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prepared to make further modifications as each child's disposition enters on a new phase. Your faith will often be taxed to maintain the requisite perseverance in a course which seems to produce little or no effect. Especially if you are dealing with children who have been wrongly treated, you must be prepared for a lengthened trial of patience before succeeding with better methods; seeing that that which is not easy even where a right state of feeling has been established from the beginning, becomes doubly difficult when a wrong state of feeling has to be set right. Not only will you have constantly to analyze the motives of your children, but you will have to analyze your own motives— to discriminate between those internal suggestions springing from a true parental solicitude, and those which spring from your own selfishness, from your love of ease, from your lust of dominion. And then, more trying still, you will have not only to detect, but to curb these baser impulses. In brief, you will have to carry on your higher education at the same time that you are educating your children. Intellectually you must cultivate to good purpose that most complex of subjects—human nature and its laws, as exhibited in your children, in yourself, and in the world. Morally, you must keep in constant exercise your higher feelings, and restrain your lower. It is a truth yet remaining to be recognized, that the last stage in the mental development of each man and woman is to be reached only through the proper discharge of the parental

THE HIGH DISCIPLINE OF PARENTHOOD.

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duties. And when this truth is recognised, it will be seen how admirable is the ordination in virtue of which human beings are led by their strongest affections to subject themselves to a discipline which they would else elude.

While some will probably regard this conception of education as it should be, with doubt and discouragement, others will, we think, perceive in the exalted ideal which it involves, evidence of its truth. That it cannot be realized by the impulsive, the unsympathetic, and the short-sighted, but demands the higher attributes of human nature, they will see to be evidence of its fitness for the more advanced states of humanity. Though it calls for much labour and self-sacrifice, they will see that it promises an abundant return of happiness, immediate and remote. They will see that while in its injurious effects on both parent and child a bad system is twice cursed, a good system is twice blessed—it blesses him that trains and him that's trained.

It will be seen that we have said nothing in this Chapter about the transcendental distinction between right and wrong, of which wise men know so little, and children nothing. All thinkers are agreed that we may find the criterion of right in the effect of actions, if we do not find the rule there; and that is sufficient for the purpose we have had in view. Nor have we introduced the religious element. We have confined our inquiries

to a nearer, and a much more neglected field, though a very important one. Our readers may supplement our thoughts in any way they please; we are only concerned that they should be accepted as far as they go.

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CHAPTER IV.

PHYSICAL EDUCATION.

Equally at the squire's table after the withdrawal of the ladies, at the farmers' market-ordinary, and at the village ale-house, the topic which, after the political question of the day, excites perhaps the most general interest, is the management of animals. Riding home from hunting, the conversation is pretty sure to gravitate towards horsebreeding, and pedigrees, and comments on this or that good point;' while a day on the moors is very unlikely to pass without something being said on the treatment of dogs. When crossing the fields together from church, the tenants of adjacent farms are apt to pass from criticisms on the sermon to criticisms on the weather, the crops, and the stock; and thence to slide into discussions on the various kinds of fodder and their feeding qualities. Hodge and Giles, after comparing notes over their respective pig-styes, show by their remarks that they have been more or less observant of their masters' beasts and sheep; and of the effects produced on them by this or that kind of treatment. Nor is it only among the rural population that the regulations of the kennel, the stable, the cow-shed,

and the sheep-pen, are favourite subjects.

In

towns, too, the numerous artisans who keep dogs, the young men who are rich enough to now and then indulge their sporting tendencies, and their more staid seniors who talk over agricultural progress or read Mr. Mechi's annual reports and Mr. Caird's letters to the Times, form, when added together, a large portion of the inhabitants. Take the adult males throughout the kingdom, and a great majority will be found to show some interest in the breeding, rearing, or training of animals, of one kind or other.

But, during after-dinner conversations, or at other times of like intercourse, who hears anything said about the rearing of children? When the country gentleman has paid his daily visit to the stable, and personally inspected the condition and treatment of his horses; when he has glanced at his minor live stock, and given directions about them; how often does he go up to the nursery and examine into its dietary, its hours, its ventilation? On his library shelves may be found White's Farriery, Stephen's Book of the Farm, Nimrod on the Condition of Hunters; and with the contents of these he is more or less familiar; but how many books has he read on the management of infancy and childhood? The fattening properties of oilcake, the relative values of hay and chopped straw, the dangers of unlimited clover, are points on which every landlord, farmer, and peasant has some knowledge; but what proportion of them

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