And in her desperate circumstances, it was far more necessary that he should.
But in well-to-do households, where there is not much work that a child can do, especially in the city, how can he be trained up in habits of industry?
This is a problem which, as we have said, confronts thousands of conscientious mothers, who believe profoundly in Mrs. Browning's pregnant lines:
"Get work! Get work! Be sure
That it is better than anything you work to get."
Country children can gather the eggs, cut feed for the animals, often have a pet lamb, chickens, heifers or colts of their own to care for. There is little difficulty in finding "chores" for them to do. But the city boy and girl are not so fortunately situated.
All that can be done for them is to devise errands, and to place upon them as much responsibility for small duties about the house, as you think they can bear. They should spend as much time as possible in the open air, playing in their own yard or, under close watch, in the street,—the playground of most city children.
Every means that can be thought of should be used to make them despise the idea of idleness, and to love work.
A distinguished professor in one of our great universities taught his classes that work was one of the cardinal evils, and that a prime endeavor of life should be to get along with as little work as possible.
A mother of one of his pupils, who had brought her son up to believe that work was noble and honorable, and that it ranked with the four gospels as a means of salvation from sin, has never forgiven that professor. He overturned in the mind of her son the ideal of the glory of work, which she had so painstakingly erected there, and it has never been fully re-established. No such man as that teacher should ever be given a position upon a college faculty.
When one reads of the childhood of the vast majority of our distinguished men it seems chimerical to hope that children brought up in comfort, with plenty to eat and to wear, should ever attain to high positions. Most of our great men appear to have struggled through seas of adversity, in order to get an education and a foothold in the world of literature or art or politics or finance. We recognize that it was the self-reliance and the capacity for hard work thus developed, which brought them success. We know that it is a truism that poverty is the mother of muscle and of invention. Many wealthy parents have tried to supply this great motive by depriving their children of luxuries, and making them work their way through college, or "begin at the bottom" of some business. This has sometimes, but not often, resulted well; for, after all, artificial poverty is only a blind, and the child has ever the underlying consciousness that it is, and that there is no real need that he should much exert himself.