Suppose your own father, as a result of your irresponsibility, refuses
to let you have an automobile to break the speed laws with? Suppose he
is forced by experience to realize that you can't be trusted with money,
any more than you can be trusted with an automobile? This realization is
sure to be a source of great disappointment and sorrow to him, but he
has to accept it. He must abandon his hope of turning over his
responsibilities to you. If money is placed at your disposal, you may be
expected to gamble with it on the stock exchange, or the race-track, or
to squander it in gratifications of an unworthy and demoralizing kind. A
young man who thinks only of gratifying his inclinations, who is not
afraid to be reckless and inconsiderate of others, and who fails to keep
his word, is hardly a fit person to be placed in control of money. It
frequently happens that a father feels it a duty, when he makes his
will, to tie up the family inheritance in such a way that it will be
beyond the reach of an untrustworthy son.
So that the remote and indirect consequences of this kind of conduct may
be more harmful to a young man than his lack of experience and
understanding makes him aware of, at the time being.
How about the young woman of superior intellect and breeding, who had an
inclination to smoke opium, on one occasion, and to sniff cocaine, on
another?
Suppose she had been better informed on the subject than she apparently
was. Suppose she happened to have a friend, who had been connected with
one of the state institutions for drug addicts, and this friend had told
her about the inmates--how hopeless and pitiful their degradation
was--how abject their slavery to the drug sensation for which they
continually yearned. No way has been found to cure them, because they
have no will to be cured. And the beginnings of the habit are so often
accidental and trivial--curiosity, or bravado, or carelessness on the
part of a practitioner. A Harvard college student, of good family, for
instance, was on a spree in Boston, with some friends--they went to an
opium joint and thought it would be fun to try the sensation. This
particular boy remained in the den twenty-four hours, under the
influence. That was the beginning--and the end. He went there again--he
got himself a lay-out--and is now a hopeless wreck in the state
institution, twenty-one years old. Another is a society woman who was
given a dose of heroin and that one dose proved sufficient for her
undoing. The craving for it came and she wanted more and more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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