Our American children are as precocious in will-power as they are keen-witted, and they need a special discipline.  The courage, activity, and pioneer spirit of the fathers, exercised in hewing their way through virgin forests, hunting wild beasts in mountain solitudes, opening up undeveloped lands, prospecting for metals through trackless plains, choosing their own vocations, helping to govern their country,—­all these things have reacted upon the children, and they are thoroughly independent, feeling the need of caring for themselves when hardly able to toddle.

Entrust this precocious bundle of nerves and individuality to a person of weak will or feeble intelligence, and the child promptly becomes his ruler.  The power of strong volition becomes caprice, he does not learn the habit of obedience, and thus valuable directive power is lost to the world.

“The lowest classes of society,” says Dr. Harris, “are the lowest, not because there is any organized conspiracy to keep them down, but because they are lacking in directive power.”  The jails, the prisons, the reformatories, are filled with men who are there because they were weak, more than because they were evil.  If the right discipline in home and school had been given them, they would never have become the charge of the nation.  Thus we waste force constantly, force of mind and of spirit sufficient to move mountains, because we do not insist that every child shall exercise his “inherited right,” which is, “that he be taught to obey.”

It is a grave subject, this of will-training, the gravest perhaps that we can consider, and its deepest waters lie far below the sounding of my plummet.  Some of the principles, however, on which it rests are as firmly fixed as the bed of the ocean, which remains changeless though the waves continually shift above:—­

1.  If we can but cultivate the habit of doing right, we enlist in our service one of the strongest of human agencies.  Its momentum is so great that it may propel the child into the course of duty before he has time to discuss the question, or to parley with his conscience concerning it.

2.  We must remember that “force of character is cumulative, and all the foregone days of virtue work their health into this.”  The task need not be begun afresh each morning; yesterday’s strokes are still there, and to-day’s efforts will make the carving deeper and bolder.

3.  We may compel the body to carry out an order, the fingers to perform a task; but this is mere slavish compliance.  True obedience can never be enforced; it is the fruit of the reason and the will, the free, glad offering of the spirit.

4.  Though many motives have their place in early will-training,—­love of approval, deference to public opinion, the influence of beauty, hopeful occupation, respect and rev for those in authority,—­yet these are all preparatory, the preliminary exercises, which must be well practiced before the soul can spread her wings into the blue.