y thoroughly-grounded boys of
the sixteen. A few of the others had attended nearly all the private
schools in the city, while two of them had been oscillating between the
public and private schools for years at their own sweet wills, and could
never decide whether the commercial or classical department of the
school in question was the one for which they were best fitted. It may
well be understood, therefore, what a medley my classes presented, and
how unlikely it was, in the face of all these drawbacks, that their
acquirements should be above mediocrity. On the score of natural
abilities, however--in quickness of perception, facility in
generalization, readiness and coherence of expression, and clearness of
head generally--it would not be at haphazard one could find an equal
number of boys in any English school to match them.

As to the vexed subject of discipline, my experience leads me to say
that, provided I was left to my own way, I would rather manage a class
of twenty American boys than of twenty English. The common cry about
Young America's disrespect for authority or worth seems to me to be
founded on a misconception, when, indeed, it is anything but the wailing
of ignorance or cant. I am strongly possessed of a belief that American
children know intuitively where respect is really due, and that there
they fully and unhesitatingly award it. I at least have found among them
a more genuine, spontaneous sentiment of regard for their teachers than
either in England or Scotland--a sentiment utterly free from the
cringing submissiveness which too often passes muster in England as a
juvenile virtue. However feared--and, _accordingly_, respected--an
English teacher may be by his scholars, he is nevertheless an ogre to
most of them--to the aristocrat a plebeian pedagogue to whom he must
defer, just as, when he is a little older and sports a scarlet tunic, he
must submit to the unlettered sergeant-major who teaches him his
goose-step; to the rich _parvenu_ more intolerable still, as the pruner
of his obtrusive vulgarities of speech and manner, the index of his
social inferiority and the standing menace to his innate rudeness, that
is only intensified by his consciousness of wealth; to the poor man's
son essentially a "schoolmaster"--a wielder of the ferule and a
bloodless automaton, to whom, as Southey wrote,

The multiplication-table is his creed,
His paternoster and his decalogue;

to only the emancipated an