_Plain Every-day Common Sense_ PLAIN common sense! When we come to sift everything down which will enable us to live wholesome, steady, every-day, interesting lives, plain common sense seems to be the first and the simplest need.

In the working out of any problem, whether it be in science or in art or in plain everyday living, we are told to go from the circumference to the center, from the known to the unknown, from simplest facts to those which would otherwise seem complex.

And whether the life we are living is quiet and commonplace, or whether it is full of change and adventure, to be of the greatest and most permanent use, a life must have as its habitual background plain every-day common sense.
When we stop and think a while, the lack of this important quality is quite glaring, and every one who has his attention called to it and recognizes that lack enough to be interested to supply it in his own life, is doing more good toward bringing plain common sense into the world at large than we can well appreciate.

For instance, it is only a fact of plain common sense that we should keep rested, and yet how many of us do?
How many readers of this article will smile or sneer, or be irritated when they read the above, and say, "It is all very well to talk of keeping rested.

How is it possible with all I have to do?
or with all the care I have?
or with all I have to worry me ?" Now that is just the point--the answer to that question, "How is it possible ?" So very few of us know how to do it, and if "how to keep rested though busy" were regularly taught in all schools in this country, so far from making the children self-conscious and over-careful of themselves, it would lay up in their brains ideas of plain common sense which would be stocked safely there for use when, as their lives grew more maturely busy, they would find the right habits formed, enabling them to keep busy and at the same time to keep quiet and rested.