He very likely
carries a bagful of golf-sticks, or is pumping up his bicycle.
But if a man says, "This beautiful Sabbath morn," you know for a
certainty that he wears a long-tailed black coat, a boiled shirt,
and a white tie. He is bald from his forehead upward, his upper
lip is shaven, and his views and those of the late Robert Reed on
the disgusting habit of using tobacco are absolutely at one.
Not alone a regard for respectability, but the hankering to be
historically accurate, urges me to make the change I speak of.
Originally the institution was a Sunday-school, and not very
respectable either. I should hate to think any of my dear young
friends were in the habit of attending such a low-class affair as
Robert Raikes conducted. Sunday-schools were for "little
ragamuffins," as he called them, who worked such long hours on
week-days (from five in the morning until nine at night) that if
they were to learn the common branches at all it had to be on a
Sunday. A ragged school was bad enough in itself, putting foolish
notions into the heads of gutter-brats and making them discontented
and unhappy in their lot; but to teach a ragged school on Sunday
was a little too much. So Robert Raikes encountered the most violent
opposition, although from that beginning dates popular education in
England.
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