Habits Are Broken Only Through
Tremendous Effort_

Whatsoever the parent desires in his child in the nature of attainment or
skill, of character or ideal, if not foreign to the nature of the child,
may be realized through attention to habit. But the training in right
habits should be accomplished during the golden age of childhood when body
and soul are plastic and impressions are easily made. Too early the
character hardens like cement and thereafter becomes well nigh impossible
to change. Think how difficult it is for the adult, but how easy for the
child, to acquire skill in music, or facility in speaking a foreign
language. With respect to moral virtue and spiritual sentiment, whatsoever
good fruit you look for in the man usually appears as seed and flower in
the child.

Among the habits that should be impressed early, habits that are absolutely
essential to success in life, are the following:

1. Promptness and regularity.

2. Obedience to right and justice.

3. Truthfulness and honesty.

4. Thoroughness.

5. Industry or the habit of work.

6. Persistence.

7. Temperance.

8. Courtesy and respect for the rights of others.

Crowning these and transcending them in importance are the supreme
sentiments and ideals of life, which cannot properly be regarded as habits;
they are sympathy, love, faith, reverence for religious convictions, and
the ideal of freedom or liberty.

Society itself could not endure but for the stability which habits afford.
It is easy to denounce custom and tradition as obstacles to progress and
reform, but it should be remembered that they are the social habits which
society has acquired through registering the experience of the past, and
that while some of them, such as intemperance and sexual vice, are
destructive of society, others, like co-operation, and the ideal of
freedom, are absolutely essential to human progress.

An example by Oppenheim, in his "Mental Growth and Control," well
illustrates the power of habit. A wealthy woman in New York City became
interested in the crowded tenements of the east side; she believed that
constant sickness, unclean habits, and the vicious characters of the people
were due largely to overcrowding. She secured, therefore, some well
furnished cottages in the suburbs and offered them rent free until such
time as the occupants should become well established. Her surprise was
great when they refused to move into these comparatively luxurious
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