ill he shall finally be led into a contempt of the
institutions as well as of the rulers of his native land, through a
father's teaching, and so grow up an embryo traitor, ready at the first
signal to embark in any revolutionary scheme or wild enterprise of
visionary reform, such as have been and are still the disturbers of our
national prosperity. For an example of such a result in our day we have
but to look at the youth of the Southern States, whose fiery treason,
far exceeding that of their elders, is nothing more than the outgrowth,
the legitimate extension and development of that bitter denunciation of
rulers who chanced to be unpopular with their fathers, of that
unrestrained license of speech which left nothing untouched, however
sacred, however holy it might be, which chanced to stand in the way of
gross and sordid interest. The ideas of the hot-blooded, fire-eating
Southern youth of to-day, the recklessness and the treason, the
denationalizing spirit of revolution and blood which so readily
manifests itself in contempt of the old flag, and the direst hatred of
all that their fathers held sacred and laid down their lives to
sustain--all this is but the idea, intensified and developed, of the
Southerner of a bygone generation; it is but the natural deduction from
his conversation and life, pondered over by the child, fixed deeply in
his heart as the teaching of a revered tutor, and carried out, by a
natural course of reasoning, to its extreme in the parricidal rebellion
of to-day. And yet that idea was, in its inception, apparently harmless
enough, being nothing more than that denunciation and vituperation of
the political leaders and the ruling powers which chanced to be in the
opposition, whereby the child was in due course of time weaned from his
country, and taught to look lightly upon and speak lightly of that which
of old time was only mentioned with love and reverent awe.

Nor is this the only reform which is needed in the education of our
youth. The phrase 'completing one's education' is used to-day with utter
looseness, and applied to that period when the youth leaves the school
or college for the busy walks of life. How much of error is contained in
such an application of the term he well knows who, after some years of
world life, can look back upon his college days and see what a mere
smattering of knowledge he gained within the 'classic shades,' and how
poorly _educated_ he was, in any and every sense