FIFTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VI. 601 



literature is cheap. Invest a few dollars in some musical instrument if you 

 can afford it, and enjoy it with the children. Invite in the friends of your 

 boys and girls. Make them feel you are interested in them. Study not 

 simply how to amuse them but how to create in them a wholesome liking for 

 innocent fun and jolly times. Don't grow too old for a hearty laugh. It will 

 add years to your life to be a boy or a girl again occasionally. 



We are sometimes so absorbed in the capture of the America eagle on the 

 United States dollar that we have no consideration for that which brings in 

 no remuneration capable of being counted in hard cash. We forget that 

 there are things in this old world of ours that can not be bought and sold, 

 and that one of these is the appreciation of the beautiful. To quote 

 Browning: 



' 'If you get simple beauty and nothing else, 

 You get about the best thing God invents. " 



Can we afford to shut our eyes to the "best thing" and wonder why 

 the children do not like home? Encourage the beautifying of the door yard. 

 Let the girls have flowers and vines and shrubs. See that the trees are 

 trimmed and placed where they show to the best advantage. Have the 

 lawn mowed and kept neat. In a word if you can't realize your ideal, at 

 least, idealize the real and cultivate this sense of the beautiful because it 

 brings in such an abundant harvest of enjoyment. 



For the young man or woman who wish to go to the city where they 

 expect to do a little and get much, let us by every means try to disabuse 

 them of this false idea. Show them how strenuous— if you pardon the use 

 of a much overworked word— the city life really is, how it wears up the 

 strength and vitality of one who engages in business. Take them behind 

 the scenes, as it were, arid let them face conditions as they really are. If 

 they can once see that beneath all the rush and bustle, the glitter and shine 

 of city life, there are aching hearts and weary hands, vain regrets and 

 unsatisfied ambitions, -they may realize that getting away from the old farm 

 is not a panacea for all ills. Everything of value has a price, and, if we get 

 something for nothing, be sure that something will turn to apples of Sodom 

 in our hands. 



As I have already intimated, the public school system has failed to some 

 extent to meet the obligations laid upon it. So long as there are no town- 

 ship high schools and consolidated district schools, we can expect the ambi- 

 tious people to go to the towns. They must do this often to compete success- 

 fully with the town bred boy or girl in any line of business. ^ Combine the 

 country environment with the well trained teaching force and the close classi- 

 fication of the town, and you have every chance to produce the highest 

 type of manhood and womanhood the American people have yet known. 

 This has been urged again and again by men and women grown gray in the 

 school service of our country, but the time seems not ripe yet for the people 

 to act. Let us hope it will be soon. 



Perhaps it may bs entirely wrong, but it seems to me that an educational 

 system which leaches that the man with an idea is the master of the man 

 with the physical power to put into effect that idea, which tends to separate 

 one set of workers from another set, which tends to create classes and masses, 

 and which puts head-culture before heart and hand-culture is largely 

 responsible for the false idea prevalent concerning work and the real worth 



