Responsibility lies at home.  We shall never have an honest generation until we have honest men and women to breed and train it.  It is folly to think we can lay on the public schools the burden of the moral education of the young.  Much is already being attempted there; yet little seems to be accomplished because the home, having the child before and after school and for a longer period each day, furnishes no adequate basis in habits, ideals, and instruction for the moral work of the school.  If parents assume that one cannot succeed with absolute integrity, that dishonesty in some degree is necessary to prosperity, then children will learn that lesson despite all that may be said elsewhere.  Honest children grow where, in answer to the false statement, “You will starve if you do business honestly,” parents say, “Then we will starve.”

But the very home life itself can be a teacher of dishonesty.  Is it largely a matter of sham and pretense for the sake of social glory?  Does it prefer a cheap veneer to a slowly acquired genuine article?  Is the front appearance that of a dandy while the backyard looks like a slattern?  Is the home striving for more than it deserves?  Is it trying to get more out of life than it puts in?  Evading taxes, avoiding duties, a community parasite, does it commend to children the arts of social cheating and lying?  Such homes teach so loudly that no voice could be heard in them.

Given the atmosphere, ideals, and practices of the honest life in the home itself, the problems of conduct, in the realm of these rights, are more than half solved.  Here in the home the real training for the life of business takes place.  Not for an instant can we afford to lower standards here, nor to lose sight of the life-long power of our ideals, our habits, and our attitudes on the conduct of the next generation.  Do parents know that the problems of lying, cheating, quarreling are the great, vital questions for their children, much more important than industrial or professional success in life; that on these all success is predicated?  If they do, surely they cannot regard the problems which arise as mere incidents; surely they will provide for the culture of the moral life as definitely as for the culture of the physical or the intellectual!

Sec. 2.  LESSONS IN HONESTY

But children also acquire habits from their playmates.  Whenever the act of pilfering appears, the wrong must be made clear.  Some sense of property rights is necessary; not the right, as some assume, to do what you will with a thing because you have it, but the right to enjoy and usefully employ it.  Help children to see the difference between mine and thine.  Slovenly moral thinking often comes from too great freedom in forgetful borrowing within the family.  In this little social group the members must first acquire the habits of respect for the rights of others.  Through toys, tools, and books the lesson may be learned so early that it becomes a part of the normal order of things.