“And the man that hires the others to build him a house is helping his town by increasing the amount of property in it. He helps the bank by borrowing money, maybe. He pays taxes to help run the country. He has provided labor for a lot of men—and he, in his turn has had to work somewhere to get the money to build the house. So all of it comes back to work. You can’t work a second without helping the whole world a little.”
“I’ll be dog-goned!” says Catty.
“And that’s why work is respectable—because you can’t do a stroke of work without benefiting everybody in the country and maybe in the whole world. Just so, the fellow who never works is looked down on because he isn’t helping anybody, but is really a detriment, because he is getting food that somebody else has to work to produce, and doesn’t do his share to pay for it. See?”
“Yes. But manners, how about manners?”
“Manners,” says Dad, “are just to make life more pleasant for everybody—like music or pictures or scenery. When the world was made it could have been fixed so it would have been just as useful without ever being beautiful at all. The coal and iron could have been piled on top and not hidden under the ground. There needn’t have been valleys and hills, but just an ugly flat. The Lord could have made it that way if He wanted to, most likely, but He didn’t want to. He wanted folks to love the earth and He made it beautiful so they would enjoy living on it. Now, manners are like that. You can get along without them. But the more of the right kind of manners you have the more people enjoy being with you. Manners, when you get right down to brass tacks, are nothing but actions agreed upon by people with good sense to make it easier and more pleasant to get along with one another.”
“Um!” says Catty, kind of thoughtful. “I git the idee. Never thought of that. Guess I’ll git me a set of manners.”
“But you can work and have manners and clothes—good clothes are merely the best way to be clean—and still not be respectable. Respectable means worthy of being respected, and to be that you have to act in just one way. It only takes a few words to tell you what that is; it is always to give the other fellow a fair deal. Just be fair, that’s all. If you’re always fair you can’t help being respected.”
“Uh-huh!” says Catty. “Much ’bleeged to you, Mr. Moore. Guess I’ll be moseyin’ along. Got a lot of things to do.”
“Catty’s took a contract to paint Mr. Manning’s new warehouse,” says I, “and all he’s got to do is convince his Dad to go to work and then get the ladders and brushes and paints to do the job.”
Dad looked at Catty a second or so before he said anything, and then he says, “Want any help?”