WHAT TO DO WITH OUR SONS.
" IT is all very well," said a professional man the other day I whom the writer was congratulating on his apparent chances of promotion, "but I don't see what to do with my boys. There they are, three of them, very fair average lads, but they won't be Dizzies, and talk as you like, I can't live as I want to live on 2,0001. a year and save fortunes for them too. They must work as I did, and what are they to do ?" We believe the trouble thus expressed by an Indian civilian is one very general in Eng- land, and one which, oddly enough, considering the immense number of opportunities, is increasing every year. It is becoming very hard indeed for a professional man, be his income anything in. moderation, to know what to do with his sons, under the limits which habit and caste feeling and sound judgment impose on the choice of a career. He probably can give them a very good, or it may be a very costly education, but he cannot give them fortunes, cannot, if he is fair to wife and daughters, leave them even a decent maintenance. That is the position of five-sixths of our tolerably successful "professional men," and as it is a serious trouble, one which gives hours of pain every week, it is worth more than a moment's attention. It seems at first sight a little absurd that a well-to-do man with education should find decision on such a point so difficult ; but we will ask any one of our readers not being land- owner or millionaire, —and we are not just now writing for them,. —whether it is not a great trouble, a real addition to the daily burden of life? In the first place, he is not clear whether he has a right to much voice in the matter at all. The lad, he thinks in his heart, ought to settle the matter, always within certain limits, pretty much for himself. If accident settles it, as it does in every second case, there being from kinship, or connection, or cir- cumstance some "opening," well and good ; but if not, most fathers of to-day are very doubtful of their right of decision. They push, as we cannot help thinking, liberality to squeamishness. No doubt there are certain principles to be observed and certain limits beyond which interference is immoral or injurious ; but those reservations made, the father is, nine times out of ten, a better judge as to the best career for his son than the son himself could be. Of course, a distinct tendency or crave ought not to be interfered with. If a man has a strong " vocation " for the Church, or a wish amounting, as it often does, to a passion for the sea, or a visible capacity for artist life, it is something worse than a blunder to forbid him from following his own judgment on the plea of parental authority. That authority ought not to destroy, but to develop his individuality, and if this leads him definitely to a dis- tinct work in life, whether lucrative or likely to lead to poverty, let him go, in God's name ! The man who prevents his son from. preaching the Gospel, or painting pictures, he having been clearly intended by nature to preach the Gospel or paint pictures, has - more to answer for than it is healthy for his conscience to sustain. He may have ruined a life, and might almost as well have com- mitted murder. But, in nine cases out of ten, lads, at the age- when they must make their election, have no determined tenden- cies of any kind, and the modern idea of letting them choose is practically a bad bit of intellectual indolence. They do not know how to choose. They do not know what life is, what work is, what they can do and not do, what will improve them, what will give them cash, what is the relation between their work and themselves which will best suit their special idiosyncrasies. How is a boy to know that his besetting trouble is indolence, or that there are not two profes- sions in which indolence is not a fatal barrier to success? Or how is a lad of eighteen to know that a particular line of life is dreary, and that dreariness is the one evil of life which he is certain never to endure with patience, is certain to bolt from, to the destruction, temporarily at least, of all hopes ? This writer has known a boy anxious to go to sea who would have fainted from physical weakness before he got to the masthead ; and saw a lad, or man, or whatever he thought himself, of eighteen, who had worried his father into sending him to a medical school, faint right away, like a girl, under the first operation he had ever witnessed. People often say that lads get their notion of a sea life from Marryat, but their notions of civil life are often just as unreal, and as deficient in the true perception of the tar and the mono- tony which belong more or less to every profession. The lad who won the first prize in the first Indian Civil Service Examination went out in his own estimation a hero of heroes, but lie had not reckoned on life in the jungle as an apprenticeship to heroic life, and himself terminated a career not really begun, which yet he had found intolerable. He had forgotten the tar.
Nine times out of ten, we suspect, the father or guardian is the best judge ; and nine times out of ten the lad does not, except by comment more or less acute, seriously oppose his judgment. But that point happily settled, then begins the elder's responsibility, and consequent embarrassment. What line of life is there which, being practicable, and on the whole endurable, promises a decent or, to speak in nineteenth-century English, a comfortable career? The choice is not so wide as it looks, at least to profes- sional men. They, iu England at all events, are not fond of
"trade," partly for caste reasons, partly for reasons of a higher kind, and rather dread a merchant's office as ultimately requiring capital. As a rule, professional life is hereditary, though the majority of professional men dissuade their sons from their own professions. They see the tar on the ropes a little too clearly, but they wish them still to be professionals ; and their point is,—which profession? The Army ought to be a very good one in some ways,— an educated officer, with experience, and without the silly dislike of civilians which comes to soldiers like a disease, being about as efficient and manly a human being as can be found,—but the Army in England is a preserve for a caste, which includes of favour the very rich. It is useless to enter the Army without connection or cash, for you spend life as General Havelock did, in the effort to reach the point where you are seen, a point the millionaire reaches without exertion. The Navy is better for those who like it, offer- ing everything except cash ; but then it is not more than one lad in three who would go into the Navy, whatever his chances or his accidental inducements might be. Then there is the Church ; but to decide for the Church one should be ortho- dox,—and a strictly orthodox professional is a rarity,—and aware that one's son could bear to stand aloof from life, could endure the formalisms, and etiquettee, and unreal asceticisms which we have most unfortunately connected with the highest of the voca- tions. An Archbishop of Canterbury cannot go to see Fechter give a new reading of Hamlet,—though he might read Hamlet as much as he liked,—and in that nonsensical restriction the Church, as a career, stands in the eyes of most professional men condemned. Unless clergymen themselves, the " cloth " worries them, and we should not be surprised to see the Clerical order become in England, as it has become to an immense extent in Scotland, hereditary. Besides, the Church is, under our system, the one profession in which ability is no aid, in which a Newton or a Whewell, if disagree- able to the rich, might live a curate all his life. Medicine, again, is, in one respect, the very best of the professions. It is the only one in which a decent man with a conscience can be absolutely certain that he is doing good. Most things are uncertain in this world, but that it is good to make a man feel less pain, or to keep a sickly child alive, or to help a woman in birth-pangs, is not, except to very crotchety or very peculiar people, uncertain. Medicine, however, though a very noble, is not a very great profession. Of all others, it has, perhaps, turned out the fewest men who were great in any way whatever outside of their own groove. It requires an exclusive devotion, has often a somewhat narrowing effect on the mind, and for reasons it is possible to explain, though impossible to justify, it does not enjoy anything like its rightful consideration with the public. An average Army surgeon must be of necessity the superior of the average officer in his regiment, being necessarily a man of some knowledge, and, whenever the question has come up, journalists and Members of Parliament have always affirmed that view of the case with something of petulance, but it will be long before the Army is of the same opinion. A great surgeon or physician in London may have any rank, but the country surgeon is not inyited by men who invite his brother the vicar, and is worse paid by half than his cousin the local attorney. Engineering is a good training for a man ; it narrows but at the same time intensifies the imagina- tion, compels it, as it were, to become concrete, but it requires special faculties. As well set ten lads chosen at random to become musicians,—a piece of folly all mothers practise with all daughters,—as set them to become engineers. Farming is an occupation which requires capital, and which, though it will one day become extremely popular in England,—agreeing as it does with English instincts and English love of out-of-door life, —is not popular yet. The farmer wants more independence, more freedom to farm as he likes, longer leases, a more complete recog- nition as a manufacturer rather than a tradesman. Farming, moreover, except on a large scale, does not pay. There remain the Law and the Civil Service ; the latter a very good profession for a lad who can work, who can bear to wait, and who can satisfy himself that 1,000/. a year is a most comfortable pro- vision for the afternoon of life. The profession has chances, too, and makes considerable men ; they get interested either in politics or literature, and despite the depressing influence of the apprenticeship, which tends to make them mere scri- veners, the service has produced as many first-rate men as any profession except the Law. The law, however, remains still the best upon the list. There are no such possibili- ties as the Bar opens, and we believe that in certain respects there is no such training as a solicitor's. There are two great drawbacks, the dreary time a barrister must wait before he is so far recognized that solicitors prefer him to their own relatives, who
now throng the Inns, and the extreme length and severity of the attorney's apprenticeship ; but nothing cultivates like the Bar, nothing develops practical efficiency—that most valuable of quali- ties which seems often so independent of mental power—like an attorney's office. The old social prejudice is wearing away, and if the heads of this branch of the profession could only secure a few prizes for it, prizes from which they are at present most un- justly debarred,—so unjustly that their submission shows a want of spirit,—their branch would for any lad not exceptionally brilliant be the very best career. The popular idea that Law reform will destroy their profits is a pure delusion. In a complicated society like ours, with vast and conflicting interests and immense wealth, lawyers will always flourish, and will always be paid as a body all their aid is worth. If payment by the piece starves them, payment by fee or by bargain will enrich them again.
Previous page
