It is very easy to criticize other people’s modes of dealing with their children.  Outside observers see results; parents see processes.  They notice the trivial movements and accents which betray the blood of this or that ancestor; they can detect the irrepressible movement of hereditary impulse in looks and acts which mean nothing to the common observer.  To be a parent is almost to be a fatalist.  This boy sits with legs crossed, just as his uncle used to whom he never saw; his grandfathers both died before he was born, but he has the movement of the eyebrows which we remember in one of them, and the gusty temper of the other.

These are things parents can see, and which they must take account of in education, but which few except parents can be expected to really understand.  Here and there a sagacious person, old, or of middle age, who has triangulated a race, that is, taken three or more observations from the several standing-places of three different generations, can tell pretty nearly the range of possibilities and the limitations of a child, actual or potential, of a given stock,—­errors excepted always, because children of the same stock are not bred just alike, because the traits of some less known ancestor are liable to break out at any time, and because each human being has, after all, a small fraction of individuality about him which gives him a flavor, so that he is distinguishable from others by his friends or in a court of justice, and which occasionally makes a genius or a saint or a criminal of him.  It is well that young persons cannot read these fatal oracles of Nature.  Blind impulse is her highest wisdom, after all.  We make our great jump, and then she takes the bandage off our eyes.  That is the way the broad sea-level of average is maintained, and the physiological democracy is enabled to fight against the principle of selection which would disinherit all the weaker children.  The magnificent constituency of mediocrities of which the world is made up,—­the people without biographies, whose lives have made a clear solution in the fluid menstruum of time, instead of being precipitated in the opaque sediment of history——­

But this is a narrative, and not a disquisition.

CHAPTER XX.

FROM WITHOUT AND FROM WITHIN.

There were not wanting people who accused Dudley Venner of weakness and bad judgment in his treatment of his daughter.  Some were of opinion that the great mistake was in not “breaking her will” when she was a little child.  There was nothing the matter with her, they said, but that she had been spoiled by indulgence.  If they had had the charge of her, they’d have brought her down.  She’d got the upperhand of her father now; but if he’d only taken hold of her in season!  There are people who think that everything may be done, if the doer, be he educator or physician, be only called “in season.”  No doubt,—­but in season would often be a hundred or two years before the child was born; and people never send so early as that.