on to gambling in
after years.

And here I would say that the absolute absence of any training given to
a boy in the right use and value of money, which has obtained till
lately in our English schools, is surely suicidal and must lend itself
to every form of abuse. I do not know whether it is the same with you,
but many of our boys know money only in the form of pocket-money, when
it becomes to him a metal token mostly signifying so much "tuck";
becoming, as he grows older, more and more deleterious "tuck" in the
shape of billiards, betting, etc., and ending in a general going "on
tick," which is worse still. But in this matter we are improving. I
think most sensible parents nowadays place a small sum at their bank to
the boy's account, with a check-book, making him responsible at first
for small articles of clothing, neckties, shirt-collars, etc, and as
soon as he shows himself trustworthy, for all his expenses except
school bills. The boy is expected to keep accounts, get nothing without
first asking the price, and to bring his receipted bills at the end of
the term to his father, and see that they tally with his foils; and,
above all, always to pay in ready money--unpaid bills being contemplated
in the bald light of shop-lifting. To this I would add, if possible, the
habit of giving the Jewish tenth, so as to make giving a steady
principle, and not a hap-hazard impulse.

Thirdly, it is a vital point to give your boys interesting pursuits.
There is great force in the rough old saying, "Never give the devil an
empty chair to sit down upon, and you won't be much troubled with his
company." Vice is constantly only idleness which has turned
bad,--idleness being emphatically a thing that will not keep, but turns
rotten. It is not the great industrial centres of our population that
are chiefly ravaged by vice; it is the fashionable watering-places, the
fashionable quarters of large towns, where idle men congregate, in which
it is a "pestilence that walketh in darkness," and slays its thousands
of young girls. "Empty by filling," has always been a favorite motto of
mine. How many a young man has been driven to betting, drinking, and the
race-course from the want of something of interest to fill his
unoccupied hours, because more wholesome tastes have never been
developed in him! Of course, tastes must be to a certain degree inborn,
but I am quite sure that many a taste perishes, like a frost-bitten bud,
full of the promis