Look For Fairies Now
It is astonishing what an effect a child’s early training has upon its whole life. When one reflects upon the subject one is inclined to agree with the noted clergyman who said, “Give me the child for the first seven years of his life and you may have him all the rest of the time.” What a wonderful power mothers have in their hands! They shape the lives of the children today, thru them the lives of the men and women of tomorrow, and thru them the nations and the world.
I see by the papers that one of the suffrage leaders of the state will tour the Ozarks this spring in the interest of woman suffrage, bringing light into the dark places, as it were.
A great many seem to regard the securing of the ballot as the supreme attainment and think that with women allowed to vote, everything good will follow as a matter of course. To my mind the ballot is incidental, only a small thing in the work that is before the women of the nation. If politics are not what they should be, if there is graft in places of trust and if there are unjust laws, the men who are responsible are largely what their mothers have made them and their wives usually have finished the job. Perhaps that sounds as if I were claiming for the women a great deal of influence, but trace out a few instances for yourself, without being deceived by appearances, and see if you do not agree with me.
A young friend with whom I talked the other day said that life was so “much more interesting” to her since she “began to look below the surface of things and see what was beneath.” There are deeps beyond deeps in the life of this wonderful world of ours. Let’s help the children to see them instead of letting them grow up like the man of whom the poet wrote,
A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him and nothing more.
Let’s train them, instead, to find “books in the running brooks, sermons in stones and good in everything.”*
– Laura Ingalls Wilder,
excerpt from “Look for Fairies Now” (April 5, 1916)**
*William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.1
**Taken from Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks
