WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUE SONS ?

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XIII, Issue 89, 13 April 1878, Page 4

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUE SONS ?

The great majority of lads at a large university are of not more than ordinary abilities, and a majority of thia majority ought, for their own comfort and happiness, to have began life — to have been apprenticed to some useful calling immediately — after they left school. A twofold movement may be noticed among the forces and tendencies of modern society. On the one hand there is a perpetual process of social up-heaval going on, a constant promotion of individuals and families from a lower to a higher grade in the social scale. On the other haDd, the very necessities of existence are compelling the sons of parents who have succeeded in rising a step or a succession of steps to make a retrograde movement, and to seek a livelihood by pocketing something of the social consideration which they are supposed to have inherited. The imperious nature of this latter obligation seems imperfectly recognised. The titled aristocracy have set an example which the middle classes would do well to follow. Dukes send their sons into the City, and the younger sons of earls swarm in the wipe-trade. There was a time when this sort of thing would have been considered the herald of a revolution, and the sure forerunner of sheer social anarchy. It is accepted now as a matter of course, and the p A trician traders do their work admirably at the counter. A professional man with an income of from^one to three thousand a year, who is blessed with a regiment of sons, must pocket his pride, and must make his boys pocket theirs. There is nothing gained by staving off the settling- j day, and by the voluntary increase of ! educational expenditure which thcee years at a university involve. At the present moment, in. London, Liverpool, Manchester, and other great cities of the empire, there are German and other foreign. clerks employed by the score in commercial houses, warehouses, and shops. Dickens has told us that, though Nicholas Nickleby had a good deal of pride about him, it was not the pride which took the shape of a rootted objection to earn his own living in any honest way that might be practicable. It would be a very good thing for both if fathers and sons 'would divest themselves of the pride which they seem to take in the gradual development of an utter importance to earn an honest shilling."— The World.