that
a succeeding race of infants will have no such advantage over their
parents; still it may be asked, should we not be making these infants
too much the creatures of society when we cannot make them more so? Here
would they be for eight hours in the day like plants in a conservatory.
What is to become of them for the other sixteen hours, when they are
returned to all the influences, the dread of which first suggested this
contrivance? Will they be better able to resist the mischief they may be
exposed to from the bad example of their parents, or brothers and
sisters? It is to be feared not, because, though they must have heard
many good precepts, their condition in school is artificial; they have
been removed from the discipline and exercise of humanity, and they
have, besides, been subject to many evil temptations within school and
peculiar to it.

In the present generation I cannot see anything of an harmonious
co-operation between these schools and home influences. If the family be
thoroughly bad, and the child cannot be removed altogether, how feeble
the barrier, how futile the expedient! If the family be of middle
character, the children will lose more by separation from domestic cares
and reciprocal duties, than they can possibly gain from captivity with
such formal instruction as may be administered.

We are then brought round to the point, that it is to a physical and not
a moral necessity that we must look, if we would justify this disregard,
I had almost said violation, of a primary law of human nature. The link
of eleemosynary tuition connects the infant school with the national
schools upon the Madras system. Now I cannot but think that there is too
much indiscriminate gratuitous instruction in this country; arising out
of the misconception above adverted to, of the real power of school
teaching, relatively to the discipline of life; and out of an over-value
of talent, however exerted, and of knowledge prized for its own sake,
and acquired in the shape of knowledge. The latter clauses of the last
sentence glance rather at the London University and the Mechanics'
Institutes than at the Madras schools, yet they have some bearing upon
these also. Emulation, as I observed in my last letter, is the
master-spring of that system. It mingles too much with all teaching, and
with all learning; but in the Madras mode it is the great wheel which
puts every part of the machine into motion.

But I have been led a l