think too closely how they were governed. 'Gild the dome of
the Invalides,' was Napoleon's scornful prescription, when he heard
the Parisian population were discontented. They gilded it, and the
people forgot to talk about anything else. They were a childish race,
educated from the cradle on spectacle and show, and by the sight of
their eyes could they be governed. The people of Boston, in 1776,
could not have been managed in this way, chiefly because they were
brought up in the strict schools of the fathers."

"But don't you think," said Jenny, "that something might be added and
amended in the state of society our fathers established here in New
England? Without becoming frivolous, there might be more attention
paid to rational amusement."

"Certainly," said my wife, "the State and the Church both might take a
lesson from the providence of foreign governments, and make liberty,
to say the least, as attractive as despotism. It is a very unwise
mother that does not provide her children with playthings."

"And yet," said Bob, "the only thing that the Church has yet done is
to forbid and to frown. We have abundance of tracts against dancing,
whist-playing, ninepins, billiards, operas, theatres,--in short,
anything that young people would be apt to like. The General Assembly
of the Presbyterian Church refused to testify against slavery, because
of political diffidence, but made up for it by ordering a more
stringent crusade against dancing. The theatre and opera grow up and
exist among us like plants on the windy side of a hill, blown all awry
by a constant blast of conscientious rebuke. There is really no
amusement young people are fond of, which they do not pursue, in a
sort of defiance of the frown of the peculiarly religious world. With
all the telling of what the young shall _not_ do, there has been very
little telling what they shall do.

"The whole department of amusements--certainly one of the most
important in education--has been by the Church made a sort of outlaws'
ground, to be taken possession of and held by all sorts of spiritual
ragamuffins; and then the faults and shortcomings resulting from this
arrangement have been held up and insisted on as reasons why no
Christian should ever venture into it.

"If the Church would set herself to amuse her young folks, instead of
discussing doctrines and metaphysical hair-splitting, she would prove
herself a true mother, and not a hard-visaged stepdame. Let her kee