I will not say that mine tried to kill me, but I do say that they
took precious little care that I was not killed. The effect upon
my body was good, however--the effect of their indifference. This
roughening process is a part of physical training which very few
parents understand. It is essential--should be insisted on--but it
must not be accompanied with a moral roughening, which forces upon
the mind of the pupil the conviction that the ordeal is meant for
his destruction rather than for his good. There will be a recoil of
the heart--a cruel recoil from the humanities--if such a conviction
once fills the mind. It was this recoil which I felt! With warm
affections seeking for objects of love--with feelings of hope and
veneration, imploring for altars to which to attach themselves--I
was commanded to go alone. The wilderness alone was open to me:
what wonder if my heart grew wild and capricious even as that of
the savage who dwells only amid their cheerless recesses? With
a smile judiciously bestowed--with a kind word, a gentle tone, an
occasional voice of earnest encouragement--my uncle and aunt might
have fashioned my heart at their pleasure. I should have been as
clay in the hands of the potter--a pliant willow in the grasp of
the careful trainer. A nature constituted like mine is, of all
others, the most flexible; but it is also, of all others, the most
resisting and incorrigible. Approach it with a judicious regard
to its affections, and you do with it what you please. Let it but
fancy that it is the victim of your injustice, however slight,
and the war is an interminable one between you!
Thus did I learn the first lessons of suspiciousness. They attended
me to the schoolhouse; they governed and made me watchful there.
The schoolhouse, the play-places--the very regions of earnest faith
and unlimited confidence--produced no such effects in me. They might
have done so, had I ceased, on going to school, to see my relatives
any longer. But the daily presence of my uncle and aunt, with their
system of continued injustice, at length rendered my suspicious
moods habitual. I became shy. I approached nobody, or approached
them with doubt and watchfulness. I learned, at the earliest
period, to look into character, to analyze conduct, to pry into the
mysterious involutions of the working minds around me. I traced,
or fancied that I traced, the performance to the unexpressed and
secret motive in which it had its origin. I discovered, or believed
that I discovered, that the world was divided into banditti and
hypocrites. At that day I made little allowance for the existence
of that larger class than all, who happen to be the victims. Unless
this were the larger class, the other two must very much and very
rapidly diminish. My infant philosophy did not carry me very deeply
into the recesses of my own heart. It was enough that I felt some
of its dearest rights to be outraged--I did not care to inquire
whether it was altogether right itself.