Budge & Toddie: Helen's Babies at Play

The many indulgent men and women who liked “Helen’s Babies” so well that they wished they had written it themselves would have changed their minds could they have been compelled to read criticisms of a certain kind that were inflicted upon the author as soon as his name and mail address became known. Some people were in such haste to relieve their minds that they rushed into print with their charges and specifications, all of which were of service to the book, as so much free advertising; at least, the publisher said it was, and his opinion on such a matter was entitled to special respect.

Some of the critics were parents of the earnest, forceful, but matter-of-fact kind that does not doubt its own infallibility in family government and regards all children as scions of one unchanging stock and needing to be treated exactly alike, no matter in what direction their tendencies may be. A larger number were unmarried persons with theories of their own which had not been marred in whole or in part by anything so utterly commonplace and exasperating as experience. These good people, whether uncles or aunts of children over whom they were not allowed to exercise any authority, or mere bachelors and maids unattached to anybody’ babies of any kind, joined in abusing Budge and Toddie as the worst trained children that ever were tossed into print and in declaring the boys’s Uncle Harry incomparably incapable as a disciplinarian, unless, indeed, the parents of Budge and Toddie were still less competent to bring up children in the way they should go.

Still another class was composed of professional teachers who had taken long, serious courses of instruction in juvenile humanity, its nature, possibilities, limitations, duties and mental conditions at specified ages. Apparently these regarded a child as something created for the special purpose of being subjected to personal, exact and continuous domination by adults, and to be let alone only when the adults themselves wearied of the strain. To prove the unfitness of the boys’s uncle and their parents to have the care of children they quoted fluently from standard authorities on education, all the way from Aristotle, concerning whose children history is silent, to Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten system, who was childless.

Others who joined in the effort to analyze this literary butterfly with a mallet were of the class that could not understand why the misdeeds and shortcomings of Budge and Toddie were not treated with reproofs and warnings deduced from certain catechisms, of which infant depravity is a popular feature. And there were the people that never read a book but on compulsion. Anyone errs greatly who believes that this class lacks intelligence, for the world has contained many wondrously clever people who could not read or write; nevertheless, men and women who seldom read anything do take any book seriously, no matter if it deserves as little attention as last year’s almanac. Some of them sought out the author, after reading “Helen’s Babies,” to tell him in good faith what they would have done to Budge and Toddie to correct some alleged deficiencies.