education of a gentleman;” and while many years are spent by a girl in those decorative acquirements which fit her for evening parties; not an hour is spent by either in preparation for that gravest of all responsibilities—­the management of a family.  Is it that this responsibility is but a remote contingency?  On the contrary, it is sure to devolve on nine out of ten.  Is it that the discharge of it is easy?  Certainly not:  of all functions which the adult has to fulfil, this is the most difficult.  Is it that each may be trusted by self-instruction to fit himself, or herself, for the office of parent?  No:  not only is the need for such self-instruction unrecognised, but the complexity of the subject renders it the one of all others in which self-instruction is least likely to succeed.  No rational plea can be put forward for leaving the Art of Education out of our curriculum.  Whether as bearing on the happiness of parents themselves, or whether as affecting the characters and lives of their children and remote descendants, we must admit that a knowledge of the right methods of juvenile culture, physical, intellectual, and moral, is a knowledge of extreme importance.  This topic should be the final one in the course of instruction passed through by each man and woman.  As physical maturity is marked by the ability to produce offspring, so mental maturity is marked by the ability to train those offspring. The subject which involves all other subjects, and therefore the subject in which education should culminate, is the Theory and Practice of Education.

In the absence of this preparation, the management of children, and more especially the moral management, is lamentably bad.  Parents either never think about the matter at all, or else their conclusions are crude and inconsistent.  In most cases, and especially on the part of mothers, the treatment adopted on every occasion is that which the impulse of the moment prompts:  it springs not from any reasoned-out conviction as to what will most benefit the child, but merely expresses the dominant parental feelings, whether good or ill; and varies from hour to hour as these feelings vary.  Or if the dictates of passion are supplemented by any definite doctrines and methods, they are those handed down from the past, or those suggested by the remembrances of childhood, or those adopted from nurses and servants—­methods devised not by the enlightenment, but by the ignorance, of the time.  Commenting on the chaotic state of opinion and practice relative to family government, Richter writes:—­

“If the secret variances of a large class of ordinary fathers were brought to light, and laid down as a plan of studies and reading, catalogued for a moral education, they would run somewhat after this fashion:—­In the first hour ’pure morality must be read to the child, either by myself or the tutor;’ in the second, ’mixed morality, or that which may be applied to one’s own advantage;’