Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1870 [PAGE 411]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

39T

uries, profligate expenditures, a looseness of morals which have ever been the bane of wealthy, aristocratic life, we shall not gain by the change. The unhealthy condition surrounding the people of our cities and populous towns, with their improper habits, intemperance and profligacy, would in time exterminate them if they did not receive fresh accessions of healthy population from the country—and the country population are too prone to imitate their city cousins. Fashions, imhealthful, inconvenient and expensive, made purposely to show that the wearer cannot labor, and designed to make labor disreputable, are almost as prevalent in the country as the city. But fashion is inexorable, and few can resist the tyrant. I would that a yearly congress was held at Washington to agree upon fashion for the year; such as are simple, healthful, economical and adapted to plain republican institutions, and then cut loose from those derived from the courtezans of Paris—the offshoots of monarchy, unsuited to our condition and a disgrace and shame to our people. There is a strong tendency with our young men to float off to the city, lured by a fancied gentility in which they can participate, and which they fear will not be found at home. This is a great mistake. Nine-tenths of them fair in business, become intemperate or fall victims to other vices. " Man made the town, God made the country.'' Yet there are errors in our system of education, religious teaching and social customs, that tend to produce this result. Our country customs embrace too few literary exercises, and social recreations: too little amusements. The religious world have generally made a very grave mistake in forbidding all exhilarating amusement; the youthful nature craves it as certainly as their food, and it is almost as necessary, and under equal restraint is no more sinful. Such prohibition drives the ardent youth to the town for that excitement denied at home; there he frequently meets and yields to temptations which prove his ruin and those who denied him pleasant, rational amusement at home are responsible for the result. Make home pleasant and you soon will be attached to home. The lyceums, the social meetings, where the old and young meet together, mutually chastening and enlivening each other, are among the needed institutions in every neighborhood. Every neighborhood should have a hall expressly for social gatherings and cheerful, enlivening amusement. The agricultural, mechanical and laboring population require it more than any other. The ceaseless daily toil, repeated day by day, to eat, to sleep, to toil, without a cheerful sound or relaxation, is more than man can bear uninjured; such amusemnnt is the best protection against intemperance and other indulgences so prevalent, and which need the anathemas oftener hurled against acts comparatively harmless. The indulgence in stimulants or narcotics of any kind, or in any amount, and which is so universal at the present time, cannot be too severely condemned. It leads directly, if not surely to intemperance; it perverts the taste, beclouds the mind, taints the breath, poisons the secretions, and degrades the man in his own estimation, if not in that of others. Would that our rural population would preserve their persons free from such contamination, that