Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1887 - Virginibus Puerisque, and other papers

Crabbed Age and Youth 8 3
money matters, you fulfil the whole duty of
man.
It is a still more difficult consideration for
our average men, that while all their teachers,
from Solomon down to Benjamin Franklin
and the ungodly Binney, have inculcated the
same ideal of manners, caution, and respect-
ability, those characters in history who have
most notoriously flown in the face of such
precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms
of praise, and honoured with public monu-
ments in the streets of our commercial
centres. This is very bewildering to the
moral sense. You have Joan of Arc, who
left a humble but honest and reputable liveli-
hood under the eyes of her parents, to go
a-colonelling, in the company of rowdy
soldiers, against the enemies of France ;
surely a melancholy example for one's
daughters ! And then you have Columbus,
who may have pioneered America, but, when
all is said, was a most imprudent navigator.
His life is not the kind of thing one would
like to put into the hands of young people ;