who we are, what sort of boys we have to deal with, what
treatment they can bear, and what are the needs of our growing American
society.

The demands of actual life, the living, visible facts of practical
science, in so large and new a country as ours, require that the ideas
of the ancients should be given us in the shortest and most economical
way possible, and that scholastic technicalities should be reserved to
those whom Nature made with especial reference to their preservation.

On no subject is there more intolerant judgment, and more suffering from
such intolerance, than on the much mooted one of the education of
children.

Treatises on education require altogether too much of parents, and
impose burdens of responsibility on tender spirits which crush the life
and strength out of them. Parents have been talked to as if each child
came to them a soft, pulpy mass, which they were to pinch and pull and
pat and stroke into shape quite at their leisure,--and a good pattern
being placed before them, they were to proceed immediately to set up and
construct a good human being in conformity therewith.

It is strange that believers in the divine inspiration of the Bible
should have entertained this idea, overlooking the constant and
affecting declaration of the great Heavenly Father that _He_ has
nourished and brought up children and they have rebelled against Him,
together with His constant appeals,--"What could have been done more to
my vineyard that I have not done in it? Wherefore, when I looked that it
should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?" If even God,
wiser, better, purer, more loving, admits Himself baffled in this great
work, is it expedient to say to human beings that the forming power, the
deciding force, of a child's character is in their hands?

Many a poor feeble woman's health has been strained to breaking, and her
life darkened, by the laying on her shoulders of a burden of
responsibility that never ought to have been placed there; and many a
mother has been hindered from using such powers as God has given her,
because some preconceived mode of operation has been set up before her
which she could no more make effectual than David could wear the armor
of Saul.

A gentle, loving, fragile creature marries a strong-willed, energetic
man, and by the laws of natural descent has a boy given to her of twice
her amount of will and energy. She is just as helpless, in the mere
struggle of wi