Even were it true, however, that by some possible system of moral control, children could be moulded into the desired form; and even could every parent be indoctrinated with this system, we should still be far from achieving the object in view.  It is forgotten that the carrying out of any such system presupposes, on the part of adults, a degree of intelligence, of goodness, of self-control, possessed by no one.  The error made by those who discuss questions of domestic discipline, lies in ascribing all the faults and difficulties to the children, and none to the parents.  The current assumption respecting family government, as respecting national government, is, that the virtues are with the rulers and the vices with the ruled.  Judging by educational theories, men and women are entirely transfigured in their relations to offspring.  The citizens we do business with, the people we meet in the world, we know to be very imperfect creatures.  In the daily scandals, in the quarrels of friends, in bankruptcy disclosures, in lawsuits, in police reports, we have constantly thrust before us the pervading selfishness, dishonesty, brutality.  Yet when we criticise nursery-management and canvass the misbehaviour of juveniles, we habitually take for granted that these culpable persons are free from moral delinquency in the treatment of their boys and girls!  So far is this from the truth, that we do not hesitate to blame parental misconduct for a great part of the domestic disorder commonly ascribed to the perversity of children.  We do not assert this of the more sympathetic and self-restrained, among whom we hope most of our readers may be classed; but we assert it of the mass.  What kind of moral culture is to be expected from a mother who, time after time, angrily shakes her infant because it will not suck; which we once saw a mother do?  How much sense of justice is likely to be instilled by a father who, on having his attention drawn by a scream to the fact that his child’s finger is jammed between the window-sash and sill, begins to beat the child instead of releasing it?  Yet that there are such fathers is testified to us by an eye-witness.  Or, to take a still stronger case, also vouched for by direct testimony—­what are the educational prospects of the boy who, on being taken home with a dislocated thigh, is saluted with a castigation?  It is true that these are extreme instances—­instances exhibiting in human beings that blind instinct which impels brutes to destroy the weakly and injured of their own race.  But extreme though they are, they typify feelings and conduct daily observable in many families.  Who has not repeatedly seen a child slapped by nurse or parent for a fretfulness probably resulting from bodily derangement?  Who, when watching a mother snatch up a fallen little one, has not often traced, both in the rough manner and in the sharply-uttered exclamation—­“You stupid little thing!”—­an irascibility foretelling endless future squabbles?  Is there