not in the harsh tones in which a father bids his children be quiet, evidence of a deficient fellow-feeling with them?  Are not the constant, and often quite needless, thwartings that the young experience—­the injunctions to sit still, which an active child cannot obey without suffering great nervous irritation, the commands not to look out of the window when travelling by railway, which on a child of any intelligence entails serious deprivation—­are not these thwartings, we ask, signs of a terrible lack of sympathy?  The truth is, that the difficulties of moral education are necessarily of dual origin—­necessarily result from the combined faults of parents and children.  If hereditary transmission is a law of nature, as every naturalist knows it to be, and as our daily remarks and current proverbs admit it to be; then, on the average of cases, the defects of children mirror the defects of their parents;—­on the average of cases, we say, because, complicated as the results are by the transmitted traits of remoter ancestors, the correspondence is not special but only general.  And if, on the average of cases, this inheritance of defects exists, then the evil passions which parents have to check in their children, imply like evil passions in themselves:  hidden, it may be, from the public eye, or perhaps obscured by other feelings, but still there.  Evidently, therefore, the general practice of any ideal system of discipline is hopeless:  parents are not good enough.

Moreover, even were there methods by which the desired end could be at once effected; and even had fathers and mothers sufficient insight, sympathy, and self-command to employ these methods consistently; it might still be contended that it would be of no use to reform family-government faster than other things are reformed.  What is it that we aim to do?  Is it not that education of whatever kind has for its proximate end to prepare a child for the business of life—­to produce a citizen who, while he is well conducted, is also able to make his way in the world?  And does not making his way in the world (by which we mean, not the acquirement of wealth, but of the funds requisite for bringing up a family)—­does not this imply a certain fitness for the world as it now is?  And if by any system of culture an ideal human being could be produced, is it not doubtful whether he would be fit for the world as it now is?  May we not, on the contrary, suspect that his too keen sense of rectitude, and too elevated standard of conduct, would make life intolerable or even impossible?  And however admirable the result might be, considered individually, would it not be self-defeating in so far as society and posterity are concerned?  There is much reason for thinking that as in a nation so in a family, the kind of government is, on the whole, about as good as the general state of human nature permits it to be.  We may argue that in the one case, as in the other, the average character of the