Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/88

 Last Commencement I met the widowed mother of one of the members of our graduating class. She was keenly interested in her son's progress, in his pleasures, in the fact that he should have gotten out of his undergraduate life all that was possible. She told me what a sacrifice it had meant to her to send him to college and with what self-denial it had been possible for her to raise the needed money. She commented upon the extra cost of this last year, but she did not regret one dollar that had made it possible for him to have what he wanted. It was easy to see from her faded, out-of-date clothes what some of her sacrifices had been that had enabled her to send him the necessary money. And yet about the campus her son had been looked upon as a young fellow of wealthy family. He had gone with the fellows who spent money freely, he had never stayed away from dinners or dances or house parties, because he could not afford to go. There had been no hesitating on his part when money was concerned. And all the time at home his mother was working and pinching—and denying herself in order that he might live in selfishness and luxury, and all the time by this sacrifice she was doing him an irreparable injury for which he and the woman he marries will in the future have to pay a heavy price.

In another way these mothers in an unselfish endeavor to do the best for their sons and to supply the place of the father that is gone, often do them harm, and that is by never allowing them to do their own thinking, to look out for themselves, to make mistakes and by making them to learn how these mistakes may be corrected. These eager mothers choose