Honoré Willsie

“ I have often thought that love is more maligned than any other human gift. Great love is not blind. Great love sees with a clarity of vision that cannot be hoodwinked. Not that it was love that caused me at first to see my children's failings and to punish them with entire thoroughness.
I saw these children physically as their physician saw them, mentally and spiritually as their psychiatrist saw them. I was as much without prejudice or preconceived idea as you are when you spend a week-end with your old college chum and pass judgment on her children. ”

“ I learned that nothing is so terrible as ignorant sentimentality may be, nothing so tender as the ruthlessly scientific system is. Day after day I saw unsung miracles wrought, unsung tragedy averted, ceaseless endeavor rising above seemingly hopeless failure.
I saw the lovely four-year-old whom everybody wanted to adopt withheld until a would-be mother could be found who would face unflinchingly the fact that the charming little girl's Wasserman test had been positive—a mother thoroughly equipped to handle the terrible problem of venereal taint. ”

“ I had come to see that, after all, even in moments of deepest exasperation and exhaustion, the overwhelming sense of tenderness toward a child's helplessness never leaves one, that having seen what I have, the eyes of the brain never lose sight of that long, sad procession of little lonely feet moving up from slavery. ”

“ My theories on child training! Alas and alack! not one of them, not a theory of all my original theories, has worked out! Even those that still are academically correct have failed when put to the test against that most immutable and uncontrollable fact of human development, child nature. Not a single one, mind you!
There is the matter of whipping. I don't believe in whipping children. Neither does the psychiatrist who advised me to lift the fear of corporal punishment from my older child, at once and finally. I did so, firmly convinced that a child could be ruled by love alone. ”

“ No one has as yet found a substitute for the individual home as the nucleus of the nation. No one as yet has been able to refute the statement that on the sanctity of its women and the integrity of its homes rests the ultimate virility of the nation. Inefficient, slipshod housewife and mother she may be, still the home pivots on her as it will pivot on nothing else. ”

“ And because my responsibility was voluntarily taken, I dare not allow my growing love for them to becloud my vision. I dare not let my tenderness for their sweetness and charm and utter trust in me move me one jot from my determination to help them conquer the weaknesses that would mar their success as human beings.
For they must succeed. The whole structure of child-placing rests on the success of the children who are placed. You may fail with your own child. ”

“ I saw the handsome little boy of five whom again everybody wished to adopt withheld because the intelligence test had found him defective. He must have no home save with people who would be willing to act as foster-parents to a subnormal child.
I saw frowsy, uncouth, foul-mouthed children of ignorant and disgusting parents tested and pronounced normal. I then watched these same workers systematically groom the small imps into pleasant-mannered youngsters purified of body and mind, and I saw them enthusiastically adopted by people who would on earlier contacts have drawn their garments aside. ”

“ Some fool—many fools, have said with a sigh and a smile that it's a blessing children forget their griefs. Listen! A child over ten forgets nothing in the way of actual grief. The wound heals, of course, but the memory scar is permanent. ”

“ Among the tenets of my own code was the idea that you are obligated to put more into society than you took out of it, to leave life in some way a little richer than you found it. The theory of social evolution was based on this idea. Mental and spiritual progress of society could come only if enough of us recognized this obligation and fulfilled it. I had always believed, I said, that I had a peculiar gift in training children. If I could adopt a child I would be doing my best bit toward my obligation.
And on what, asked the boss, did I base my belief that I had talent for child training? ”

“ It was, after all, very difficult to rule a child who did not fear his parents. It was proper to make the punishment fit the crime. Gradually I found myself inventing all sorts of ingenious and complicated rules and punishments, immensely interesting to me and, as to my dismay I gradually discovered, to my children also. Punishments, ft seemed, were not always punishments, but stunts, endurance tests, sporting events. Still, I would not whip the children.
Every parent has one red rag. Mine is lying. Nothing angers me as does being told a lie by one of the children. ”

“ You must realize that in order to recognize my little daughter as instantly as I did, my child-placing expert must have grilled a fair amount of education into me. After you have studied the game some time, if you are a child-lover, you get a sort of feeling about children, a sort of antenna, that tells you things your tongue finds difficult to phrase. Just as,—pardon the analogy,—if you are a dog-fancier, you become expert in picking a good dog. When you guess that a child is thoroughbred, you are not mistaken as often as might be supposed. ”

“ The body laid away in the soil returns to earth again and again and yet again in forms varied and beautiful. And the spirit, set free, wings in some way we cannot know to God, Who is its home. Perhaps on the farthest stars those free spirits find their happiness. ”

“ Most of us mistaking taste for talent, the patter for the solid structure. But all that is another story. What counts here is that after a due amount of sweating blood I reached the point where my writing made me self-supporting, and that I married, and that I found my life extraordinarily full of interesting things. ”

“ The simplest, surest way that I know of to halve the difficulty of bringing up a child is to bring up two children. Any mother will tell you this. Children entertain and discipline one another in a way no grownup can.
I did not discontinue my interest in the general work of child-placing organizations after my own little son came home with me, and so one day, about two years after young Gray-Eyes arrived, I saw a tiny blue-eyed girl whom I instantly knew to be mine. ”

“ We have with us to-day the social worker who uses the intelligence and Wasserman tests directly on the child and indirectly but none the less thoroughly on the would-be parents. We have gradually dawning on the public the idea that the pauper child is also a human child, that bad habits are not heritable.
I blush to admit that most of these facts about the handling of the dependent child were new to me. ”

“ It was patent, even to me, that an ancient bereavement, however permanent and far-reaching in its effect, was not a sound reason for involving a man in this particular kind of discomfort and responsibility. And, anyhow, I had just proved to myself that I had no words for expressing the wordless. But there must be other reasons. I dived into the workaday part of my mind.
It was, I said, a question of one's philosophy, of the code on which was based one's plan of life. There had been a time when the church planned and inforced such a code. ”

“ At the very time that philanthropists were stirring the sensibilities of England with tales of the brutalities of the American slave systems, they were ignoring the fact that English mill-owners were trafficking in child labor. These mill-owners were supplied regularly with pauper children by overseers of the poor. It was often customary for the parish authorities to get rid of imbeciles by supplying one idiot with every group of twenty sane children. ”

“ If the child is old enough to respond satisfactorily to the intelligence tests, have these tests continued over a long enough period to convince you that the child's mental type will fit fairly well into your family type? For example, a child not of the mental type, though normal, would be unhappy in a college professor's home, but might fit well in a laborer's family. The delicate, artistic type would not be a success in farm life. ”

“ None, I knew, had evolved such a workable code of ethics as Jesus. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and its Thirteenth Amendment had been possible, I believed, because the moral fiber of the men who created them was woven of this selfsame code. Given this code in early youth, no matter how much of the ritual or credal aspects of it was stripped away, a human being could never, unless wilfully, lose certain clean-cut, workable, ethical standards. ”

“ A man married to a female fiction writer has his own side of the story! Nevertheless, I gave the boss the tales as they happened. I could not hope to improve on the truth.
The real effect that I wanted to produce on him was that child adoption as handled by a scientific organization had reduced the gambling element to about fifty-fifty with the own-child hazard. You ordinarily know far less about the eugenic history of your husband's family than you do about the ancestry of the child you have adopted under proper conditions! ”

“ I learned that the handling of the dependent child by certain groups of people had become as nearly scientific as anything as intrinsically inexact as the handling of the child could be. Not that all child-placing agencies are now scientific in the placing of children or that orphan asylums have become Binetian models of perfection. ”

“ But the Wasserman test and intelligence tests have come into practical use, and the psychiatrist has fought his way from the children's courts into a permanent place as consultant for those who endeavor to study children intelligently. I discovered that in numerous instances there were child-placing organizations which took full advantage of these advances in science, that these organizations worked with a degree of understanding in finding homes for children that was almost unbelievable. ”

“ But she doesn't believe in whipping. You bet us kids do. We lick the daylights out of one another."
I was thoughtful and confused. I became more watchful and I scotched many lies. The fear lies and the fairy-tales lies I commented on, but let go. The mean, tattling lies worried me, and I kept after them sternly with every kind of fitting punishment I could devise or read about. This was for perhaps a year. Then came a lie so extraordinarily ornery that I dared not experiment further, and I offered the child his choice between a complete confession and a whipping. ”

“ So, behold me, equipped with my fatuous egotism as regards my fitness to be a wise mother, equipped also with many admonitions from the child-placing organizations, and with certain hard-and-fast rules from a children's physician and a psychiatrist, starting out on the fine adventure. ”

“ The philanthropists took no heed until the factories bred a malignant fever that spread over the people at large.
America has no greatly better boast to make of her earlier treatment of the pauper child. ”

“ But here your child's job ends. Mine must go still further.
This is her obligation to that little life of three years. She, too, must see with eyes not always tear-dimmed the procession that has toiled upward for so many generations, and she must yearn toward it with a love nobler even than that she will bear toward her own children, and out of that love must come service to the world's dependent children, service practical, concrete, idealistic
She has a fine mind, but with it, thank heavens! goes a nature inherently debonair. It's a curse for a woman to have a big brain and no charm. ”

“ And with a sudden fierce resolve that that little life should not have been lived in vain, that that pain should not be permanently barren, I turned to paper and pencil and sought to make a record in fiction of those short three years of life. ”

“ Few women are. I want her to keep her lovely, quiet sense of humor. As long as she keeps that, it will take many, many tragedies to hurt her too much. For a sense of humor is, after all, a sense of proportion. ”

“ In the chair was a clothes-basket. Mrs. Schaeffer stooped over the basket and pulled down a bit of blanket. A baby! A tiny red-faced baby!
Underneath a bashful, tomboyish exterior I was an extremely emotional child. I had lived much in my eight years in the way of tensity of feeling. ”

“ Production is at so low an ebb that men working alone cannot increase the world's wealth soon enough to prevent long years of misery. The women, all women, for a few years of their lives, at least, ought to work. ”

“ War has so upset the economic equilibrium of the world that all women ought to be producers of economic values. This without regard to their financial status or the ability of their men to support them. ”