d a speech little
sure of itself. Normal habits, deep impressions, the ordinary contact
with reality, bring frankness with them. Falsehood is the vice of a
slave, the refuge of the cowardly and weak. He who is free and strong is
unflinching in speech. We should encourage in our children the hardihood
to speak frankly. What do we ordinarily do? We trample on natural
disposition, level it down to the uniformity which for the crowd is
synonymous with good form. To think with one's own mind, feel with one's
own heart, express one's own personality--how unconventional, how
rustic!--Oh! the atrocity of an education which consists in the
perpetual muzzling of the only thing that gives any of us his reason for
being! Of how many soul-murders do we become guilty! Some are struck
down with bludgeons, others gently smothered with pillows! Everything
conspires against independence of character. When we are little, people
wish us to be dolls or graven images; when we grow up, they approve of
us on condition that we are like all the rest of the world--automatons:
when you have seen one of them you've seen them all. So the lack of
originality and initiative is upon us, and platitude and monotony are
the distinctions of to-day. Truth can free us from this bondage: let
our children be taught to be themselves, to ring clear, without crack or
muffle. Make loyalty a need to them, and in their gravest failures, if
only they acknowledge them, account it for merit that they have not
covered their sin.

To frankness let us add ingenuousness, in our solicitude as educators.
Let us have for this comrade of childhood--a trifle uncivilized, it is
true, but so gracious and friendly!--all possible regard. We must not
frighten it away: when it has once fled, it so rarely comes back!
Ingenuousness is not simply the sister of truth, the guardian of the
individual qualities of each of us; it is besides a great informing and
educating force. I see among us too many practical people, so called,
who go about armed with terrifying spectacles and huge shears to ferret
out naive things and clip their wings. They uproot ingenuousness from
life, from thought, from education, and pursue it even to the region of
dreams. Under pretext of making men of their children, they prevent
their being children at all;--as if before the ripe fruit of autumn,
flowers did not have to be, and perfumes, and songs of birds, and all
the fairy springtime.

I ask indulgence for ev