of the best rules of good farming is to keep things back as much as possible.  Let your progress also be slow and sure; prevent the youth from becoming a man all at once.  While the body is growing the spirits destined to give vigour to the blood and strength to the muscles are in process of formation and elaboration.  If you turn them into another channel, and permit that strength which should have gone to the perfecting of one person to go to the making of another, both remain in a state of weakness and the work of nature is unfinished.  The workings of the mind, in their turn, are affected by this change, and the mind, as sickly as the body, functions languidly and feebly.  Length and strength of limb are not the same thing as courage or genius, and I grant that strength of mind does not always accompany strength of body, when the means of connection between the two are otherwise faulty.  But however well planned they may be, they will always work feebly if for motive power they depend upon an exhausted, impoverished supply of blood, deprived of the substance which gives strength and elasticity to all the springs of the machinery.  There is generally more vigour of mind to be found among men whose early years have been preserved from precocious vice, than among those whose evil living has begun at the earliest opportunity; and this is no doubt the reason why nations whose morals are pure are generally superior in sense and courage to those whose morals are bad.  The latter shine only through I know not what small and trifling qualities, which they call wit, sagacity, cunning; but those great and noble features of goodness and reason, by which a man is distinguished and honoured through good deeds, virtues, really useful efforts, are scarcely to be found except among the nations whose morals are pure.

Teachers complain that the energy of this age makes their pupils unruly; I see that it is so, but are not they themselves to blame?  When once they have let this energy flow through the channel of the senses, do they not know that they cannot change its course?  Will the long and dreary sermons of the pedant efface from the mind of his scholar the thoughts of pleasure when once they have found an entrance; will they banish from his heart the desires by which it is tormented; will they chill the heat of a passion whose meaning the scholar realises?  Will not the pupil be roused to anger by the obstacles opposed to the only kind of happiness of which he has any notion?  And in the harsh law imposed upon him before he can understand it, what will he see but the caprice and hatred of a man who is trying to torment him?  Is it strange that he rebels and hates you too?

I know very well that if one is easy-going one may be tolerated, and one may keep up a show of authority.  But I fail to see the use of an authority over the pupil which is only maintained by fomenting the vices it ought to repress; it is like attempting to soothe a fiery steed by making it leap over a precipice.