"When I was President I cleared decks every day, and I'm going to clear decks now." He finished dictating; then, fainting with pain, rolled on the floor, leaving the couch drenched with blood. Keep your decks clear, and take care that to-morrow is not mortgaged by the neglects of to-day. This is one of the golden rules of successful business.

Enthusiasts are often despised by people who affect a leisured calm in all things. While excess of zeal, and zeal in the wrong place, may be an irritating characteristic in a man-and even the mark of a boreapathy is a soul-destroying habit of mind. A young man without an enthusiasm of any sort develops into an amorphous and stodgy personality. Cherish your enthusiasms. Take sides, and hold your opinions passionately. Let your work absorb your mental and physical energies, and enter into your recreations with all your might. The angel of death is said to have waited upon a man, only to find that he had been dead all his life-dead to every enthusiasm. It is much better to be alive than to be dead; and our enthusiasms quicken our lives and enrich our spirits. There are some things worth dying for; there are many more things worth living for.

"B

IX

PURITY AND CHIVALRY

Y two wings," says Thomas à Kempis, "a man is lifted up from things earthly-by simplicity and purity." During the last ten years the whole question of sexual purity has been faced from a new angle. The subject is not a pleasant one; but the need for presenting the ideal of purity to the young men of our time is urgent, and to shrink from the task is an evasion of duty.

Dr. Woods Hutchinson declares his belief (in The Doctor in War) that-notwithstanding the old popular delusions to the contrary-the young are clean-minded and more decent and sensible about these matters than the middle-aged; and that once possessed of sufficient knowledge, average humanity is surprisingly sound and sensible in judgment. He expresses approval of the emphasis which army doctors placed upon two facts: (1) that sexual indulgence is not in the least necessary to health, and (2) that the greatest menace of such illicit pleasure is to the welfare of the next generation. "The dangers of the adolescent period," he declares, "have been enormously exaggerated, and the hysterical descriptions to boys and young men of the terrible temptations and fierce struggles with these instincts which they are sure to experience if they attempt to

behave decently and sensibly, do far more harm than good."

I believe myself that infinite mischief is done by leaving boys in ignorance as to their sexual nature. The instinct of sex runs like a powerful current through all nature. In the case of most animals the instinct is controlled for them by mysterious physiological laws, and man alone is left to control himself by the force of will and conscience. This sex instinct is a possession for which a young man carries a responsibility to succeeding generations. The old tradition, which happily has now passed away, that 'youth must be served," and "a young man must sow his wild oats," has, as Dr. Hutchinson says, been responsible for probably as many wrecks and misfortunes as all the hot-headed and uncontrollable impulses of youth put together.

Sexual immorality is one of the vices that are individually degrading and socially desolating. No warning is really needed by a young man against sexual promiscuity. His own conscience condemns it. He would want to shield his sister against it; and he knows that when he comes to be the father of sons, he will want his boys to have a high standard of personal purity. A young man cannot indulge his sexual propensities without injuring his most sacred possession-his own personality. Purity is the crown of real manliness, and impurity of act, speech or thought is the enemy of the noblest qualities of young manhood.

Faith in the virtue of women is the foundation of domestic happiness. That faith can only be preserved by maintaining towards all women a chivalrous

respect which forbids sexual license. In the days of chivalry purity in the young knight's relations to women was impressed upon him, at his initiation, as a religious ideal; and it was in the spirit of ancient chivalry that Lord Kitchener, in his famous message to his soldiers embarking for France, enjoined upon them the duty of being courteous to all women, but familiar with none.

No one conversant with the facts can blind his eyes to the sinister truth that the war-as all wars have in the past-has had a deteriorating effect on sex morality. The conscientious young man of to-day, desirous of taking his small part in restoring the best elements of national character, should quietly resolve that neither by speech nor act will he have any responsibility for lowering moral standards. Morality based on fear is not the soundest morality for a young man. He requires a far higher imperative than fear. Nothing, indeed, but an exalted ideal of womanhood, and the dynamic of moral conviction -at the heart of which is the religious sanctionare adequate. The purity of the family, which is the essential unit of a high civilization, should be his knightly concern; and the thought that he may in the future be the head of a family, with sons and daughters of his own, should be with him as a safeguard against laxity. The standard of womanhood is set by women themselves, and they are largely responsible if men take a low one and treat them lightly.

Reverence for his mother, affection for his sisters, and respect for all women should be cultivated by young men. Under no circumstances should a young

man trifle with the affections of a young girl. The friendship of women is a thing to be prized, not abused by flirtation or levity. Perhaps it is not quite so true of the modern girl as it was of the young women of his time, but there is still much truth in Washington Irving's observation that "a woman's whole life is a history of her affections; . . . she sends forth her affections on adventure, she embarks her whole soul in the traffic of affection, and if shipwrecked her case is hopeless-for it is a bankruptcy of the heart." Possibly the Twentieth Century girl, who has turned two of the mincing steps of her Nineteenth Century sister into one manly stride, and who boasts of a hockey limp, is beyond dying of a broken heart; but, though times have changed, a girl's affections are very sacred things, and trifling with them is wanton selfishness unworthy of a chivalrous young man.

Perhaps all I need say here on Love and Marriage is epitomized by the schoolboy who, on being given the first line of a famous couplet and asked to complete it, wrote:—

""Twere better to have loved and lost,

Than not to have loved, and won.”