THE LAWS OF HABIT. 447 



walks of life from being desei'ted by those brought up to tread therein. 

 It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter ; 

 it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log- 

 cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow ; it protects 

 us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It 

 dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nur- 

 ture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disa- 

 grees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too 

 late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. 

 Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism 

 settling down on the young commercial traveler, on the young doctor, 

 on the young minister, on the young counselor-at-law. You see the 

 little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of 

 thought, the prejudices, the ways of the " shop " in a word, from 

 which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can 

 suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he 

 should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by 

 the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never 

 soften again. 



If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical one in the 

 formation of intellectual and professional habits, the period below 

 twenty is more important still for the fixing of personal habits, prop- 

 erly so called, such as vocalization and pronunciation, gesture, motion, 

 and address. Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken 

 without a foreign accent ; hardly ever can a youth transferred to the 

 society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech 

 bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, 

 indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he even 

 learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares 

 as eagerly to him as to the veriest "swell," but he simply can't buy 

 the right things. An invisible law, as strong as gravitation, keeps 

 him within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was the last ; and how 

 his aristocratic acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear, 

 will be for him a mystery till his dying day. 



The great thing, then, in all education, is to make automatic and 

 habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as ice can, and to 

 guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvan- 

 tageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of 

 the details of our daily life. we can hand over to the infallible and 

 effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind 

 will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miser- 

 able human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but inde- 

 cision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every 

 cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning 

 of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. 

 Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, 



