ion should result in giving us very many
more good habits than bad habits. This happy conclusion is based on
the supposition that while many of us are so constituted that it is
possible we might, in some unguarded moment, do a wrong act, it is
unlikely we could repeat the error so often and so long as to make the
questionable action become a fixed habit.

The doing of a wrong thing should result in convincing us, on sober
second thought, that it was a mistake on our part to have permitted
ourselves to have been led into uncertain, unhappy paths and we would
then and there reinforce our moral strength and our determination that
the wrong should not occur again.

In doing right things, the conditions are quite reversed. Every good
deed inspires us to still greater determination to do more of the same
kind. Wrong deeds are, in most cases, committed in a moment of
thoughtlessness when one's conscience, one's higher and better self,
is momentarily off guard. Our good acts are performed with a full and
proud realization of what we are doing and are followed by a grateful
sense of retrospective pleasure, after they have been done.

"Could the young," says Henry James, "but realize how soon they will
become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to
their conduct while in the plastic state. Nothing we ever do is, in
strict scientific literateness, wiped out." One of our latter day
philosophers tells us that "happiness is a matter of habit; and you
had better gather it fresh every day or you will never get it at all."

In speaking of the success he had achieved in life, Charles Dickens
said: "I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have
worked much harder and not succeeded half so well; but I never could
have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order,
and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one
object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon
its heels."

When we come to study carefully the full meaning of the word "habit"
we find it to be a very comprehensive term. In the sense in which it
is here employed the dictionary defines it as being "a tendency or
inclination toward an action or condition, which by repetition has
become easy, spontaneous or even

unconscious." From this definition it is easy to deduce the conclusion
that one's habits are in fact one's manners, one's principles, one's
mode of conduct; and a care