Let the boy speak aloud, if he pleases—­that is, to a certain pitch; let his blood circulate; let the natural secretions take place, and the physical effluvia be thrown off by a free exercise of voice and limbs:  but do not keep him dumb and motionless as a statue—­his blood and his intellect both in a state of stagnation, and his spirit below zero.  Do not send him in quest of knowledge alone, but let him have cheerful companionship on his way; for, depend upon it, that the man who expects too much either in discipline or morals from a boy, is not in my opinion, acquainted with human nature.  If an urchin titter at his own joke, or that of another—­if he give him a jab of a pin under the desk, imagine not that it will do him an injury, whatever phrenologists may say concerning the organ of destructiveness.  It is an exercise to the mind, and he will return to his business with greater vigor and effect.  Children are not men, nor influenced by the same motives—­they do not reflect, because their capacity for reflection is imperfect; so is their reason:  whereas on the contrary, their faculties for education (excepting judgment, which strengthens my argument) are in greater vigor in youth than in manhood.  The general neglect of this distinction is, I am convinced, a stumbling-block in the way of youthful instruction, though it characterizes all our modern systems.  We should never forget that they are children; nor should we bind them by a system, whose standard is taken from the maturity of human intellect.  We may bend our reason to theirs, but we cannot elevate their capacity to our own.  We may produce an external appearance, sufficiently satisfactory to ourselves; but, in the meantime, it is probable that the child may be growing in hypocrisy, and settling down into the habitual practice of a fictitious character.

But another and more serious objection may be urged against the present strictness of scholastic discipline—­which is, that it deprives the boy of a sense of free and independent agency.  I speak this with limitations, for a master should be a monarch in his school, but by no means a tyrant; and decidedly the very worst species of tyranny is that which stretches the young mind upon the rod of too rigorous a discipline—­like the despot who exacted from his subjects so many barrels of perspiration, whenever there came a long and severe frost.  Do not familiarize the mind when young to the toleration of slavery, lest it prove afterwards incapable of recognizing and relishing the principle of an honest and manly independence.  I have known many children, on whom a rigor of discipline, affecting the mind only (for severe corporal punishment is now almost exploded), impressed a degree of timidity almost bordering on pusillanimity.  Away, then, with the specious and long-winded arguments of a false and mistaken philosophy.  A child will be a child, and a boy a boy, to the conclusion of the chapter.  Bell or Lancaster would not relish the pap or caudle-cup three times a day; neither would an infant on the breast feel comfortable after a gorge of ox beef.  Let them, therefore, put a little of the mother’s milk of human kindness and consideration into their straight-laced systems.