ROBBING HIS BOY | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 9, 1880

ROBBING HIS BOY.

Last spring a farmer found in his flock a lamb which the mother would not own. He gave it to his son, a boy fifteen years old, who saved it and raised it. The boy called it his all summer, all the family called it his, and it was his. But this fall when his father sold his lambs he let this one go with them, and taking the pay for it, tucked it into his big wallet and carried it off to pay taxes or put in the bank. On this statement of facts the Manchester Mirror makes the following severe but just comment:—

Now this farmer did not intend to do anything wrong. Least of all did he intend to wrong his boy.

Probably he did not give the matter much thought anyway; but if he did, he considered the boy's ownership of the lamb a pleasant fiction, or reasoned that the boy, having all his needs supplied out of the family purse, did not need the pay for the lamb, and it was better to put it into the common fund.

But for all that, taking the lamb and selling it in that way, and pocketing the proceeds, was stealing. No, it was robbery, and, as between this boy and his father, one of the meanest robberies that could be perpetrated.

Not only this, but by robbing the boy of that two dollars the farmer did more to make the boy discontented and drive him away from home than he can undo with ten times that amount. A boy is a little man, and if he has any of the gather and grip to him when he grows up, he begins at an early age to feel that desire to own something and add to the property subject to his ownership, which is at once the incentive to effective work and the motive which reconciles men to their condition.

No matter how well the boy's wants are provided for from a fund which is common to the whole family, he takes no particular interest in adding to that fund, because he does not feel that it is his, and he tires of labor and thought, the proceeds of which he must share with several others.

But give him a piece of property of his own, to manage as he pleases, to keep or sell or change, and let him feel that his ownership is secure, and that his loss or gain depends upon his own endeavors, and he will work cheerfully and contentedly.