The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1893-11-09
SELF DENIAL OF PARENTS.

II Should Never Be Permitted to Degcn-
crate into Self Efacement.
That parents should deny themselves SUI
perfuities for the sake of their children is
not in the least to their credit. 1t Is meet
right and their bounden duty. That they
should give their children better advan-
tages than they have had themselves is
equally. in the nature Of things, their
proper line Of conduct. Each generation
owes to the one in advance all that it can
bestow OF preparation, of culture, of op-
portunity and of privilege The self de-
NAL OF parents is the tribute the race de-
Inands. 1t is not especially notable nor
particularly praiseworthy because 1T is the
appointed and expected rcie which Is given
to people when they take upon them the
obligations of parenthood
But self denial on the part of the parents
is one thing, and self effacement quite an
other. The plain man and the plain wom-
an who have scrimped and stinted and
saved, contrived, managed, risen early and
sat up late, to send their sons and daugh-
tiers to college, to educate them literally,
to place them we'll in the world, are not to
be set aside as Of small account when their
children arrive at maturity.
They are wrong to allow themselves to
be pushed to the wall, set in the back
ground, as they sometimes are The mother
may not know Euclid or have the faintest
acquaintance with the Greek poets, the
music her daughter plays may bea Chinese
puzzle to her comprehension, but she does
know whole world of science, not neces-
sarily in books, to which her daughter can
gain no clew in the classroom, since life
must be the teacher
The father may speak a less ornate YER
nacular than his boys vocabulary, but he
has the shrewdness, the acquaintance with
men, which come only by intercourse with
ones fellows, by Joy and sorrow and the
different phases through which all pass
who live long enough. 1t should be no
part OF the.self denial of parents to do with
out the deference,s the tenderness, the re-
gard, OF those whom they have brought up.
One finds it oftener in comparatively
new country than in the more conventional
life of our cities, a state of things in which
parents seem to have been outgrown by
their children. There are sarmhouses in
our frontier states where women, not yet
middle aged, have put on gray hairs and
wrinkles. lost the beauty and elasticity of
youth, years before their time, resignedly
oSoePoiiiS pilfdglOA anu tOll anu loneliness
to give their girls q chance
If the girls are noble, sweet natrred and
true, they will hold the dear mother in the
greatest esteem because of all that she has
done for them. Far from entertaining
feeling of pride or Of complacency, they
will repay the beautiful self denial of their
parents by devotion which never knows
a shade of diminution. 1t is an ignoble ma
ture alone which is capable of feeling
ashamed Of those who belong to ones kith
and kin on account of any simplicity Of
manner or plainness of speech. Self denial
must not become self effacement.
A few years ago it was not uncommon to
ind the parents Of young people rather
crowded out OF the way, the drawing rooms
given up to the youthful daughters and
their friends, while the mother and father
sat by themselves in basement dining
room or their own chamber A better state
Of things obtains now, and young people
have learned that society is crude and I'M
satisfactory, in which parents have not their
hitting place.-Harper's Bazaar.