Common Sense
Common sense is the only true promoter of mankind and yet how few of our present generation strive to obtain the knowledge.
Our boys and girls may have had their proper beginning at school, in due time successfully passed the usual graduation exercises, and some more may have received a costly course at college, yet those having been deprived of the most important instruction stand before the world as helpless as in their beginning.
To learn to work is the foundation in constructing the knowledge of common sense.
Knowing how to work and especially with those who were taught to do it with pleasure, never faltering nor complaining, simply accomplishing their daily task in a systematic manner will succeed.
A successful school or college training should only be considered as a sharpened tool to be better equipped in applying this common sense.
At home is the place where the child should be taught to do little things and as it grows older and while attending school, the importance of accomplishing bigger things should be impressed from time to time.
Every parent who neglects to teach his child to work is robbing it of its birthright.
There should be time for work and time for play, but as the former is usually out of the question, that very moment our should-be-home instructors are guilty of moral crime.
Work strengthens the body as well as the mind and a useful exercise should be the most preferable one.
If you wish to rear a good boy, teach him how to work.
If you wish your son to become an ideal young man, preach to him that the most valuable time lost, is, when he is neglecting to build up his storage of common sense.
Plod along quietly, but with determination. Promotion will surely follow.
We are none of us perfect; try to do right as nearly as you possibly can and you will profit. To neglect means disappointments.
If you wish to bring up a good girl, teach her to be useful.
If you wish to be the possessor of a model daughter, teach her the value of work; all other accomplishments should be subordinate issues, but are very commendable features if connected with common sense ideas.
Common sense should be the first principle in the make-up of a young woman, and it is only obtained while learning the rudiments and duties to manage a home; and a home of contentment is only where such a supreme being, commonly called wife, predominates.
Teach your daughters to be deserving, have them learn to appreciate, to be sincere and you will encourage a better class of young men.
Let them grow up in idleness, teach them to despise labor, let them depend upon someone for a continuously happy time, and you will cultivate the good-for-nothing young man.
Do not let them expect to marry a worthy man unless they show themselves to be worthy. The laws of nature will not permit otherwise.
Honor the man of toil. To snub him shows ignorance and bad breeding.
Neither good looks nor fortune should figure as a drawing card. Nothing but virtues embodied in the knowledge of common sense will conquer.
Virtue prevails
Where beauty fails.
Nor will riches easily won maintain comforts and satisfaction which only true merit will reward.
To be occupied encourages health and thrift; with self-denial—self-respect and happiness.
To be idle invites ills of many kinds; it breeds discontent, engenders poverty and brings misery—and as the wheels of commerce are continuously turning around, the rich becoming poor and the poor becoming rich, the importance of acquiring the knowledge of common sense should not be so woefully neglected.
Try not to accumulate wealth, but exert your talents in promoting your children to become self-reliant and you will have endowed a legacy which means more than untold fortunes to them, a consolation to the parent and a blessing to the community at large.
The poorest boys and girls in the world are those not taught to work.
October, 1897.