THE USES OF HARDSHIP.
Did you chance, my friends, any of you, to see, the other day, the 83rd number of the Graphic, with the picture of the Queen's concert in it? All the fine ladies sitting so trimly, and looking so sweet, and doing the whole duty of woman—wearing their fine clothes gracefully; and the pretty singer, white-throated, warbling "Home sweet home" to them, so morally, and melodiously! Here was yet to be our ideal of virtuous life, thought the Graphic! Surely we are safe back with our virtues in satin slippers and lace veils—and our Kingdom of Heaven is come with observation!
Ruskin
Ruskin has said that the children of the rich often get the worst education to be had for money, whereas the children of the poor often get the best education for nothing. And the poor man's school is hardship.
It is generally admitted that wealthy American parents are too indulgent towards their children. However this may be, many an American father is determined that his sons shall not go through what he himself went through as a boy, forgetting that the hardships of his youth were largely the hardships of pioneer life which have vanished forever. No boy with good stuff in him and with a fair education unmixed with extravagant habits of living can possibly have more hardship nowadays than is good for him. Every young man must sooner or later stand by himself; and hardship, which in its essence is to be thrown on one's own resources, is the best school.
But the most alluring school of hardship, a sort of Summer School of the University of Hard Knocks, is a walking trip into the mountains to the regions of summer snow, carrying one's whole outfit on one's back as did the Kansas boys of '89, or indulging in the ownership of a pack-pony and a miner's tent as did D. and the writer in '95. The hardships of such a trip are of the old old type, the facing of all kinds of weather and the hunting for food, and they waken a thousand-fold deeper response than the most serious hunt for a job in a modern city.