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and business-like manner.

The number and variety of such transactions in which the modes of doing
business among men may be imitated with children, greatly to their
enjoyment and interest, is endless. I could cite an instance when what was
called a bank was in operation for many years among a certain number of
children, with excellent effect. One was appointed president, another
cashier, another paying-teller. There was a ledger under the charge of the
cashier, with a list of stockholders, and the number of shares held by
each, which was in proportion to the respective ages of the children. The
bank building was a little toy secretary, something in the form of a safe,
into which there mysteriously appeared, from time to time, small sums of
money; the stockholders being as ignorant of the source from which the
profits of the bank were derived as most stockholders probably are in the
case of larger and more serious institutions. Once in six months, or at
other periods, the money was counted, a dividend was declared, and the
stockholders were paid in a regular and business-like manner.

The effect of such methods as these is not only to make the years of
childhood pass more pleasantly, but also to prepare them to enter, when
the time comes, upon the serious business of life with some considerable
portion of that practical wisdom in the management of money which is often,
when it is deferred to a later period, acquired only by bitter experience
and through much suffering.

Indeed, any parent who appreciates and fully enters into the views
presented in this chapter will find, in ordinary cases, that his children
make so much progress in business capacity that he can extend the system so
as to embrace subjects of real and serious importance before the children
arrive at maturity. A boy, for instance, who has been trained in this way
will be found competent, by the time that he is ten or twelve years old,
to take the contract for furnishing himself with caps, or boots and shoes,
and, a few years later, with all his clothing, at a specified annual sum.
The sum fixed upon in the case of caps, for example, should be intermediate
between that which the caps of a boy of ordinary heedlessness would cost,
and that which would be sufficient with special care, so that both the
father and the son could make money, as it were, by the transaction. Of
course, to manage such a system successfully, so that it could afterwards
be ex