The Coconino weekly sun., 1894-06-07
THE RIGHTS OF CHILL SREN.
Mistakes That Are Too Often Mads ry
 Parents in Their Training.

Mistakes That Are Too Often Mads ey
 Parents in Their Training.
 From the time the infant has an iA- dependent existence it has independ- ent, inherent, inalienable rights, cus- tom and popular belief to the contrary notwithstanding.
 It would cause no little merriment in certain families in this land if some- one were to assert that the baby had rights that the parents were bound to respect.
 "Tne idea of the baby being an inde- pendent citizen!" was the contemptu- ous remark of a parent when this as- sertion was made. "Why, the little thing has no sense, strength or the capacity to provide for even one of its wants."
 That may be very true" was the reply; but, all the same, that does not affect the rights of the child. If you were hopeless, helpless invalid, able only to feel, perhaps to see, and were waited on and cared for as this tiny scrap of humanity is, you would yet possess all the rights that you do now, and your child has precisely as many as you would have under tho same circumstances"
 Because it is his child, many a man thinks that the little one has no right to an independent thought or wish. Parents often delight to tyrannize over their children. They are the only beings in the world over whom they can exercise absolute authority, and this privilege is inexpressibly sweet to them Not infrequently they become angry, exasperated, worried, enraged at some injustice that they may suffer atthe hands of the outside world, and go home frantic with desire to vent their wrath upon something or some. body.
 Children are almost always trying, many times extremely aggravating, and it needs but word to set the parents off as a spark of gunpowder. Thousands of children are injured for life because somebody has trampled upon what the parents consider their rights and privileges in the outside world. Every human soul, as soon as it takes its place in the ranks of nor tality, has a right to good treatment, the ordinary necessities of life and as many of the comforts as the means of the parents allow.
 There is a wide difference between sensible, well.directed liberality and indulgence. A prodigal waste of the good things of this world should never be tolerated in child or adult. The old adage that Waste makes want" is one of the truest sayings that ever obtained currency in any language; therefore, among its other rights, the child is en- titled to instruction as to how to make the best use of the things it possesses, or is some day likely to possess. To throw a young person upon the world in ignorance of the ways of mankind, to bequeath to it large possessions and give it no idea of the proper way to care for them, to lavish gold and gifts upon it all its days and withhold from it the training and discipline that are among the most important of arma- ments against misfortune, are to de. prive it of a right that will handicap it all through life. Parents will have learned great lesson whel they come to fully understand that it is as much their duty to establish their offspring in the rights that naturally belong to them as it is to feed them when they are helpless and hungry. Indeed, it would be better for the community and the child itself that it were starved in its cradle than to be turned loose upon the world without the protection oi knowledge and the ability to intelli. gently exercise those faculties thai lead it to provide for itself and those who, in due time, will become depend ent upon it.-N. Y. Ledger.