order to qualify unreasonable expectations.  But there are thousands of stirring people now in England, who are so far misled as to deem these schools good in themselves, and to wish that, even in the smallest villages, the children of the poor should have what they call ‘a good education’ in this way.  Now, these people (and no error is at present more common) confound education with tuition.

Education, I need not remark to you, is everything that draws out the human being, of which tuition, the teaching of schools especially, however important, is comparatively an insignificant part.  Yet the present bent of the public mind is to sacrifice the greater power to the less—­all that life and nature teach, to the little that can be learned from books and a master.  In the eyes of an enlightened statesman this is absurd; in the eyes of a pure lowly-minded Christian it is monstrous.

The Spartan and other ancient communities might disregard domestic ties, because they had the substitution of country, which we cannot have.  With us, country is a mere name compared with what it was to the Greeks; first, as contrasted with barbarians; and next, and above all, as that passion only was strong enough to preserve the individual, his family, and the whole State, from ever-impending destruction.  Our course is to supplant domestic attachments without the possibility of substituting others more capacious.  What can grow out of it but selfishness?

Let it then be universally admitted that infant-schools are an evil, only tolerated to qualify a greater, viz., the inability of mothers to attend to their children, and the like inability of the elder to take care of the younger, from their labour being wanted in factories, or elsewhere, for their common support.  But surely this is a sad state of society; and if these expedients of tuition or education (if that word is not to be parted with) divert our attention from the fact that the remedy for so mighty an evil must be sought elsewhere, they are most pernicious things, and the sooner they are done away with the better.

But even as a course of tuition, I have strong objections to infant-schools; and in no small degree to the Madras system also.  We must not be deceived by premature adroitness.  The intellect must not be trained with a view to what the infant or child may perform, without constant reference to what that performance promises for the man.  It is with the mind as with the body.  I recollect seeing a German babe stuffed with beer and beef, who had the appearance of an infant Hercules. He might have enough in him of the old Teutonic blood to grow up to a strong man; but tens of thousands would dwindle and perish after such unreasonable cramming.  Now I cannot but think, that the like would happen with our modern pupils, if the views of the patrons of these schools were realised.  The diet they offer is not the natural diet for infant and juvenile minds.  The faculties are over-strained, and not exercised with that simultaneous operation which ought to be aimed at as far as is practicable.  Natural history is taught in infant-schools by pictures stuck up against walls, and such mummery.  A moment’s notice of a red-breast pecking by a winter’s hearth is worth it all.