| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 16 |
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The boy who lacks the ease, plenty, and luxury is the one with the really fine chance in life. The necessity which sends him to his tasks and keeps him at them early and late is a most friendly condition in his life, although he may think it just the reverse. Today one said of her brother, “He wants a position, but he says it must be one with short hours and light duties. He would like to go to work at nine and quit at three.” Yet that same fine young fellow’s father has been an honest, hard working brick layer for forty years, with days of ten hours or longer. It was in such toiling that this good man, now growing old, built up his worthy character and provided for his family, this boy included. The son, however, has no thought of being his father’s successor in such life. He must have easy work and short hours.
Time will tell what kind of manhood he will make for himself. It looks now as if he would be of small account in the world. He has not found his nine to three o’clock place, and at the age of thirty is hanging about the house, idle, wearing good clothes, and smoking cigarettes, while his father, at sixty, is toiling day after day at his bricklaying, finding it hard to earn enough to support his family and keep his gentleman son in easy indolence. It needs no prophet to tell the kind of man that will be evolved from such a life of self indulgence as this young man has elected.
Hardness is the only true school of good life. The father who tries to save his son from struggle and work is irreparably hurting the boy’s character and crippling him so that he cannot run the race of life nor fight its battles with any measure of success. The men, who stand up among other men, strong, wise, victorious, are the men who have been brought up in the school of hardness. They learn in the fields of active life how to live. They knit thews of strength for themselves in doing life’s tasks and bearing its burdens. They learn lessons in failures.
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