Talk With Boys and Girls. 



YOUNG FRIENDS : Did } - ou ever stop to think that twenty-five years from now 

 America will be just what you are? To put the matter in a declarative form, you who 

 will then be alive will be America as the ivorld will read it. What will you be? If you 

 do not know let me tell you: You will be just what your thoughts have made you. What 

 books do you read? Every word you hear and every word you read is the picture of a 

 thought. Your mind is a camera, your eye is a lense, your brain is a. sensitive plate 

 which receives the image of the object for which the word stands; hence, just whatever 

 shall be the nature of your reading matter and the company you keep, these will deter- 

 mine the thoughts that are kept before your mind; and your outward, visible self will be 

 onlv an expression of your real self, your thoughts. This is an age of fiction, and I 

 know of nothing particularly wrong in a fictitious work when read for the purpose of 

 relieving the mind from heavy, laborious tasks; but if you make fiction your food, you 

 will become & fictitious excuse for a representative of manhood or womanhood. It has 

 gotten so now that many young people (and some older ones) cannot read any facts 

 unless they are woven in with, a "love story." 



Take a look at photo 164. See how these two young people are absorbed in reading 

 a love affair! Nothing bad about it, but, mark you, they are not practical; they are not 

 observing the realities by which they are surrounded and that are overhanging them! 

 They don't seem to be conscious of the presence of that little rascal, the small brother, 

 who is ready with his fishing-pole to start the hornets from the nest hanging nearly over 

 them! How that vision of Utopian bliss will vanish and what a scattering there will be 

 when that nest is disturbed! Don't hug your best girl and read love stories under a hor- 

 net's-nest. 



In photo 165 you have a practical boy; it is Paul H. Davey, seven years old. He and 

 his brother Ira have been taking care of one thousand young elm trees, started the first 

 year of the new century. These trees are to be presented to the citizens of Cleveland 

 (see pages 50 to 56, inclusive). 



How many of you young people have made a study of plant life? Have you ever 

 thought that life, itself, is the greatest miracle known? Yet some avow that there is no 

 such thing as a miracle. Who can explain the life force of a blade of grass? No one. 

 The life of the human, the life of the animal and the life of the tree are all governed by 

 similar laws. We live at an epoch when there is a veritable hobby, bordering on a craze, 

 about reforming. There is a lack of real, sound thought in our social and religious 

 systems. A boy goes astray and plunges into the depths of vice. When he gets so far 

 that he detests himself and is loathsome to decent people, occasionally one will reform, 

 make a hero of himself by telling what a demon he has been, and good people lionize 

 him ; indeed, sometimes, almost make a demigod of him. We should encourage anyone 

 to do better, but to make heroes of those who have been cursing the world with their 

 vices is not salutary. The formation of character is what we should encoiirage, and in 

 that every boy and girl should strive to be perfect. In photos 32 and 33 you have trees that 

 have been rightly formed, while photo 87 shows you a specimen that is deformed and, in 

 96, is a tree that has been started on a process of reforming. It is better to reform than 

 to go on to destruction; but how deplorable even to think of the result of bad influences 

 that grow out of evil that has been committed! And think of a character tarnished with 

 vice and wounded with crime! Young people, think of this : a wrong that is done never 

 can be undone. What a distressing and deplorable sight are the wounds on the trees on 

 the first dozen pages of this work! How infinitely more hideous will be the wounds on 

 your moral character if you allow them to be placed there. How inexcusable the folly 

 of wasting a life in vice when there is no end to the good that might charm our lives and 

 fill us with joy unspeakable! 



Nothing fills one with greater delight nor is more elevating than the study of nature. 



86 



