proprietors of the great business houses of
Chicago petitioned the school authorities for improved instruction
along moral lines, affirming that the boys needed religious ideas to
make them more reliable in business affairs.

It has been said by President White of Cornell that,--"The great thing
needed to be taught in this country is _truth, simple ethics, the
distinction between right and wrong_. Stress should be laid upon _what
is best in biography_, upon _noble deeds and sacrifices_, especially
those which show that the greatest man is not the greatest orator, or
the tricky politician. They are a curse; what we need is _noble men_.
National loss comes as the penalty for frivolous boyhood and girlhood,
that gains no moral stamina from wholesome books."

If youths learn to feed on the thoughts of the great men and women of
all times, they will never again be satisfied with the common or low;
they will never again be satisfied with mediocrity; they will aspire to
something higher and nobler.

A day which is passed without treasuring up some good thought is not
well spent. Every day is a leaf in the book of life. Do not waste a
day any more than you would tear out leaves from the book of life.

The Bible, such manuals as "Daily Strength for Daily Needs," such books
as Professor C. C. Everett's "Ethics for Young People"; Lucy Elliott
Keeler's "If I Were a Girl Again"; "Beauty through Hygiene," by Dr.
Emma F. Walker, such essays as Robert L. Stevenson's "Gentlemen" (in
his "Familiar Studies of Men and Books") Munger's "On the Threshold";
John Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies"--these are the books that make young
men and maidens so trustworthy that the Marshall Fields and John
Wanamakers want their aid in the conduct of great business concerns.
Blessed are they who go much farther in later years, and who become
familiar with those

"Olympian bards who sang
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so."

The readers who do not know the Concord philosopher Emerson, and the
great names of antiquity, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Plato, have
yet great pleasures to come.

Aside from reading fiction, books of travel are of the best for mental
diversion; then there are Nature Studies, and Science and Poetry,--all
affording wholesome recreation, all of an uplifting character, and some
of them opening up study specialties of the highest order, as in the
great range of books classified as