Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/156

 good principles and good manners is invincible. He has friends, he commands respect, he has two strong and trusty weapons with which to combat temptation and to meet difficulty.

First of all you will have to be honest. The line between what is honest and what is not is not so widely drawn even among men of experience that it is not strange that young boys should often become confused in the matter, and yet the distinction between what is mine and what is thine, between borrowing and theft, between crime and a practical joke ought to be distinguishable.

Few boys would give a burglar a leg into the window of a house which he was about to rob, yet it takes more principle than most boys possess to refuse to give help to a needy friend or even to a passing acquaintance who asks for it in a school examination. If he demurs at all, it is quite as often from the fear of being detected as from any moral principle which actuates him, though one act is as undeniably dishonest as the other. I have put the question to scores of boys, yet I have seen few who did not feel that it was rather a virtue than otherwise to help a man who is in trouble even though the help was simply an aid to dishonesty. I have even known fathers who, while they would have been sorry to have their sons crib, were yet rather proud that these same sons had aided some one else to be dishonest.

There is often a feeling among boys, also, that an examination in school is not a test of their knowledge but a con-