68 The Laws of Nature as Applied to the Affairs of Life. 
Perhaps the labor trouble is another forming cloud. If so, it becomes this 
people to see that history does not repeat itself, as surely it will if we do vio- 
lence to the right relation between capital and labor. Three times the writer 
has seen a commercial thunderbolt fall upon the manufacturers of America, 
arising from absurd tariff laws. The railroads are now getting the lightning 
which they themselves manufactured by their pooling system, which is a pal- 
pable violation of trade laws. Some of the manufacturers of our own city are 
going through the same process of purification. The sad feature of these 
thunderbolts is, that they pound away at you until you have paid .back the 
last farthing, and then add penalties for violating the law. Until we learn 
that the principle of uniformity is universal, and applies to every act of man, 
as well as to the forces of nature, we shall ever be getting thunderbolts, and 
ever saying, ‘‘ History repeats itself.’ If our home teaching, school teaching 
and pulpit teaching would grind these truths into the boys and girls, until it 
became part of their constitution, so that when they became men and women 
their acts would flow from them without effort, then many of the errors of our 
day, and of generations before us, would .disappear, and the evils of history 
would not so often repeat themselves. : 
Prof. Huxley says: ‘‘Education is the instruction of the intellect in the 
laws of nature, under which name I include, not merely things and their 
forces, but men and their ways, and the fashionings of the affections and of 
the will, into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those 
laws. For me,” he says, “education means neither more nor less than this. 
Anything whieh professes to call itself education must be tried by this stand- 
ard, and if it fail to stand the test, I will not call it education, whatever may 
be the force of authority, or of numbers, on the other side.”’ 
Parents and teachers would do well to remember these words. I fear our 
public school system would be sadly deficient if tried by this standard. 
The teaching of some of these laws to the young does not seem to me to be 
so very difficult. Let us try one of them, and a very important one, I think 
it will be granted by all parents. How can we teach our sons so they will not 
become addicted to one of the worst of vices, that of gambling? Certainly 
not by good advice, and not by telling them it is wicked, for they rather enjoy 
that; and then they do not have to go far from church fairs to convince them 
that it cannot be so very wicked. 
Has science anything better to offer? It seems to me it has. Teach your 
boy by actual experiment that he cannot, in the long run, by any possibility 
win. Take a true dice and let him calculate how many sixes he ought to have 
in ninety-six throws (a larger number would be better), provided all the num- 
bers came up an equal number of times. Now let him shake the box and keep 
tally. @Let him try again and again, and he, and perhaps you will be sur- 
prised at the results. His first lesson is now learned, and the answer is, there 
is no such thing as luck. Now tell him that‘all gambling games have a per- 
centage in favor of the man who runs the game —never less than ten and as 
high as forty per cent. Then take a hundred coffee beans and call them dol- 
lars (silver or nickels would be better), and arrange the game with ten or even 
five per cent. advantage in your favor. Give him the money, and tell him if 
he will play against you one hour every night for a week he shall have all he 
can win. Lend him money whenever he gets broke. At the end of a week 
settle with him, and his second lesson is learned, and the answer is indelibly 
fixed in his mind that he cannot by any possibility gain money in this way. 
Then add your moral and religious teaching and your boy is saved from that 
vice, if he is worth saving. When he is grown and becomes a clerk in a bro- 
ker’s office, or a grain commission house, you will wish to keep him from 
gambling in. stocks or speculating in wheat or corn in the bucket shops 
or on change, and he now needs another scientific lesson. Take a hundred ~ 
