Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 March 1886 — What to Do With the Boys. [ARTICLE]

What to Do With the Boys.

We often hear the question asked" , “What is to become of our buys?” This, is indeed a serious questing for fathers and mothers to answer. It is a startling fact that far too many boys of the present day are bf unfitted to grow up, and that, too, witli the consent of their parents, without preparing themselves for the hard, rough-and-tumble fight ■that life surely has in store for them. Few Ixiys of well-to-do parents afo learning trades. Young men reach their twenties, who, if they were suddenly throwtr upon the world nnd their own resources, would be as helpless as the chihl in its teens. Why is it that so few of the boys of well-to-do patents are learning trades ? Is it because it is no longer considered honorable for a boy to learn a trade? Again, it used to be that young boys would go to work for $2 and $3 a week, at some trade, counting that, in addition to his small wages, the knowledge he ucquireil was worth much more than the yearly salary he received- Now it is hard work to get a young boy to work for less than $0 to $lO per week, his parents often upholding him in the demand, seemingly preferring that he do nothing unless he can get the wages demanded. Many young men are struggling today with the meager salary of clerks, or eking out a miserable existence in some of the over-crowded professions, who would be a tl'.o isand times lietter off had they put,their pride to the rear and learned some one of the useful trades. Money expended to educate a boy, if the education is going to fill his head with the idea that it is not honorable for an educated man to work, is money poorly expended. Education should l>e just as honorable in its shirt-sleeves, working at some one of the useful trades, as it is in a shabby-genteel Prince Albert coat loafing about a lawyer’s office. And it would be if it wasn’t for the tyrant called “Society.” Can any sensible father or mother tell ns why the boy who is clerk in the postoffice or a clerk in a dry goods store, measuring tape-and -selling- -embroidery and corsets, should be admitted to the drawing-rooms of society, while the door is shut in the face of the brother—son of the same father and mother—who is at work in the machineshop, the carpenter-shop, or on the locomotive? People say this is not done.; but it is done, and every day, in this city and every other city and town in the country. Is this the reason that more young men are not learning trades? Is your daughter less safe in keeping company with an honest young man who wears a check shirt at his honest toil all day than she would be with the young man who does nothing and who decks himself out with celluloid shirt fronts and cuffs of the seme material? 1 We often read of men who have grown suddenly rich by some lucky turn of the wheel of fortune, who disown their sons because of their marriage with some honest but poor girl, whose parents are in every respect, except wealth, the equal of the parents of the young man. Tins vulgarity such as only a wealthy vulgarian can assume, and such only as Jhe iytynt Society seems demand. Wealth is no crime, neither is it a virtue. The fatfierpr mother who makes it a test of respectability in choosing ; husbands and wives for their children are fathers and mothers scarcely worthy the name. Some writer, in giving advice to young men, put it in the following words: “Be and continue poor,, young man, while others around yon grow rich by fraud and disloyalty; be without place or power while others buy their way upward; bear the pain of disappointed hopes while, others gain the accomplismnent of theirs by flattery; forego tire gracious pressure of the hand for others cringe and crawl; wrap yourself in your own virtue, and seek a friend and your daily bread. If you have in such a course grown gray with unblenfished honor, bless God and die.”— Chicago Mail.