Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1893-11-07

SELF DENIAL OF PARENTS.
1t Should Never he Permitted to Degen-
crate Into Self Effncement.

crate into sell
That parents should deny themselves SUI
perfiuitics 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 sdvan-
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 OPP
portunity and of privilege. The Helf de
NAL of parents is the tribute the race de-
mands 1t is not especially notable nor
particularly praiseworthy, because IT is the
appointed and expected role 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 placement 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 well in the world, ara not to
be set aside az 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
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, nut 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 Difference, the tenderness, the re-
gard, OF those whom they have brought up.
One finds IL oftener in a comparatively
new country than in the more conventional
life of our cities, a state of things lit which
parents seem to have been outgrovn by
their children. There are farmhouses 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
accepting privation and toll and loneliness
to give their girls chance.
IL the girls are noble, sweet natured and
true, they will hold the dear mother in the
greatest esteem because of all that she has
done for them. Far from entertaining "A
feeling of pride or of complacency, they
will repay the beautiful self denial of their
parents by devotion which never knows
shade of diminution 1t is an isnoble 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
find the parents Of young people rather
crowded cut 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 un-
satisfactory, in which parents have not their
fitting place.-Harpers Bazaar.