The Topeka State Journal

"We should mark on moral qualities.
not merely mental attainment or proficiency," says Elbert Hubbard in
speaking of schools, "because in the
race of life only moral qualities count."

There is one moral quality that I
sincerely wish could be taught thoroughly in our schools. I wish there
might be a course in it every year
from kindergartens to the last year of
college. and that quality is "consideration for the rights and privileges of
other people."

Show me the man or woman who
does not forget at least two or three
times a day that he lives in a world
with other men and women, and I will
show you a rarity.

And before you vote yourself into
that class, let me translate my abstract
into the concrete. and tell you a few
of the people who need a course in the
rights and privileges of others.

I suppose I scarcely need mention
one class that is exceptionally prevalent this season, and that is the woman with the hat so large as to seriously
inconvenience people about her.
Again and again this spring I have
seen people in some crowded space
forced to stand with necks agonizingly
crooked to one side so that there might
be room for the woman with the straw
cartwheel on her head.

One state in the Union has passed a
law that no woman shall wear a hat
more than five feet in circumference.
If we saw such a law in some book on
old time customs how we would laugh
at it, and yet such a law is necessary
today.

Been to the theater lately? If you
have, you have doubtless met another
type of the person painfully lacking
in an appreciation of the rights of
others, and that is the man who wriggles and crowds past half a dozen to
a dozen people at least once or twice
during the evening to get his between-the-acts smoke.

For the man who can't possibly sit
through two hours and a half without
a smoke there are just two places in
the theater, and one is the end seat
and the other is outside the door.

How do you carry your umbrella?
Close to your side or at such an angle
that anyone who doesn't give you a
respectful ten foot leeway is pretty
sure to be impaled upon it?

When you meet someone you know
on the street, do you draw up in the
middle of the sidewalk, and let everybody circle around you?

When you see something in a window that interests you, do you stop so
short that the person behind tumbles
over you, or do you remember that
you live in a world with other people
and look out for them?

When you are hot do you immediately open a window. and when you
are cold as promptly turn on the
steam without any inquiry as to the
temperature of the rest of the people
in the room or office with you?

Do your hatpins extend beyond your
hatbrim?

These are just a few suggestions, to
illustrate why very few people can
qualify as having a thorough respect
for the rights and privileges of other
people.

Perhaps I haven't touched your own
particular disrespects at all, but if I've
just given you the clue to them I'm
quite satisfied.

The satisfying quality in Lewis' Single Binder's found in no other 5c cigar.