A Letter to the Children.
YOUNG FRIENDS: There is a right way and a wrong way through life. You are more easily influenced for good or evil than grown people, and the course you now take may lead you to honor, usefulness, and long life, or to infamy, misery, and an early death. It is of the utmost importance to yourselves, your friends, and society, that you be directed to take the true way, and form such habits as will keep you in this way, and make you loathe any other. A dying mother once asked her little son to promise her three things: Never to swear, never to drink liquor, never to use tobacco. He promised, and remembered his promise, and kept it, and this led him in the right way, and made an earnest and useful man of him, to a good old age. Swearing, liquor, and tobacco, lead to the wrong way, and each and every one of you should shun these things, and try to influence your companions to shun them. These are social evils, which afflict our land, and crowd our prisons with criminals, our asylums with lunatics, and our county-houses with paupers. The poor drunkard whom you have seen staggering in the street, uttering profane or indecent language, was once a little boy like some of you, who then might have been directed, by proper influences and exertion, to take a better course. But when he drank the first glass of liquor, took the first oath, or the first morsel of tobacco, he did a ruinous thing. But he did not see it then,—he had no idea of becoming a drunkard! Dear boys, have moral courage to resist every evil temptation to which any misguided person would lead you. Moral courage is far better than physical, for it leads one to do right, if all around them are doing wrong. This is the courage most needed everywhere, to secure better health, and better morals, in individuals and societies.—Rural New Yorker.