A Man's Greatest Help

Noting the tendency of mothers to escape the care and responsibllity of training their own children, resorting to nurses, governesses, kindergartens etc., Edward TV. Bok, in the November Ladies' Home Journal, vigorously contends tfhat woman should conBMer her God-given duties" to her children Tastly paramount to every 'claim" that eau be made upon her time. "It is one of the most baleful tendenties of the times," writes Mr. Bok, "that youiig children are placed so much and so entlrely in the hands o hurses, and so far away from their mothers. I do not think that women exactly realize what the early teachings and influences of a mother mean to a man when he rcaches years of maturity. The time which a boy spends at his mother's knee Is.never forgotten by the man. Our morality is learned there. Our characters are formed there. "We are most impre8sionable when we are in a stage of dependence upon others. What sort of a recollection is it íor a man to look back to a lime of nurses and governesses ? What moral ntimulu does he receive from the recollection of a mother inevitably reading some novel and resting in a languid stupor with fan and smelling bottle 1 What moral fibre is instilled iato a chüd who sees his mother only as she flits before him between morning calis, luncheons, meetings, teas, drives, dinners and theatre-parties ? What doea a boy learn at the knee of a nurse ? üood ? Perhaps. But just as often he learna that which is not good. llany a man ha stood at the forks of the road ia his life, brokennearted and perplexed, only ,to have his mother's words, uttered to him when a child, come before him and point him the way. It is then that he realizes that the best thing in the world to a man is to have a good mother, watchïul, tender and anxious, as only a mother can be where her child ie concerned. In those supreme moment the lessons taught- not by the nurse, not by a stranger, not at the kiedergarden, but at the mothev's knee- becomes a precious recolieetion and a beneíaction. It means then a man's salvation. And in that quiet moment a man thinks of a good mother as he never thinks of any other woman. A look of tenderness comee into his eyes, a feeling of soft ness creeps into his heart, and the attitude of his earliest infancy comes to him as, unconsciously, he looks upward and breathes to himself the most precious of all words : Mother.' It remains for the mothers of to-day to determine how mueh that word will mean to the men, of to-morrow."