A TYRANT AND HER VICTIM.
By Alice P. Carter
I WITNESSED yesterday from my Parisian balcony a sad case of a persecuted victim and of the tyranny of one in whose hands was apparently absolute, irresponsible power. The victim was a woman, and therefore worthy of some forbearance and pity, but there was no pity in the heart of the tyrant. And why?—That tyrant was a minute child who had learned the power of her own screams. The scene lasted so long that it seemed as if there would be no end to it. First the woman would take the child's hand and gently try to draw her along. Instantly the roars would break forth and fill the street, and the woman, either her mother or a governess, would meekly drop the hand, and the child, accepting the implied apology, would cease roaring. This was repeated over and over again. The passers-by every now and then stopped, and apparently tried to mediate between tyrant and victim. One woman went down on her knees and seemed to plead for some time. In vain. One lady, in passing, gave the child a poke with her umbrella, whether in wrath or in jest I do not know. Then a gentleman tried his powers of blandishment and persuasion. Still the child refused to stir. I think finally the matter was settled by bribery, for after some talk the child suddenly took the woman's hand and walked off as amiably as possible. It is such scenes as these that you have before you, mammas and papas, of babies, if you are letting those babies, great or small, see that you are afraid to have them cry. Once give up to a child because it cries, and it will try again the recipe for getting its own way. Once let it get the habit of using the formidable weapon of lung power, and you are enslaved. There is no more helpless mortal on the face of the earth than a parent who must give up, for fear a child will scream. The child knows it, and "knowledge is power." The youngest babies are knowing enough to discover their power in this way. Mine discovered it when he was too young to move when I laid him on a sofa. He noticed that the servant was afraid of his slightest squeak. I was not. Consequently he bullied her, and was a model baby with me. By the time he was twenty months old, his behavior in this way was simply ludicrous. Now and then a parent is absolutely obliged to be conquered by a screaming fit in public. A friend of mine was thus conquered, but a whipping, administered the moment the little rebel reached home, gave her a hint that she must not again attempt to manage her mother by lung power in a city street. Some such penalty ought certainly to follow any such triumph on the part of a child who has thus temporarily conquered a parent, to take away the desire for future triumphs of the same description. Fortunately, a child who does not have such triumphs in the privacy of home, does not generally indulge its parents in such scenes in public as I witnessed yesterday under my windows.—Babyhood.