If you want him to be a man, don't begin by making a mollycoddle of him.
You don't want to make a mollycoddleof him, do you?
It was reinforced by the large mollycoddle vote--the people who are soft physically and morally, or who have a twist in them which makes them acidly cantankerous and unpleasant as long as they can be so with safety to their bodies.
Their idea was to please both the mollycoddle vote and the vote of the international tail-twisters by upholding, with pretended ardor and mean intelligence, a National policy of peace with insult.
The Red-blood joins societies; theMollycoddle is a non-joiner.
And if the Red-blood is an American, and the Mollycoddle an European, then the situation is tense indeed.
Artists and poets belong to the genus I have named "Mollycoddle"; and in America the Mollycoddle is hardly allowed to breathe.
In his lifetime the Mollycoddle may be the slave of the Red-blood; but after his death, he is his master, though the Red-blood know it not.
The Mollycoddle in action is the Crank: it is he who accomplishes reforms; who abolished slavery, for example, and revolutionised prisons and lunatic asylums.
Hence the fact, noted by a cynic, that it is the Mollycoddle who cuckolds the Red-blood.
The Mollycoddle discovers, and the Red-blood invents.
The Red-blood despises the Mollycoddle; but, in the long run, he does what the Mollycoddle tells him.
He despises her because of the Mollycoddle he divines in her.
Still, primarily, the Mollycoddle is a critic, not a man of action.
Not but what the Mollycoddle may act, and act efficiently.
The Red-blood is the matter, the Mollycoddle the form; the Red-blood the dough, the Mollycoddle the yeast.
The Red-blood sees nothing; but theMollycoddle sees through everything.
The Mollycoddlealso despises the Red-blood, but he cannot do without him.
