The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1883-11-24
No Love Like Mother Love.

| to know better, as you please-that
| there is no love like mothers love, as
q modern poet phrases it, and it is true
in so far as it implies that there oWght
to be no love like mothers love; but as
mothers are as fallible as wives and
| daughters and sisters, we, too, fire.
| quenhy meet specimens of them that
make us think that if there is no love
like mothers love, we are glad of it,
and we should think that children
would be, too.
OF course these observers are not in
tending to deny the great fact of ma
ternal devotion in the main, of the self
sacrifice that bares its own breast to
protect its young, that dies for it if
need be. But there are mothers and
mothers; and whenever we see an in
herently selfish woman we see also one
who, if she is mother, is of the sort
that, if there is any dying to do, lets
her children die for her. Although oc-
casionally this mother is of the descrip-
ton that makes you wonder how she
ever happened to be chosen to preside
over home, usually she is the tender
and petted pretty woman, gentle and
sweet and incapable, whose children
ride over her, as the word goes, not
because she loves them so that she can
refuse them nothing, but because she
loves herself too much to undertake the
trouble of resistance, and without say
ing it herself exactly, her actions say
for her that she would rather the chill
dren came to grief than that she should
be obliged to make an eXertion or fore
go pleasure to prevent it. This is
the mother who lies at home reading
a novel while the nurse girl, fresh to
our fashions and full of her own inter-
ests, drags the baby out in crowded
thoroughfares, often with its eyes in
the sun, or just as often among horses
heels, with her own head turned the
other way, and so busy with her gossips
and tiirtations that the child might be
stolen under her hand and she know no
more about it than the nurse of the
child who replaced Pomona's baby did;
the mother who sits on the seaside
piazza with her crewel-work and her
friends while her child is in danger of
drowning, or is off about her pleasure
while the servant has her children SWEET
ering in the neighbors' kitchens, and
eating whatever they can lay their
hands on. When, knowing their moth
ers' whereabouts and behavior, we see
these neglected little beings. and find
their pulses feyered, their digestion dis
ordered, and thejc whole state Just what
it should not be, we say to ourselves
that that mothers children ought to be
taken away from her, and usually
Providence seems Of our way of think
ing, and they are taken away
1t is well for ones opinion for ones
own race that there is another sort of
mothers in the world -mothers whose
lives, unlike those of these cuckoo
mothers, resemble more the lives of
the domestic hens, which are one long
act of maternity. 1t is fortunate that
one can remember the self-forgetful-
ness of ones own mother, listen be-
lievingly to the story of the sacrifices
OF ones husbands mother, see daily
the Argus-eyed care of ones wife's
mother, feel sure that no dumb Great
ure ever eXcelledin watchful provision
the efforts of ones friends mother, re-
member the great mothers in history,
and not suffer the selfish shortcomings
of this incapable and worse than
worthless mother to outweigh them.
There are mothers in the world who
feel that they are responsible for the
spirits called from the vastly deep, and
for the bodies that clothe them, who
do not know how to rest unless every
condition of health and safety has been
fulfilled. They would scorn the sue-
gestion of the shiftless mother who
takes no pains because she may have
no thanks, for to them the thanks are
in the deed. the reward is in the doing;
they would be wretched if they failed
to do, and they are happy in
their endeavor. What an amount of
good is it that these mothers render
the world ! To them more than to
any other single and separate influence
Is due the health that follows the race
up out OF savagery, and attends it per-
haps to unguessed development of
strength; and to them-their hands up
held doubtless as the prophets were on
the mountain, by the help they have
is largely due that improved moral ex-
cellence, to prove the reality of which,
If casuists deny its existence, one needs
only to point to the difference in public
and private life between the mass of
people in the nineteenth and that of the
fifteenth, the thirteenth, and the
eleventh centuries, and as much farther
back as undohbted history can take us.
And if the development of the brain of
the race is not directly due to these or
any mothers, it is, at any rate, to their
watchful help that it owes the oppor-
tunity of development. For oftener
than any one else it is the mother who
spells out the lessons with the child.
even after it has escaped her tutelage
and is in the hands of masters. I'D be-
times in the morning, and bending over
the book in the evening. 1t is she who
denies herself the money, that the price
OF the education may be had, and the
clothes for pride or for decency, if there
is any denial to be done; and she who.
by her own exertion, spares the tired
little student in every way when stud
les and classes are over for the day:
and it is she who fires the ambition and
fans it with daily and hourly breath;
and she who looks out for the play-time
and pleasure between the tasks. Yet