By Oliver Wendell Holmes

Listen, Benjamin Franklin.406-1 This is for you, and such others of tender age as you may tell it to.

When we are as yet small children, long before the time when those two grown ladies offer us the choice of Hercules,406-2 there comes up to us a youthful angel, holding in his right hand cubes like dice, and in his left spheres like marbles. The cubes are of stainless ivory, and on each is written in letters of gold—Truth. The spheres are veined and streaked and spotted beneath, with a dark crimson flush above where the light falls on them and in a certain aspect you can make out upon every one of them the three letters, L, I, E.

The child to whom they are offered very probably clutches at both. The spheres are the most convenient things in the world; they roll with the least possible impulse just where the child would have them. The cubes will not roll at all; they have a great talent for standing still, and always keep right side up. But very soon the young philosopher finds that things which roll so easily are very apt to roll into the wrong corner, and to get out of his way when he most wants them, while he always knows where to find the others, which stay where they are left.

Thus he learns—thus we learn—to drop the streaked and speckled globes of falsehood, and to hold fast the white angular blocks of truth. But then comes Timidity, and after her Good-nature, and last of all Polite-behaviour, all insisting that truth must roll, or nobody can do anything with it; and so the first with her coarse rasp, and the second with her broad file, and the third with her silken sleeve, do so round off and smooth and polish the snow-white cubes of truth, that, when they have got a little dingy by use, it becomes hard to tell them from the rolling spheres of falsehood.

The schoolmistress407-3 was polite enough to say that she was pleased with this, and that she would read it to her little flock the next day. But she should tell the children, she said, that there were better reasons for truth than could be found in mere experience of its convenience, and the inconvenience of lying.

Yes—I said—but education always begins through the senses, and works up to the idea of absolute right and wrong. The first thing the child has to learn about this matter is, that lying is unprofitable—afterwards, that it is against the peace and dignity of the universe.

1. What does the stainless ivory in the cubes indicate?

2. What is the meaning of the veins, streaks, and spots and the dark crimson flush in the spheres?

3. Are the letters L, I, E, always visible? Does this mean that lies are not always known to be lies to the person who tells them, or that they may deceive the person to whom they are told?

4. Does Dr. Holmes mean to imply that it is natural for a little child to lie when he says that the spheres are the most convenient things in the world?

5. What does Dr. Holmes mean when he says that the spheres are apt to roll into the wrong corner?

6. How does Timidity teach a child to lie? How does Good-nature lead him to lie? What are some of the “polite lies” that help to make the cubes roll?

7. Which cuts most deeply a substance upon which it is rubbed—a rasp, a file, or a silken sleeve?

8. Which causes the most lies, Timidity, Good-nature or Polite-behavior?

9. Do you think the schoolmistress is right? If so, what better reasons are there for telling the truth than mere convenience and the inconvenience of lying?

10. What do you understand by “against the peace and dignity of the universe?”

11. Do you think the schoolmistress would agree with the Autocrat in his last statement as to the way in which children are taught the difference between right and wrong?

12. Do you think if a child is first taught that lying is unprofitable he will without further assistance learn that lying is wrong in itself?

13. Do you gain from the whole selection the idea that all lies, even the polite lies of society and the common and apparently harmless lies of business life, are always and wholly wrong?