The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

THE BOY OF TO-DAY63

637

It is possible for the American boy to attain a professional life, if he has the ability, even though he may lack
the means, for nowhere in the world is more done for the.education of youngr men than in our own country. He who
has an ambition for a studious life and a desire for education and fails of them because of poverty, must be singularly lacking in knowledge of the helps that are provided
for him, or in force of character necessary to secure them.
The future is so full of promise to young men, and the
various institutions of the country are so ready to help
them, that I find it hard to forgive them, when they turn
their backs upon the noble life that wooes them, and are
content to plunge into the black waters of dissipation, and
to wreck their future on the rocks of a dissolute life.
All boys enter life with appetites and passions common
to humanity. These should be their servants, the drivingwheels of their higher natures, and never their masters.
But not unfrequently, long before their moral natures are
developed or their judgment formed, they stand by our
side in the full maturity of passion and appetite, even
before we ourselves are aware of it. To them come such
temptations as their fathers and grandfathers did not know.
They could walk the streets of our great cities without
being enticed by ten thousand saloons, gambling hells, and
houses of vice, made attractive by art and wealth, and all
under the protection of law.
Then the boy of to-day comes into life with the genius
of Aglo-Saxondom in his blood. Every nation has a
genius of its own, as well as a specially besetting sin. The
grenius of Greece was a genius for art. So superbly devel