Salt Lake evening Democrat. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1885-1887, 1885-05-08
THREE THINGS.

"There are three things" said John
Lilv. (Which cause perfection in man.
Nature. Reason, Use. Reason l call DIS
cipline: Use, Exercise. If any OF these
branches want, certainly the Tree OF Nlr-
tue must needs wither." If this be true,
then that which is inconsistent with II
must help to kill the Tree of Virtue, and
the parent or the guardian who allows
his child or ward to 60 to places where
these three things are not, wrongs the
child and harms the State, for In the eX-
cellence of her citizens is her STABILITY
and worth. The State should embody
forth the ideas of all her citizens, and
that which engenders false and
pernicious ideas should not be,
and each citizen should take upon HIM
self the task of crushing out ideas of
error, not by brutal force, but by the pro
pagation of ideas of better worth. 1t IS
in youth, early, plastic youth, that the
mind is moulded, and in its virgin soil
are sown the seeds of vice or virtue. In
the home will we find the nature OF which
Lily speaks, and there are to be found
those finer, subtler influences which
course through the veins OF our whole eX-
lstence. They show forth in strong man
hood, and they and the regrets OF the life
that is gone, never to return, are the
things which are ever present in old age
Old age is the sum of our existence, and
the influences OF our early life are its
chief factors. "For Nature without
Discipline is of small force, and Dis
cipline without Nature more feeble"
Reason and Discipline, then, are one, and
they point the object to be attained,
which is individual excellence. No
matter how great the endowments of
Nature, without reason and discipline
they become of no avail; and that which
with careful cultivation and tender sOlici-
tude would be a thing of beauty and
a JOY forever, grows into a wild weed,
whose seeds are sown by the wandering
winds. Discipline determines what the
method shall be for attaining the object
which is wanted There is no excellence
without labor, and no labor without dis
cipline.
But how different from this is the
course of many parents of this town, and
very many of our youths are upon our
streets, and lounge on corners where
every word they hear uttered is profane,
whose sole tendency is to make of the
boys men as degenerate as those to whom
they listen. The city should pass ordi
nances forbidding the congregation of
drunken loafers upon the street corners,
Or anywhere else for that matter, and
clear the streets of these social pests.
There is another thing to which the city
should turn its attention, and that is the
pool rooms where boys are allowed to play
and make of themselves idlers. Their
influence is bad in the extreme, whether
liquors are. sold at these places
or not, and the license ordinances
should be SO amended as to forbid
those who keep pool rooms admitting
youths into them, whether they enter as
spectators or as players. 1t is sheer non
sense to say that these places do not have
a harmful influence upon boys and
youths, and if parents have not sufficient
influence to restrain their children from
visiting such places, the city should make
it an impossibility for those children to
visit such places. Certainly, those who
keep these places will object to such ordi-
nances and call them an outrage, but let
them call them what they choose and
fight the ordinances in the courts, yet the
city should not heed them until the high
est court has said that such ordinances
ire wrong. The same provisions should
be made applicable to saloons also. These
are three things which our city should do,
md do Immediately.