The Secret Of Wealth
132 total pages.
Just as important is it for boys and girls to be trained to "simple living and strenuous exertion, to find zest in tackling hardships, to become lithe as a panther." " The Battle of Waterloo was won first on the English cricket fields" where those boys who afterwards saved their country gained their hard muscles, their resistance, their self-control and their obedience. Boys and girls must first learn the obey habit. The captain of a baseball team demands obedience--and gets it. The school-teachers and later the employers of the boys and girls demand it--and get it. When a sentimental mother is tempted to encourage in her boy or girl the love of an easy life, luxurious habits, and wastefulness of money, let her remember this: Money is the only distinguishing difference between the gentleman of leisure and the hobo--their place in the world is the same; they love the passive pleasures which soften and degenerate; they lose the wish and the power to accomplish anything worth while; or to be anything worth while; and even lose the power of enjoying the kind of lives they have chosen. "Better than a clever boy, or a sensitive boy, or a boy, elegant and gentle it is to have a boy that is hard, with hard muscles, a hard, vigorous mind and a hard and valiant spirit." A boy must learn to take the initiative; to use his judgment in deciding; then go ahead and take the consequences, good or bad--and not whimper if they are bad. The best training is making mistakes. The boy in the public school-yard who makes mistakes gets beaten up by the other boys. In business life, the man who makes mistakes has it taken out of his skin, too. The boy who has grown up defending himself has learned to tackle hard problems, to find a way of handling them, and to enjoy the proud feeling that comes from achievement -- he has learned that resisting is power. Train the boys and girls to resist enervating softness; to resist the inclination to spend their money. One boy turns out to be a ne'er-do-well because he was a spendthrift, slothful in body and mind; the other mounts to fame and wealth-- '' He was that kind of a boy.''
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The Secret Of Wealth