The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-06-22
Teach Chil- dren Courtesy And Good
 Manners
Dorothy Dir
Your Childrens Manners Are Living Advertisement Of You-Inbred Courtesy Will Unlock The
 Door Of Success For Them Later

A Mississippi womans club has started courtesy crusade" and pro- poses to devote it's time and energy to cultivating good manners in the community in which it functions. Fine. Good idea, which, it is to be hoped, other organizations of women will push along. No club could have a worthier object or perform a more important civic duty, for. whatever other virtues and charms Americans may possess, we are, as nation, lamentably lacking in the suave and gracious are of courtesy. We are a lot of rough diamonds sadly in need of polishing.
 woman's club should undertake to preach the gospel of courtesy be- cause the work is peculiarly their own province.
 Good manners, like charity, begin at home. There they must be learned if they ever become ingrained into the character of a man or woman and are not merely an outside veneer that is sure to crack under strain. The lesson of courtesy Is best in culcated at mothers knee. A child who has been drilled in the cradle in all the gentle ways of department
 
 or she grows up.
 There is bromidic old story of a Spotless Town that was kept that way by the simple eXpedient of clean. Following this classic ex- ample, every mother would simply have to teach her children to be polite in conduct, gracious in speech and considerate in bearing to bring about a millennium in which the hoodlum would cease from troubling and the brute and bully be at rest.
 It Is curious how little attention women have paid to this subject, particularly when every woman's s children are an advertisement of her and by their manners we judge her. If Johnny keeps his cap on when he enters a room and Sadie turns her back on us when We try to make conversation with her; if both chill dren handle their knives and forks as if they were pitch forks and spades; if they whoop and yell like a tribe of wild Indians through the house. we set their mother down at once as woman of no breeding or culture or social experience.
 Sometimes. we are wrong. Some times a mother is too lazy to take l the trouble to teach her children good manners. Sometimes she is one of the fond fools who think that whatever they do is right, and that the world will excuse them for eat ing with their knives and keeping their hats on in the drawing room just because she does.
 Unfortunately, howevar, the world never gives a mother the benefit of the doubt. It presupposes that un- couth children have an uncouth mother. and that the reason that they are not little ladies and gentlemen is because the mother herself had no standards of gentility.
 On the other hand, when young people have charming manners when they know what to do and say; when they show deference to older people and their table manners are beyond reproach, we know what kind of mother they have as well fas if they carried a family tree in one hand and social register in the other.
 Aside from vindicating her own character every woman should teach her children good manners, because it adds a hundred per cent to their efficiency and their chances of suc-