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Show WITH THE HIGH SCHOOL CLASSICS By MARGARET BOYD "... the King Will bind thee by such vows as Is a shame, A man should not be bound by, yet the which No man can keep." Idylls of the King. In view of the seer's statement that no man could keep the half dozes vows that Arthur required of his knights, It Is Interesting to consider Benjamin Franklin's experiment In perfection. Franklin tells us that when he was a young man. he "concelv'd the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection." He listed thirteen virtues "all that at that time oecurr'd to me as necessary or desirable." The thirteen were: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, Justice, moderation, cleanll-ness, cleanll-ness, tranquillity, chastity and humility humil-ity a longer list than Arthur required of his knights and a more difficult. Franklin felt he could not hope for success In his project unless be could make each of these virtues a habit. He knew he could not form so many habits at once, so he devoted a week at a time to each virtue. The first week he tried to make temperance a habit; the second week silence; and so on through the list. When he had finished his thirteen weeks, he started In again with temperance, thus going through his course four times a year. In time he felt it necessary to go through the course but once a year, later but once in several years, and finally not at all. He made himself a little book of thirteen pages, allotting one page to each virtue. He ruled each page with a column for each day of the week and a line for each virtue of the list. Each night he reviewed his life of the day, and marked a black spot In his book for each offense of the day, Franklin says he acquired the vlr- tues In an imperfect state, having had especial trouble with order and humility. humil-ity. He, however, attributes all his success In life to the measure of virtue vir-tue he did acquire through this experiment, experi-ment, together with the blessing of Ood. Franklin planned to embody his own experience in a sort of textbook of life, to be called "The Art of Virtue," a book that "would have shown the means and manner of obtaining virtue, vir-tue, which, would have distinguished it from the mere exhortation to be good, that does not Instruct and Indicate the means"; but private and public business busi-ness kept him so busy he never got his book written. "It's what I think to myself sometimes, some-times, as there need nobody run short o' victuals if the land was made the most on, and there was never a morsel mor-sel but what could find its way to a mouth." Silas Marntr. When political reformers and political polit-ical economists speak of this subject, they use the terms "production" and "distribution." One faction says no one would need go hungry If all the land were made the most of. They say the reason some people never get enough to eat Is because there Isn't enough food In the world to go around that Is, they say the fault is with production. These people believe that there should be so heavy a tax on land that no one could afford to own any waste land. They believe that If taxes were assessed according to the number of acres a man owns Instead of according to the assessed value of the land he owns that no man could afford to own more land that he could farm Intensively. They believe that the present owners of large farms and ranches would have to sell their land to men who would farm It as Intensively Intensive-ly as th European peasant farms his little plot. These people believe that when all the land In the country Is properly cultivated everybody will have enough to eat. They forget the natural law recorded by Solomon centuries ago, "When goods Increase, thev are Incrensed that eat them " The other faction says the fault Is with distribution. They say there Is plenty of food in the world If we could Just get It to those that need It. We can appreciate this phase of the problem when we go Into any average kitchen. The common statement Is that the American family throws Into the garbage can enough to feed the Fniropenn family. Certainly the scraps of bread thrown away, the gravy and sauce left sticking to the sides of the kettles and pans, the peelings so thick as to waste the vegetable or fruit, the butter container with butter sticking stick-ing to It, the hones filled with mnr-row, mnr-row, and the scraps of fat meat thrown away are nil wastes of food. On every farm there are windfalls, fruit that the farmer cannot sell. In the fields are potatoes too small to gather; heads of cabbage too small to market or to store for winter use; tomatoes to-matoes that would spoil before they could be sold; and the like. If we could stop all waste In kitchen and store and field, the food saved would certainly go fur towards feeding all those who now go hungry. |