The Kinsley graphic. [volume] (Kinsley, Kan.) 1890-1940, 1890-06-27
MOTHERS AND THE FOURTH.

They Dread the Day and Yet Would Provo
Themselves Young America's Most
Faithful Champions
The Fourth of July is not, for reasons
of its own, the most joyous festival in
the calendar of feastS to women. To
men, apart from the sentiment of it
it comes as what they call day of, if
not of rest, at any rate not of labor; by
boys, who begin to save their money, to
be spent in its enjoyment, at the open
ing of the year itself, it is anticipated
as the year of jubilee once was; even
by little girls, who are not allowed the
use of the incendiary fire-cracker, or of
the decorating torpedo, or the sputter-
ing pin-wheel, it is most welcome. The
mother alone finds a reverse to the
shining shield here. 1t is not that she
| fails to recognize all the nobility of the
day which any wife of a citizen, and a
mother of possible President, ought
| to feel, that she does not see in the day
an exponent of the loftier condition of
her sex in free country, that she does
not also regard it as a representative
of the happy future of the whole race
under the protection of the liberties for
which that day has been made, as it
were, the mouth-piece. 1t is not,
either, that she breads the pic
mics and sailing parties and gem
eral festivities belonging to the
occasion in their disastrous eff
fects upon the various toilets she had
to prepare or superintend for the young
patriots of her family. 1t is not any
grudging of labor in furnishing lunch
baskets, in the making of cakes and
tarts and salads and sandwiches and
1 hn no n
the shield that she finds is solely and
simply gunpowder.. From fear and
hatred of that explosive rises feverish
anxiety for her husbands safety, and an
indignant concern as to her own neces-
sary sleep on the night preceding that
day issued in by cannonading and bell
ringing the land over. The Fourth of
July celebrates the facts of liberty, and
she is glad of it; but liberty to all does
not mean the infringement of the rights
of any; and she has a right to sleep on
the night of the Sd of July-she who
has watched already too many nights;
but she is deprived of the exercise of
that right by the mode of celebration of
this liberty. For at midnight the toy
pistol begins to pop, the little cannon to
cry havoc, and Thea, all about the town,
the big boy who has his rife has sailed
out, the fire-cracker is fixing in every
alley, and the fish-horn is making night
hideous; and she wonders what other
mothers mean by allowing it; and she
does not hinder her boys from join
ing it. Does not? She can not.
Young America asserts its freedom
for that twenty-four hours, and sub
mits to no tyranny on the part of
mothers or mother-countries Alasi she
knows it. And that is the whole of it.
She knows that gunpowder was in
vented, not for war, but for the de-
} struction of boys. Her own and their
mates have been making red fire and
1 green fire in secret places for weeks al
ready; copper filings. and zinc filings,
| and sulphate of anthony. and salts of
: strontia, and nitre, and sulphur, and
charcoal, all exist, in her excited i'm
agination, only to blow up these boys
with the Bengal-lights and Roman
5 candles and feeble rockets that they
essay to compound from them, or that
r their hard-earned probationary has
gone to buy. She knows, from the
moment that her boys have surrepti-
tiously crept out of her back window,
= with her full but hidden knowledge
and connivance, since there would be
no glory OF liberty at all if they went
l openly out of the front door, not one
moment of comfort or PSdeiddnl quteten
as to her hearts beating, till she sees
: them come in again, in the course oil
the following day, worn and torn.
. starved and soiled and smooched and
l scorched and smeared, so weary with
{ the pleasure of their gun-firing that not
even cannon wake them if they
, fall asleep, and only luck if the whole
of them is there. She does not look for
g ward to a broken back for them, or q
y broken leg, or even broken neck, ex-
? actly; but the loss OF a certain number
t of fingers in the loading and discharging
a of their toy weapons, the peppering Of
their dear rosy faces with powder. the
D loss of their eyes, and even the fracture
; of their skulls and the conclusion oil
their brains, are contingencies ever be-
t fore her. She feels, long before the
welcome close of day. that conclusion oil
her own brain, or something as bad, is
imminent She does not allow herself
to remember what peace is till-the all
blown thin with powder, smell OF
sulphur everywhere, fragments of ex-
ploded red Chinese paper lining all
the sidewalks, and when silence, ex-
cept for here and there group of be
lated jewellers, has ''healed the blows
of sound"-the boys and the rest of the
! family are sleeping the sleep of the
: Northumberland citizen; and even
then she is bestead by dreams of posi-
I BILE fires, smoldering from the spark.
of malicious and misdirected crackers
I TO wrap them, after all the escapes o.
5 the day, in flaming death at midnight
And yet, if the father of the boys
prohibited the days excitements, re
fused the money for the fireworks
kept the lads under lock and KEY, thi:
mother would be the stoutest rebel Of
them all, fight their battles for them
and gain their freedom to go out and
: burn their powder and their fingers and
, their eye-lashes, at the cost of all tbs
S eloquence she had Whichever horI
of the dilemma the mother chooses K
r take is. as we said in the beginning, Z
i painful necessity: the one depriyes he
= of her comfort and tranquility; the
e other deprives her boys OF their pleas
d ure, and of the assertion of their right.
, OF liberty and equality But being
5 woman. and therefore an arrangement
d of unselfish practice and principle, sh.
sacrifices herself. II Christmas is cele
: brated throughout the Southern coun
$ try with gunpowder explosions, i
n would seem to be pity, she argues, i
n the Fourth of July, won by gunpowder
{ could not be celebrated by gunpowde
e too. and although on that one day sh,
n is strongly tempted to wish cornWalli
k had beaten Washington, yet she rub
g up her patriotism. lets her boys tie thei
e fire-crackers to the tail of the British
q lion in the streets. and her girls breal
It their torpedoes on the door-stone an,