The American Child | Page 2

that we would do? And why is it that we try so unceasingly
to do it?
It seems to me that we desire with a great desire to make the boys and
girls do; that all of the "very much" that we do for them is done in order
to teach them just that--to do. It is a large and many-sided and
varicolored desire, and to follow its leadings is an arduous labor; but is
there one of us who knows a child well who has not this desire, and
who does not cheerfully perform that labor? Having decided in so far as
we are able what were good to do, we try, not only to do it ourselves, in
our grown-up way, but so to train the children that they, too, may do it,
in their childish way. The various means that we find most helpful to
the end of our own doing we secure for the children,--adapting them,
simplifying them, and even re-shaping them, that the boys and girls

may use them to the full.
There is, of course, a certain impersonal quality in a great deal of what
we, in America, do for children. It is not based so much on friendship
for an individual child as on a sense of responsibility for the well-being
of all childhood, especially all childhood in our own country. But most
of what we do, after all, we do for the boys and girls whom we know
and love; and we do it because they are our friends, and we wish them
to share in the good things of our lives,--our work and our play. To
what amazing lengths we sometimes go in this "doing for" the children
of our circles!
One Saturday afternoon, only a few weeks ago, I saw at the annual
exhibit of the State Board of Health, a man, one of my neighbors, with
his little eight-year old boy. The exhibit consisted of the customary
display of charts and photographs, showing the nature of the year's
work in relation to the milk supply, the water supply, the housing of the
poor, and the prevention of contagious diseases. My neighbor is not a
specialist in any one of these matters; his knowledge is merely that of
an average good citizen. He went from one subject to the other,
studying them. His boy followed close beside him, looking where his
father looked,--if with a lesser interest at the charts, with as great an
intentness at the photographs. As they made their way about the room
given over to the exhibit, they talked, the boy asking questions, the
father endeavoring to answer them.
The small boy caught sight of me as I stood before one of the charts
relating to the prevention of contagious diseases, and ran across the
room to me. "What are you looking at?" he said. "That! It shows how
many people were vaccinated, doesn't it? Come over here and see the
pictures of the calves the doctors get the stuff to vaccinate with from!"
"Isn't this an odd place for a little boy on a Saturday afternoon?" I
remarked to my neighbor, a little later, when the boy had roamed to the
other side of the room, out of hearing.
"Not at all!" asserted the child's father. "He was inquiring the other day
why he had been vaccinated, why all the children at school had been

vaccinated. Just before that, he had asked where the water in the tap
came from. This is just the place for him right now! It isn't odd at all
for him to be here on a Saturday afternoon. It is much odder for me" he
continued with a smile. "I'd naturally be playing golf! But when
children begin to ask questions, one has to do something about
answering them; and coming here seemed to be the best way of
answering these newest questions of my boy's. I want him to learn
about the connection of the state with these things; so he will be ready
to do his part in them, when he gets to the 'voting age.'"
"But can he understand, yet?" I ventured.
"More than if he hadn't seen all this, and heard about what it means,"
my neighbor replied.
It is not unnatural, when a child asks questions so great and so far-
reaching as those my neighbor's small boy had put to him, that we
should "do something about answering them,"--something as vivid as
may be within our power. But, even when the queries are of a minor
character, we still bestir ourselves until they are adequately answered.
"Mamma," I heard a little girl inquire recently, as she fingered a scrap
of pink gingham of which her mother was making "rompers" for the
baby of the family, "why