Is It Right? by Rural New Yorker

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 2, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 14.

Is It Right?

By Rural New Yorker

A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD boy writes us that, wanting a little money that should be all his own, he bought a pig last spring with his saved-up pennies and managed to buy enough mill feed to keep it growing all summer, and last fall he earned the corn to fatten it by husking nights for every eighth bushel. He has just sold the pig for twenty dollars, and his father took the money, saying the boy had no use for it, and that he would give him another pig in the spring. The boy asks was that right? We wish we could say, No, so loud that every father in America could hear. Legally, no doubt, the father had a right to the money, but morally he had no more right to it than he would have to any other boy's money. That boy had worked full hours for his father and had taken time from his sleep to earn the corn that made that pig, and it was theft for that father to take the money. Not only this, but the father who would so treat his boy, is as nearly a fool as would be he who should give a young colt its first lesson in harness hitched to a stump or an immovable load.

A few such lessons crush the ambition all out of a boy or colt either, and while no one so treats an animal, the whole country is full of such examples with the boys. We know a hundred such fathers. They seem to think that the boys have no rights that their fathers are bound to respect, that the entire end and aim of boyhood is to add a few dollars to their wealth, and when the boys, utterly disgusted, leave home, they wonder why their boys take no interest in the farm.

Nothing pays better than to encourage the boys—except to teach them honesty, and this you can't do by defrauding them—and nothing so encourages one to thought and care in his work, as a pecuniary interest. Don't fail, therefore, to give the boys a direct interest in something on the farm, and then see to it, as you would prize their integrity, that you deal honestly by them in dividing the profits. With how much more complacency will you leave, when you come to die, a full-grown, honest, prosperous man—your son—than a paltry bank account! Deal justly, deal liberally, deal encouragingly, with the boys.—Rural New Yorker.