named. All of them
were newspapers. One was a general daily, two were local dailies, and
the rest were local weekly papers. No intelligent person would have
carried over three of those papers from the post-office. This man spent
hours upon a class of reading that should be finished with a few minutes
each day. In this same family the mother told me that she had never
rode on a railway train, and that she had never been outside of her
own county. This is an exceptional case, but it illustrates how that
ignorance makes thrift and happiness impossible in a home, neither
of which belong to this family. Here every law of health is violated,
foresight in providing for the physical comforts of the home is
wanting; little attention is given to the education of the children;
no sacrifices to-day enrich to-morrow; life is a humdrum, a routine, a
dread, with no exuberance, joy, or hope. In time, such a life leads
to failure and gloom, to secret, then to open vice, and to a final
shipwreck of the home and of the individual. In a similar yet in a less
marked way, the career of many a home is ended. No one may be directly
to blame, but want of common knowledge and common wit have set a limit
beyond which such a family may not go. The intelligent family has some
sort of a history which it is their privilege and duty to perpetuate.
Members of the intelligent family are moral sponsors for one another,
the mother for the daughters, the father for the sons, the brothers
and sisters for one another. They find their own best interests in the
interests of one another. The intelligent family is not superstitious.
They act upon the wisdom of the ancient poet, "every one is the
architect of his own fortune." They look to cause and condition for
results. They spell "luck" with a "p" before it. The intelligent farmer
plants his crop in the ground, rather than in the moon, and looks for
his harvest to the seed and the toil. The intelligent merchant locates
his business on the street of largest travel and makes the buying of his
goods his best salesman. The intelligent man of letters thrives at first
by making friends of poverty and want, until one day his genius places
his name in the temple of honor. So it is with the artist, the musician,
the inventor, the architect. To be happy and useful in one's lot, one
must know something of the sphere in which he lives and works, of its
practical wisdom, and must be prepared to live, or glad to die for the