THE CALLOUSNESS OF BOYHOOD.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 248, 21 March 1888, Page 9

THE CALLOUSNESS OF BOYHOOD.

Almost every father whose family contains two or three hearty boys under the age of 15, certainly every teacher in a boys' school unless he altogether fails to reach the hearts of the youngsters around him, nmsb feel after reading a volume or two of current children's literature, that his own boys lack the tender sympathy, the overflowing compassion, which it is now tho fashion to impute to the heroes of juvenile fiction. Those persons who are not in a position to come in contact with the childron of to-day need only to recall to memory the scenes of their own childhood in order to find repeated episodes in which a suffering puppy or kitten was the central and unpitied figure. The callousness of the children of one's own circle will be made evident after a few minutes spent in such clarifying (though, to sensitive people, rather annoying) introspection, and what is true of one 8 own circle in this regard is approximately true of all. My own conviction is that healthy boys under 15 feel very little compassion for any suffering but that of their near relatives, their close friends, and occasionally their pet animals. Not only do they evince libtlo compassion, but they often show more than entire apathy, even an actual pleasure, ab the sight of pain inflicted upon animal?, and some, with whom we need not now concern ourselves, take a delight that to grown people seems almost fiendish in tormenting their weak play-fellows. Of course, there are instance*, as raro as they are delightful, of highly sympathetic children ; but such are to be discriminated from tho ordinary run of boys. The children who habitually show this spirib are to be reckoned as moral prodigies, far above the common level, and they are no more to be compared in point of morality with ordinary healthy boys than in point oi intellectual power. John Stuart Mity; reading "Lucan" and "Plato" in his eighth year, is not to be compared with the primary pupils struggling through the mysteries of " carrying " and " borrowing." Boys of 14 who share our feeling of pain ab the useless snooting of a bluebird, who have no instinctive impulse to claim a ground squirrel from a well-aimed shoto from a sling, are examples of moral precocity. But when all the circumstances are considered, it will, perhaps, appear that moral precocity is no more to be desired than intellectual precocity, because the existence of either indicates that tho development of the child in which it appears is abnormal.