance, and when we don’t have to do things we become slackers. We have to have necessity to spur us on to achievement.

“Call over the roll of the rich men of to-day, of the men who sit in high places, from the President down, of the men who are famous inventors, and writers, and artists. They were almost all poor boys. There is scarcely the name of a millionaire’s son in the whole list. And riches lead a boy into temptation from which the poor boy is safe. The boy who has to work for his daily bread has his mind and his hands occupied. He has something interesting and exciting always to do. The idle rich boy must make his own diversions, and find some way of killing time, and he does it only too often by the booze and the gambling route, and in the company of wild women. For adventuresses and grafters fasten themselves like leeches on the man with a fat pocketbook. There is nothing like lacking the price as a first aid to virtue.

“As for not being able to give your girls advantages, do you really think it is any advantage to a girl to be brought up to be nothing but a fashion plate, to have no duties and responsibilities, to have no object in life except amusing herself and to be taught merely to be a waster and a spender? Do you think that the woman who has a dozen homes in this country and Europe, between which she vibrates with no more local attachments than a transient guest has in a hotel, gets the pleasure out of them that the woman does out of her little bungalow, whose every plank has been paid for by some sacrifice and where every chair and plate is the result of weeks of saving and planning? Do you think the girl who buys herself a European title is as happy with the roué husband she has purchased as the girl who marries some clean, honest young chap she loves and works up with him to prosperity? Do you think that the woman who bears children and then turns them over to nurses and governesses gets the benediction out of motherhood that the woman does who cradles her children on her breast and rears them up at her knee?

“You lament that you cannot give your daughters the chance to make fine marriages. Why, the working girl has ten times as good chance to make a good marriage as the society girl has, because she is thrown with more men. She works side by side with the go-getters and the coming men, and she has the pick of them all. So,” I said to my lachrymose friend, “stop whining because you aren’t rich and can’t give your children ‘advantages.’ You are giving them the necessity of standing on their own feet and fighting their own battles, of developing all that is best in them, and that is the greatest advantage that you could possibly give them.”