Don't Be a Sloven

1910

No One Can Afford to Be Untidy

No man or woman is great enough to be slovenly.

I have known — and of course you have — many people who felt justified in developing their minds and ignoring their bodies, because they thought the mental was so much more important than the physical, a writer in the Colorado Springs Gazette says.

I think that is a very wrong outlook. No mental power, however great, exempts its possessor from the care of the person.

A brilliant, slovenly person may succeed in life, but only by using twice as much force as he need have expended. He will never go so far as the man or woman who takes care to add a prepossessing appearance to a prepossessing mind.

A few months ago I was much pleased to hear that a young minister for whose brilliance I had great respect had been honored by a call from a small town where he was preaching to one of Boston's most famous and beautiful churches.

Yesterday I was saddened by hearing that his resignation had been asked and given and that he had left the church and gone back to a small parish.

And the reason was simply this: He did not keep his linen clean.

A small thing, you say?

I don't know. A very large one, I should think, if it had the power to come between the congregation and his message.

A woman in our town whose slovenliness about her dress and her person has made her a town character took the civil-service examination recently. She is as clever as she is slovenly and passed at the head of the list. She has never received an appointment. It is an open secret that her failure to do so is simply because the officials will not have a person of her disgraceful appearance in a public position.

In the college from which I was graduated the commencement part is one of the prizes for which the best students strive. In awarding it last year a girl of the highest scholarship was passed over for one who had received less excellent rank because the first girl was nothing more nor less than "sloppy." The college was not willing that a girl of untidy appearance — no matter how brilliant her mind, no matter how clever a speech she might have made — should represent it on its commencement platform.

A shopkeeper might have an excellent stock of articles, but if his window show were thick with dust and his doorway choked with litter the public would be pretty apt to pass by and go to the more attractive shop down the street, though the articles sold there were no better or even scarce as good.

Any one who thinks the contents of his mind ought to make friends and win success for him, no matter how slovenly and unattractive his person may be, is just such a shopkeeper.

The examples I have cited have been extreme cases, of course. But on that account they are the better object lessons to remind any of us who may sometimes be careless in some slight particular that it never pays.