These are formed in the home, by the father and
mother,--by brothers, sisters, and companions. It does not matter how
complete may be the education given in schools. It may include the whole
range of knowledge: yet if the scholar is under the necessity of daily
returning to a home which is indecent, vicious, and miserable, all this
learning will prove of comparatively little value. Character and
disposition are the result of home training; and if these are, through
bad physical and moral conditions, deteriorated and destroyed, the
intellectual culture acquired in the school may prove an instrumentality
for evil rather than for good.
The home should not be considered merely as an eating and sleeping
place; but as a place where self-respect may be preserved, and comfort
secured, and domestic pleasures enjoyed. Three-fourths of the petty
vices which degrade society, and swell into crimes which disgrace it,
would shrink before the influence of self-respect. To be a place of
happiness, exercising beneficial influences upon its members,--and
especially upon the children growing up within it,--the home must be
pervaded by the spirit of comfort, cleanliness, affection, and
intelligence. And in order to secure this, the presence of a
well-ordered, industrious, and educated woman is indispensable.
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