XLV
SELF-CONTROL
If I were to go to a mother who was cradling her babe on her breast, and tell her that I knew a magic formula by which she could insure power, and prosperity, and happiness to her child, she would impoverish herself to purchase this knowledge from me, and fall on her knees and bless me for having given it to her.
Yet I know just such a bit of white magic. In her secret soul every mother herself knows it, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred she is either too weak or too lazy to use it.
This charm that would have changed all life for innumerable people; that would have kept men out of prisons, and women out of brothels; that would have turned paupers into rich men; made the unsuccessful successful and stopped the wheels of the divorce court—consists simply in teaching children self-control.
Almost every misfortune under which humanity suffers goes straight back to that. There is hardly a derelict in the world who cannot say: “I would not be what I am if my mother had taught me to control myself.”
For it is lack of self-control that is at the bottom of most of our sins of omission and commission.
Look at the murderer going to the death chair. Not once in a thousand times is he a cold-blooded murderer; but he was a high-tempered child whose mother never taught him to control himself. There came a day when something irritated him more than usual and, aflame with anger, he took a fellow creature’s life. It is the supreme manifestation of the same spirit that made him kick the chair against which he stumbled as a child and beat with impotent little fists all who thwarted him.
Look at the drunkard wallowing in the gutter. He is there because his mother never taught him to control his appetites. He is the logical outgrowth of the greedy little boy who was permitted to gorge himself on cake and candy until it made him ill.
Look at the poor, shabby, out-at-elbows man who has drifted from job to job all his life, and has never been able to make a decent support for himself and his family. He is his mother’s handiwork. She put the curse of incompetence on him when she let him give up every undertaking the moment he struck the hard sledding in it.
He changed from one school to another because the lessons were too difficult, or the teacher was too strict. When he started to work, he left one place because the hours were too long, another because his boss was too exacting. He tried a dozen different occupations that he left because he found they had unpleasant features and involved doing uncongenial tasks. He is a down-and-outer because his mother never taught him the self-control that makes a man set his teeth and go through with the business to which he has put his hand.
Look at the girls who go astray. Not one of “the sorrowful sisterhood” as the Japanese pitifully call them, but who is what she is because her mother did not teach her self-control. Did the girl sin because she was so weak and so in love with some vicious libertine that she listened to her heart instead of her head? Her mother could have saved her from a fate worse than death if she had taught her to control her emotions, instead of being ruled by them.
Did the girl sell her soul for fine clothes, and good times? Again the mother’s fault for not teaching the girl self-control, and to do without the things that she could not honestly get.
Look at the poor old people who are dependent on their children, or the grudging charity of relatives and friends. In how many cases is their unhappy fate simply the result of their lack of self-control! They have had their chance of fortune. As long as the man was able to work he made plenty of money, and they lived luxuriously, but they spent everything as they went along. They laid up nothing for their rainy day, and when it came, it found them paupers and parasites. The difference between dependence and independence, between comfort and misery in your old age depends upon how much self-control you have had in your youth.
Look at the ever increasing number of divorces. Look at the forlorn half-orphan children, and broken up homes. Look at the unhappy married couples you know. What is the real cause of all this domestic trouble? Merely that mothers do not teach their children self-control. They raise up spoiled, selfish daughters who never consider a thing in life but their own pleasure.
They raised up spoiled, selfish sons who have never considered another human being but themselves. These two, with undisciplined wills, unrestrained tempers, undirected impulses, marry each other, and they fight like cats and dogs. Observation shows that either a husband or a wife who controls himself or herself can save almost any marriage, and it takes no prophet to foretell that mothers could insure their children’s domestic happiness by teaching them iron bound self-control.
You can teach a baby three weeks old self-control by refusing to give it the thing it howls for. Say to the toddler that falls and bumps its nose, “Mother’s brave boy doesn’t cry,” and it will bite back the sobs. It will yell the roof off if you pity it. A child of three will be obedient, cheerful, respectful of the rights of others, or he will be a little demon, according to the way his mother has brought him up.
If she has taught him self-control, she has given him the magic that works all the miracles of life, and if she hasn’t, she has done him the greatest wrong that any human being can possibly do to another human being.