t may prove a
sudden awakening to one, giving an impulse in a certain direction that
may last for years, may make no impression on another. People wonder why
the children of the same family differ so widely, though they have had
the same domestic discipline, the same school and church teaching, and
have grown up under the same influences and with the same environments.
As well wonder why lilies and lilacs in the same latitude are not all
alike in color and equally fragrant. Children differ as widely as these
in the primal elements of their physical and psychical life.

Who can estimate the power of antenatal influences, or the child's
surroundings in its earliest years, the effect of some passing word or
sight on one, that makes no impression on another? The unhappiness of
one child under a certain home discipline is not inconsistent with the
content of another under this same discipline. One, yearning for broader
freedom, is in a chronic condition of rebellion; the other, more easily
satisfied, quietly accepts the situation. Everything is seen from a
different standpoint; everything takes its color from the mind of the
beholder.

I am moved to recall what I can of my early days, what I thought and
felt, that grown people may have a better understanding of children and
do more for their happiness and development. I see so much tyranny
exercised over children, even by well-disposed parents, and in so many
varied forms,--a tyranny to which these parents are themselves
insensible,--that I desire to paint my joys and sorrows in as vivid
colors as possible, in the hope that I may do something to defend the
weak from the strong. People never dream of all that is going on in the
little heads of the young, for few adults are given to introspection,
and those who are incapable of recalling their own feelings under
restraint and disappointment can have no appreciation of the sufferings
of children who can neither describe nor analyze what they feel. In
defending themselves against injustice they are as helpless as dumb
animals. What is insignificant to their elders is often to them a source
of great joy or sorrow.

With several generations of vigorous, enterprising ancestors behind me,
I commenced the struggle of life under favorable circumstances on the
12th day of November, 1815, the same year that my father, Daniel Cady, a
distinguished lawyer and judge in the State of New York, was elected to
Congress. Perhaps the exciteme