Note 73 — Chapter X · (continued 2)
Reading edition
A female teacher in the Bay State, in 1847, addressed the following inquiry through the columns of the Massachusetts Common School Journal:
"I have been laboring for the last year in a large school, and have endeavored, according to the best of my ability, to inculcate habits of neatness among the pupils, especially to break them of the filthy habit of spitting upon the floor. I have often told them gentlemen never do it. But at a recent visit of the committee, an individual, who has been elected by the town to superintend the educational interests of the rising generation, spit the dirty juice of his tobacco quid upon the floor of my school-room with apparent self-complacency.
"Shall I say to the children that this person is not a gentleman, and thus destroy his influence? or shall I pass it over in silence, and thus leave them to draw the natural inference that all I have said on the subject is only a woman's whim?"
Mr. Mann, the editor, gave a full reply through the Journal, from which I have here quoted part of a paragraph. He closes by offering a prize of the "eternal gratitude of all decent men" to the discoverer of a remedy or antidote for the evil.