XCVII.
TOO HIGH A DAM.
Once upon a time a criminal, sentenced to a twenty-year term of punishment, declared that his ruin was due to the fact that too high a “dam” had been built around his early life.
He was a boy on a farm, the son of strict parents, who never unbent into friends and comrades, but had iron ideas of parental duty along the lines of restraints, and gave large doses of the catechism and the Ten Commandments, interspersed with much fault-finding and complaints of the waywardness of boys in general and their own boy in particular.
As a consequence the boy chafed against the “high dam,” burst its bounds early and came to the city with a zest for freedom in proportion to the restraint he had undergone and an admiration for a fast life. This was by way of reaction from his disgust for the farm and its slow ways.
“Don’t build your dams too high,” was the brief sermon preached by this condemned criminal and directed to parents—especially those who are rearing children in the country or in small towns. Human nature will continue to be human nature, and boys will continue to be boys. Youth will long, and naturally so, for variety and amusement. The house in which parents never unbend in sympathy with their children’s longing for a little brightness and jollity, where work goes on in unretrieved monotony, and home means only a place to sleep and eat in—such a home sends its boys and girls to the city before they are panoplied to meet its temptations; either this, or else it hardens and saddens them into mere machines or beasts of burden.
Books, music, flowers, games, social clubs, cheerful pictures, love and sympathy—these will bind the young heart to home and right living and will obviate the necessity of the “high dams” of restraint.