Part 5 (2/2)
Nature is strong, and she es to circumvent, to a certain extent, the obstructive devices of htly corseted mothers The outer flesh and blood of the child are made in the obscure laboratories of the body hly refined fabrications of brain and nerve Are the low average brain-power and the weak nerves of our people, leading in so ely due to our crilect of the conditions of free and splendid motherhood?
But, if ant to become a healthy and powerful people, what isand healthywith health is immoral
The most conscientious observance of its laws should be iuard the health of our girls, for their function in the state is just now of vital arded apparently as that of their brothers
CHAPTER VII
WORK AS A VITAL PART OF PATRIOTISM
Gurowski asked, ”Where is the bog? I wish to earnpeat” ”Oh, no, sir, you cannot do such degrading work” ”I cannot be degraded I am Gurowski”--EMERSON'S JOURNALS
SOMETHING has been said of the esti, are held in our country
In an illu sermon, Dr Lyman Abbott once treated of this subject It was on the Fourth of July, and he began by saying that the most important result of the Civil War, as he viewed it, was one that he had never heardthus enlisted the keenest attention of his hearers, he continued in nearly these words:
”Before the Civil War, theelement in the South Supplied with an are planter was spared the necessity of exertion
He hunted in the season, raced soa, that no ners believe also) who engages in trade or pursues any ed all that Many of the richest planters had to go to work Some of them had even to enter menial servitude in order to earn bread for their families Then they found out that it was possible to preserve their scholarshi+p, their refineh they worked hard every day It was an epochal discovery
”Fronity of labor was established in the South, as the Pilgriland, and as it hout the world, if the world is ever to rise to the full glory of the deument of the advocates of Child Labor in our fields and factories, is that the children thus become early used to work,--a habit which is productive of the best results in later life
Carlyle's great essays upon work have inspired thousands; and in Professor Carl Hilty's wonderful volume called ”Happiness,” there is an essay on ”Work,” which every parent should read He sho laziness,--the inherent aversion to work,--has been a chief obstacle to progress in all ages; how hard labor was so universally relegated to slaves during early times that even to philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, any social system was unthinkable, which did not include a slave class
One of Professor's Hilty's incidental re He speaks of the many excellent women who observe scrupulously the injunction in the Fourth Commandment to keep the Sabbath Day holy; but who see sentence of the command that one day out of the seven, or even none at all, is enough for that purpose He feels that the progress of the world depends upon the co man and woman for six days out of the seven,--with only occasional vacations!
We are all probably agreed that every citizen should kno to support himself
One of our truant officers went to a poor home to find out why a boy who lived there had been absent from school for several days The mother reported that the father was in the hospital, and that her only support was the s errands for the corner grocer, and so on
The teapot stood on the stove, and the officer said, ”But your boy will grow up ignorant if you keep him out of school like this Don't you want hirows and how it is prepared for the market?”
”Oh,” responded the poor woman, with a practical common sense which disconcerted her hearer, ”I'd a dale rather he should kno to airn a pound of it”
And in her desperate circumstances, it was far more necessary that he should
But in well-to-do households, where there is not much work that a child can do, especially in the city, how can he be trained up in habits of industry?
This is a problem which, as we have said, confronts thousands of conscientious nant lines: