when a wrong state of feeling has to be set right.  Not only will you have constantly to analyse the motives of your children, but you will have to analyse your own motives—­to discriminate between those internal suggestions springing from a true parental solicitude and those which spring from your own selfishness, your love of ease, your lust of dominion.  And then, more trying still, you will have not only to detect, but to curb these baser impulses.  In brief, you will have to carry on your own higher education at the same time that you are educating your children.  Intellectually you must cultivate to good purpose that most complex of subjects—­human nature and its laws, as exhibited in your children, in yourself, and in the world.  Morally, you must keep in constant exercise your higher feelings, and restrain your lower.  It is a truth yet remaining to be recognised, that the last stage in the mental development of each man and woman is to be reached only through a proper discharge of the parental duties.  And when this truth is recognised, it will be seen how admirable is the arrangement through which human beings are led by their strongest affections to subject themselves to a discipline that they would else elude.

While some will regard this conception of education as it should be with doubt and discouragement, others will, we think, perceive in the exalted ideal which it involves, evidence of its truth.  That it cannot be realised by the impulsive, the unsympathetic, and the short-sighted, but demands the higher attributes of human nature, they will see to be evidence of its fitness for the more advanced states of humanity.  Though it calls for much labour and self-sacrifice, they will see that it promises an abundant return of happiness, immediate and remote.  They will see that while in its injurious effects on both parent and child a bad system is twice cursed, a good system is twice blessed—­it blesses him that trains and him that’s trained.

[1] Of this nature is the plea put in by some for the rough treatment experienced by boys at our public schools; where, as it is said, they are introduced to a miniature world whose hardships prepare them for those of the real world.  It must be admitted that the plea has some force; but it is a very insufficient plea.  For whereas domestic and school discipline, though they should not be much better than the discipline of adult life, should be somewhat better; the discipline which boys meet with at Eton, Winchester, Harrow, etc., is worse than that of adult life—­more unjust and cruel.  Instead of being an aid to human progress, which all culture should be, the culture of our public schools, by accustoming boys to a despotic form of government and an intercourse regulated by brute force, tends to fit them for a lower state of society than that which exists.  And chiefly recruited as our legislature is from among those who are brought up at such schools, this barbarising influence becomes a hindrance to national progress.