The Shooting of the Young Idea.
By Annie Laurie
A LITTLE girl who lives near me took her brand new hat and tore it into a thousand pieces and threw it into the fire the other day, because her mother couldn't find time to take her out just at the moment that the little girl felt inclined to go. The mother smiled and said, "Poor child, she hasn't learned the lesson of meeting evil with good yet." I'm going to watch that little girl. I'm afraid she'll make very interesting copy for the newspapers some day. She'll be just the sort of person who will shoot some man for refusing to keep his promise and divorce his real wife and marry her. I wonder how much of all these brand new theories about subduing evil with good and meeting enemies with a smile, and the development of the "ego" have to do with the epidemic of murder and all sorts of unhallowed crime in this country! A woman shot a man in Arizona the other day. She says she is glad she did it. She was a trained nurse and when the man's wife was dying he promised her that as soon as the funeral was well over he would marry her. Instead of which he took the first train out of town when the funeral was over, and the nurse had to track him a thousand miles to get close enough to teach him what she calls "a lesson." I wonder why she didn't learn her own lesson early in life—the lesson that a woman who lets another woman's husband make love to her is both a fool and a wicked woman, and that she will have some little bills of her own to pay before she gets thru with the wretched business. . . . Whenever a merely finite mind begins to argue that it is stronger and bigger and wiser than any set rule or command, look out for trouble. Now, if that little girl who threw her hat into the fire had been mine, I should have given her a good, old-fashioned spanking first of all, and then I should have made her go without a new hat for the rest of the season. Then when she was grown she'd know what the phrase "cause and effect" means and how to deal with that meaning. I wonder if I'm a hopeless barbarian?—
Annie Laurie.