A Question of “Rights”

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 9, 1916

A Question of “Rights”

“MOTHER, why can’t Polly help me fill the wood box this morning? You know I’m going to play Indian with the other fellows at nine, and it’s getting near nine now. Can’t she help me?”

“Mother, haven’t I got a right not to help him? I want to get the playhouse fixed up before Lulu comes over, and I can’t stop to bother with the wood!”

Mother’s pretty brown eyes looked down into two other pairs of brown eyes, both rather indignant and tearful.

“Why, yes, Polly,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “I suppose you have a right not to help Junior. The wood box is his work, and you’ve finished all your own morning chores.”

Polly’s brown little face mirrored a flash of self-satisfaction, while Junior’s gloomed visibly. Cousin Jane, who had been visiting mother since day before yesterday, sympathized with the lad, and wondered a little at mother.

“It seems to me,” mother went on reflectively, “that it isn’t exactly a question of rights. Suppose that yesterday, when Mr. Jones wanted father to help him get in that hay which the shower threatened to spoil, father had said, ‘No, I have all I can do at home.’ It would have been true enough.”

“It would have been awful mean,” pronounced Polly, emphatically. “There was nothing father’d just got to do for himself.”

“And yet he had a perfect right to refuse, if he wanted to do so,” said mother.

Polly’s face fell a little.

“You see,” went on mother, “father thought what he should like, if he were in Mr. Jones’s place—the golden rule, you know. So he went beyond his rights, to do a favor. Now, in this case, suppose you, Polly, wanted Junior to help you do the dishes so that you could get ready to go to ride with him and father. He would have a right to refuse, because washing dishes isn’t his work; but how would you feel about it—and him?”

A long, long pause: Presently Polly’s bent head lifted, and she whirled on her heel determinedly.

“Come on, Junior!” she cried.

“We’ve got to hurry!”

They clattered out of the sunny kitchen, and mother turned smilingly to Cousin Jane, whose expression was slightly disapproving.

“It seems to me,” said the latter, “that I never in my life heard so much about ‘rights’ from children as I have since I’ve been here. ‘I’ve a right to do this; you’ve no right to do that.’ It gets on my nerves, and I should think it would on yours, Kate.”

“Upon what better foundation can we build the structure of a child’s responsibility to himself and to society than that of his own rights and those of others?” queried mother.

“Yes, but you see how it works. It makes them disobliging. See the way Polly was going to do, when she ought to have wanted to help her brother!”

Mother’s smile broadened.

“It’s no use, Jane, for either of us to pretend that we were youthful angels when we were children. Do you remember that when you finished your ‘stint’ of apple paring or picking over beans at grandfather’s long before I did, you wouldn’t help me? Child nature is about the same, whether it shows itself in ourselves, as we look back, or in our children. The difference is, you didn’t voice your rights, and Polly did.”

“The only way a family in which there are children can preserve peace and order, is to insist upon the observance of one another’s rights—the right to have one’s own playthings, the right to one’s share of the goodies, the right not to be compelled to give up to the demands of the most selfish child because that is the easiest way to avoid trouble. This is the lesson of social accountability—a respect for the rights of others, whether friend or foe. Isn’t the home the best place to learn it?”

“But they harp so upon it!”

“Of course! They’ve come to recognize their rights and demand them, but they haven’t gone the step farther which teaches them to yield some of them when it is kind to do so. But they must have their rights before they can actually yield them. If I had simply forced Polly to help her brother, without the little talk we had, her sense of right would have been wounded, he would have felt that she ought to help him whenever he demanded it, and neither one would have recognized her compliance for what it really was—the gracious waiving of a right in order to do a favor. Now, I think, they do. Polly feels magnanimous, Junior realizes that it is to her, and not to me, that he owes the favor, and will be inclined to return it in kind, some day. Isn’t this really the better way, even if it is a bit the longer?”

Cousin Jane looked thoughtful.

“I do believe it is!” she admitted.—American Motherhood.