The Importance of Habit in Youth

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious up- risings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter ; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log- cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow ; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nur- ture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disa- grees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveler, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counselor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the "shop" in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits, the period below twenty is more important still for the fixing of ^^erso^m^ habits, prop- erly so called, such as vocalization and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address. Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken without a foreign accent ; hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he even learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The mei'chants offer their wares as 6agerly to him as to the veriest "swell," but he simply cmiH buy the right things. An invisible law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was the last ; and how his aristocratic acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear, will be for him a mystery till his dying day.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to maJce automatic and habitual, as early as j^ossible, as many useful actions as we can, and to guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvan- tageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the infallible and effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miser- able human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but inde- cision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters wbich ought to have been so thoroughly ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very day to set the matter right.

Education must instill good habits in people while they are young so that the individual does not get hardened into an immoral state when they are older.