u will have not only to detect,
but to curb these baser impulses. In brief, you will have to carry on
your own 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 recognised, that the last stage in the mental
development of each man and woman is to be reached only through a proper
discharge of the parental duties. And when this truth is recognised, it
will be seen how admirable is the arrangement through which human beings
are led by their strongest affections to subject themselves to a
discipline that they would else elude.

While some will 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
realised 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.

[1] Of this nature is the plea put in by some for the rough treatment
experienced by boys at our public schools; where, as it is said, they
are introduced to a miniature world whose hardships prepare them for
those of the real world. It must be admitted that the plea has some
force; but it is a very insufficient plea. For whereas domestic and
school discipline, though they should not be much better than the
discipline of adult life, should be somewhat better; the discipline
which boys meet with at Eton, Winchester, Harrow, etc., is worse than
that of adult life--more unjust and cruel. Instead of being an aid to
human progress, which all culture should be, the culture of our public
schools, by accustoming boys to a despotic form of government and an
intercourse regulated by brute force, tends to fit them for a lower
state of society than that which exists. An