THE FATHERS OF ENGLAND.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 March 1920, Page 11

THE FATHERS OF ENGLAND.

THEIR REAL JOB. By Rita S. Hale. Fathers are scarcer in .England than they were five yeftrs ago. The war thatraged for four of those years took not only potential but actual fathers as well. Those fathers who are left must make up to the children of England for those who are gone. They must be fathers indeed, not merely clerks or barristers or plumbers or doctors who provide a roof and food for their families. They must be fathers in a more real sense of the word. . Since the beginning of things, mothers have been glorified in song and story. No one has thought much of fathers as fathers. They themselves hav.; thought that just being fathers wasn't their job. It was the mother's job to stay at home with the children, theirs to go out and earn a living. But if it was the mother's job to stay at home while the father went out into the world, how important it was for him to bring into the home the things the mother, shut up within its walls, couldn't get, the things that count enormously in the children's own contact with the world, so soon to come. It does not occur to the average father that, there are vital things a child needs and wants of him quite aside from the material things that his daily wage provides. He does not know that there are bigger, finer, better things than just abundant food and fine raiment that every boy needs and wants, and that every father can give him if he will. First, of all, there is the love that encircles and protects. That is as old as fatherhood. Then there is the companionship that enriches that love. The companionship that has superseded the old idea of "duty and respect" from son to father, an idea that contained no hint of reciprocal duty and re*,pect from father to son. Next there is the preparation for life which the father can give the son as no one else can, and which he must give him if he has any sense of duty or of the obligation of fatherhood at all. For no matter how poor or dull or uneducated he is, he can hold the child's interest and imagination as no one else can. For every normal father of every normal child is that child's first hero.. No matter how commonplace or uninteresting he is to the rest of the world, he is the centre of his child's universe. What _he says and does ia the most interesting thing in the world to the child. That interest alone gives the father a power for good or ill with the child that no one else will ever have.

That interest alone makes it a sacred duty for the father to hold it and justify it. The absence of the fathers of England who will never return from France makes that obligation doubly sacred-