EARLY TRAINING OF CHILDREN 
 
 UC-NRLF 
 
 MALLESON 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Class 
 

NOTES 
 
 ON THE 
 
 EARLY TRAINING OF CHILDREN 
 
 BY 
 
 MRS. FRANK MALLESON 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS 
 1887 
 
Cfrest |t0tts art efokaf*ir 
 
 TO THE 
 
 HAPPINESS OF CHILDREN. 
 
 " To all of us, the expressly appointed schoolmasters and schoolings we 
 get are as nothing compared with the unappointed, incidental, and continual 
 ones, whose school hours are all the days and nights of our existence, and 
 whose lessons, noticed and unnoticed, stream in upon us with every breath 
 we draw." CARLYLE'S " LIFE OF STERLING." 
 
 '* Thou therefore which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself?" 
 
 ROMANS, chap. ii. v. 21. 
 
 236585 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTORY . . . . . * . . . . 5 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 INFANT LIFE . . 15 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 NURSERY MANAGEMENT- ....... 28 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 THE EMPLOYMENT AND OCCUPATION OF CHILDREN , 46 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 SOME CARDINAL VIRTUES. RP:VERENCE .... 65 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 SOME CARDINAL VIRTUES. TRUTH 77 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 SOME CARDINAL VIRTUES. LOVE 88 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SOME CARDINAL VIRTUES. OBEDIENCE TO CONSCIENCE ; 
 DUTY . ioo 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS . . . , , . 115 
 
 iv 
 
NOTES 
 
 EARLY TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 "The problem is, 'to train up a child in the way' he should 
 grow. Grow he will in any case; what we want is, so to control 
 the circumstances that call forth his activity that he shall grow 
 as straight as possible, as much as possible, in as many direc- 
 tions as possible, but as harmoniously as possible." 
 
 James Ward. 
 
 THERE are few gifts to man more precious, and 
 at the same time more common, than the gift of 
 children ; and yet the art of education, of train- 
 ing the young into useful and virtuous men and 
 women, is widely misunderstood or neglected. In 
 how few families do we see the result of thoughtful 
 and careful practical education ! in how many do 
 we find that want of good training which results 
 in so-called " spoiled children " ! The very 
 
6 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 phrase implies an unfulfilled capacity of excellence. 
 For all the virtues of childhood, these children 
 exhibit the contraries ; in the place of intelligent 
 activity, indifference and idleness ; of obedience 
 and self-control, angry self-assertion and wilful- 
 ness ; of loving confidence, irreverent curiosity ; of 
 serenity, fretful impatience. These manifestations 
 are not the growth of a day. They are the result 
 of management uninspired by a guiding prin- 
 ciple, of management in which training has no 
 place. 
 
 Yet few fathers and mothers experience the 
 first joy of parentage without feeling also some- 
 thing of the solemn responsibility it includes. 
 What mother folding her arms around her new- 
 born infant can wish less than that it should 
 become "as much as possible an instrument of 
 happiness to himself, and next, to other beings " ? 
 What father appreciating the mute contrast of 
 his baby's tender helplessness and his own mature 
 strength, can do less than resolve that the silent 
 appeal for protection and guidance shall be faith- 
 fully met ? But such germs of parental duty do 
 not include a definite ideal of education, nor do 
 they point out how educational ends are to be 
 attained by educational means. " It is a truth 
 yet remaining to be recognized," says Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer in his " Education/' " that the last stage of 
 
Introductory. 7 
 
 i 
 
 mental development of each man and woman is 
 to be reached only through a proper discharge of 
 the parental duties." And as the present race of 
 parents has not found the Art of Education in their 
 curriculum of studies, as^ Mr. Spencer hopes future 
 -generations will do, they are left to deal with the 
 problem of infant life, freshly given for their in- 
 dividual study and solution, without preparation, 
 and often indeed without the idea that preparation 
 is necessary. 
 
 For the average parents the great educational 
 thinkers seem to have existed in vain : the wisdom 
 of Plato, with its perennial freshness and beauty, 
 the noble ideal of Milton, the excellent sense of 
 Locke, the originality of Rousseau, the loving 
 insight of Pestalozzi, the abundant thought and 
 suggestiveness of modern writers on education, 
 are guiding lights which exist not for them. They 
 are at no trouble to settle which definition of 
 education is most satisfactory to them, they are 
 not oppressed by the importance of the subject 
 with which they have to deal. The child belongs 
 to them ; its relations to society and humanity 
 do not come within the scope of their thought. 
 They gather up, in some sort of fashion, the cur- 
 rent ideas of their time with regard to the bringing 
 up of children, and they act upon these. If they 
 are well-to-do, a conventional care and treatment 
 
8 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 is demanded of them : " experienced nurses " are 
 the first necessity ; but as a rule they are not 
 engaged like other functionaries, because they are 
 specially qualified to handle the material entrusted 
 to them. Grooms and gardeners are supposed to 
 know something about the nature of the horses, 
 or the conditions of plant life, with which they 
 have to deal : valuable property might be injured 
 by their ignorance or want of skill. Children 
 alas ! demand, as most parents think, no special 
 understanding or management. It is not recog- 
 nized that their sensitive and tender natures 
 require to be dealt with by persons qualified by 
 temperament and instruction ; so that nurses as 
 a class, though they may have some small know- 
 ledge of the physical bringing up of children, are 
 wholly unfit to deal with the complex life given into 
 their charge. They are even too blind and ignorant 
 to be aware of the difficulties of their task. They 
 govern by rule of thumb, kindly if they are kindly 
 women, harshly and oppressively if they are the 
 reverse ; their nursery management consists 
 mainly in repressing activity, levelling individuality, 
 obtaining obedience at any cost when possible, 
 and fostering vanity and emulation. Ordinary 
 nursery life is a tissue of dreariness, ennui, and 
 repression. 
 
 The life of the schoolroom, which succeeds 
 
Introductory. 9 
 
 that of the nursery, is after the same pattern. A 
 governess is engaged to teach probably two 
 languages besides her own, music, arithmetic, 
 history, and every other subject needed for the 
 curriculum of schools. In her there will probably 
 be more ability to treat the children, but she will 
 doubtless share the educational perplexity of the 
 parents, and it will soon be found that the boys 
 of the family are " beyond the management of 
 women," and must be sent to school ; while the girls 
 are left to submit to or to rebel against, the rule of 
 the schoolroom, as the case may be, and to pick 
 up what knowledge is possible under such imper- 
 fect provision of instruction. And the same want 
 of guiding principles of action is shown in the 
 choice of schools. How few parents carefully 
 inquire into the government and methods pursued 
 at any school they select ; how few consider in 
 what way the ends of parental care will be 
 furthered by school-life ; how few choose this or 
 that particular school for reasons of a real educa- 
 tional value ! 
 
 In families where there is less material wealth 
 and an equal ignorance of practical education, 
 some of these evils are intensified : the nurses are 
 of a commoner type, the governess less capable, 
 the schools of a presumably lower class. On the 
 other hand, where the scale of wealth is still 
 
io Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 lower, the children get the advantages, such as 
 they are, of State education joined to a closer 
 family life, and also the training in usefulness, 
 intelligence, and self-dependence often to be found 
 where every member of the household is expected 
 to contribute to the common good. 
 
 But in all classes we find a fatal want of 
 educational ideals, with an equally fatal powerless- 
 ness of adapting educational means to ends. A 
 definite aim, however, a clear knowledge of what 
 is desirable to attain in the training of children is 
 essential ; for their education must be accomplished 
 in the life of minutes and hours, in infinite small 
 degrees ; and the great division of the work 
 makes it difficult to keep the goal of the 
 labour always in view, and to see how each part 
 will tell on the whole. The author of " Natural 
 Religion " forcibly states this first need in rational 
 and successful education : 
 
 " Look, then, how the English people treat 
 their children. Try to discover, from the way 
 they train them, from the education they give 
 them, what they wish them to be. They have 
 ceased, almost consciously ceased, to have any 
 ideal at all. Traces may still be observed of an 
 old ideal not quite forgotten : here and there a 
 vague notion of instilling hardihood, a really 
 decided wish to teach frankness and honesty, and 
 
Introductory. 1 1 
 
 in a large class, also good manners ; but these 
 are, after all, only negative virtues. What 
 do they wish their children to aim at? What 
 pursuits do they desire for them ? Except that, 
 when they grow up, they are to make or have 
 a livelihood, and take a satisfactory position in 
 society, and, in the meanwhile, that it would be 
 hard for them not to enjoy themselves heartily, 
 most parents would be puzzled to say what they 
 wish for their children ; and, whatever they wish, 
 they wish so languidly, that they entrust the 
 realization of it almost entirely to strangers, being 
 themselves, so they say and, indeed the Philis- 
 tine or irreligious person always is much engaged. 
 The parent, from sheer embarrassment and want 
 of an ideal, has in a manner abdicated, and it has 
 become necessary to set apart a special class for 
 the cultivation of parental feelings and duties. 
 The modern schoolmaster should change his 
 name, for he has become a kind of standing or 
 professional parent." 
 
 But no schoolmaster, however wise, can supply 
 the omission of early parental care, which must 
 begin at least with the life of the child in the 
 cradle. It is true I have known enlightened 
 people who rated so highly the special gifts needed 
 in the early training of children that they were 
 sceptical of finding them in ordinary families, and 
 
1 2 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 advocated children being sent from home (I do 
 not know at what age) to the care of those who 
 possessed these peculiar qualifications for training ; 
 - btrt in modern life, where numbers of homeless 
 little ones have been collected together, it has 
 been found that the best way of training them even 
 into useful human beings, has been to put them 
 into small groups under the guardianship of a 
 factitious mother or father, and thus imitate in 
 some sort the essential features of family life. 
 As far as we can see there is, and should be, no 
 escape from the sacred obligations of parental 
 duty. We must look to parents and to none else 
 for radical improvements in the early training of 
 children : we can appeal to none, if not to them, 
 for a truer justice towards those who are involun- 
 tarily dependent on them; and we must trust that 
 with a finer conception of their duty to offspring 
 they will see a first obligation in preparing them- 
 selves for the duties of parents. 
 
 In the following " Notes " I address myself 
 with some confidence, though with due humility, to 
 parents. I believe so much in both the nobility 
 and the difficulty of their duties to their children, 
 that I think they will be willing to weigh the 
 results arrived at through the experience of 
 another educator, that they will receive with 
 some interest her views concerning the aims to be 
 
Introductory. 1 3 
 
 striven for in the daily education of children, and 
 will consider with some attention the methods 
 she suggests for obtaining certain desirable 
 results. Both the ideals I would present to my 
 readers, and the methods I urge should be 
 employed to attain them, will best be seen in deal- 
 ing with the several divisions of my subject. I 
 will only put in condensed form here what I shall 
 try to elaborate in every one of the following 
 pages. 
 
 The main point is to perceive clearly the 
 ideal to be striven for. It can never be satis- 
 factory in education to aim at less than the 
 highest ; the child given to us to deal with 
 may have within him (I use the masculine 
 form throughout as inclusive of both sexes) all 
 the capacity of excellence to be found in the 
 best of the race : educate him at least as if he 
 had. Do not begin with limitations, they will 
 force themselves upon us soon enough. That 
 must always be a poor ideal that reaches no 
 farther than a repetition of ourselves, or narrows 
 the ambition of the educator to fitting the child 
 for some small niche in the industrial world. We 
 have to educate, as far as is permitted us, a 
 perfect man or woman, nothing lower or smaller ; 
 and in proportion to the faithfulness with which 
 we keep this standard in view will be our measure 
 
14 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 of success. In pursuance of this standard, we 
 must do our best to secure to our child health 
 and full physical development, that the body may 
 be as far as possible a perfect instrument of the 
 mind. We must train the senses to be acute and 
 accurate, the intellect to be keen and clear and 
 strong, disciplined to the power of concentrated 
 attention and the love of work : we must make 
 the moral nature courageous, truthful, loving, and 
 unselfish ; we must foster those spiritual qualities 
 which link ordinary daily life with what is per- 
 manent and eternal. Our task is, to train for life, 
 for useful, honourable life, worthy in being and in 
 doing, begun in mortality, but to reach, we hope, 
 beyond and above it. 
 
Infant Life. 15 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 INFANT LIFE. 
 
 " Man is like a plant, which requires a favourable soil for 
 the full expansion of its natural or innate powers." 
 
 Lecky's "History of European Morals" 
 
 SCIENTIFIC and unscientific opinion agree that 
 the influences affecting the child begin before 
 birth. I do not know how far physiologists 
 believe it will ever be possible to control and 
 direct these influences ; but it seems probable 
 that, with the advance of knowledge and reflection 
 in this regard, men and women will be more 
 impelled by latent physiological convictions, and 
 consequent instincts, into unions good for the 
 possible offspring of their marriage. We see 
 these instincts now operating against glaring 
 physiological unsuitability, such as hereditary 
 madness ; and it is scarcely too much to hope 
 that sooner or later secondary influences which 
 now determine marriages will be repudiated, and 
 unions made which satisfy the whole natures of 
 the men and women who contract them ; unions 
 in which " falling in love " shall be evidence that 
 
1 6 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 while the senses and the fancy are pleased, the 
 intellectual and moral aspirations of both are 
 satisfied, and the sanctification of noble passion 
 follows the mutual attraction of each and every 
 part of the two natures. 
 
 It may be that the most powerful influences 
 affecting the unborn child will always continue to 
 be the fitness of the parents for union, the strength 
 of their love, and their desire for offspring. In 
 the present state of opinion, when these influen- 
 ces are scarcely recognized, others which are ac- 
 knowledged are not strongly enforced. Expectant 
 mothers are enjoined to live hygienic lives for 
 the sake of the coming child ; but they are 
 not educated to think it right or expedient to 
 alter the tenour of their lives in more important 
 particulars for its sake. Yet I think weighty 
 reasons might be advanced to show that the life 
 of the expectant mother should be filled and 
 governed by a sense of responsibility to the child ; 
 and that not only should she avoid whatever is 
 injurious to her physical health, but, regarding 
 herself as the appointed medium of influence to 
 her babe, should actively guard her own mental 
 and spiritual health, " possess her soul in patience," 
 and, serenely receptive, keep herself sensitive to all 
 ennobling influences. It has been divinely ordered 
 that the mother shall wait many months for her 
 
Infant Life. 17 
 
 child. This time is obviously meant to be one 
 of preparation in several directions. We think 
 even a poor mother strangely careless if she does 
 not then provide shelter and clothes. But how 
 more than equally necessary is it that she should, in 
 addition to material comforts, prepare herself to re- 
 ceive the coming gift! If the loveliness and holiness 
 of such gifts were not obscured to ordinary vision 
 by their commonness, could parents ever receive 
 them without befitting humility and reverence ? 
 
 Training, defined to be "directed growth," 
 begins with the birth of the child. It is im- 
 mediately sensitive to impressions of outward 
 things ; these cause it pain or pleasure, and it 
 manifests its resistance to the one and its desire 
 for the other. It feels hunger, and the shock of 
 cold air, and it cries ; it is soothed by food and 
 warmth, it is quiet and sleeps. It very soon shows 
 a sense of its own helplessness and need of human 
 protection and sympathy; and this need should 
 not be disregarded. I know that some good 
 nurses point with triumph to infants "who give 
 no trouble," who will allow themselves to be laid 
 in their cradles, and fall asleep, who are " spoiled" 
 by no rocking or over-much dandling. But I 
 maintain that the traditional lullaby is the natural 
 satisfaction of a natural craving, and cannot be 
 abandoned without proportionate harm. Love is 
 
 B 
 
1 8 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 essential to an infant's well-being; "a babe Js 
 fed with milk and praise," tender Charles Lamb 
 reminds us, and the mother naturally manifests 
 hers in brooding over it, in giving up time to it, 
 in rocking, and moving, and soothing her child 
 in many manifold ways ; and if " beauty born of 
 murmuring sound shall pass into " its " face," 
 how much more subtly shall love pass into the 
 spiritual seedling, and nurture it into ampler life ? 
 Again, we are often told that crying is good for 
 the child ; but we have to remember that crying is 
 its protest against pain, in a greater or less degree, 
 and this warning cannot be neglected with impunity. 
 We may take it as an axiom, that the healthier 
 and the better managed the babe is, the less it 
 will cry. I do not pretend to give here directions 
 for the physical care of infants ; these can be 
 found in many good treatises devoted exclusively 
 to the subject ; I wish only to touch upon one or 
 two points where the physical management of the 
 infant involves its moral training, and I regard 
 the avoidance of crying as a very important step 
 in the latter. The baby should have its wants 
 anticipated, to prevent its crying to express 
 them, and attention should be given to it quietly, 
 promptly, lovingly ; it should never be needlessly 
 thwarted in its desires, never made passionate 
 by inattention or resistance ; it should be kept 
 
Infant Life. 19 
 
 serene and happy, and this care should extend to 
 every moment of an infant's day. With a recur- 
 rence of actions at stated times, habits are formed, 
 and the child will soon fall into sleeping and 
 taking its food at regular intervals. These should 
 be carefully, though not too rigorously, observed. 
 I have known conscientious mothers prefer to let 
 infantscry with hunger, rather than feed them before 
 the allotted time; but it is reasonable to believe that 
 the physical wants of even new-born infants may 
 be subject to some variation, and the sympathy of 
 the mother will lead her to study and gradually 
 interpret the baby's desires. This subtle guide 
 sympathy is first awakened by very simple needs. 
 The mother's first lessons are comparatively easy ; 
 accepting them, she will find they increase in 
 complexity with the growing life of the child ; and 
 thenceforth, while education goes on, a watchful 
 study of the nature before her will be required of 
 her, until, helped by her own wonderful affinity 
 to it, she learns to put herself in imagination into 
 the place of the child, and to understand what it 
 feels and needs. 
 
 It is difficult to say how soon a baby may cry out 
 of wilfulness, for ends beyond the imperative satis- 
 faction of its wants; the needs of hunger, cold, sleep, 
 change of position, the necessity of movement. 
 
 I am inclined to believe that Rousseau, with 
 
2O Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 subtle perception, has touched upon a truth, when 
 he says that the baby, while experimenting on its 
 surroundings, tries to discover, amongst other ex- 
 periments, how far the power of its own person- 
 ality can reach, how much it can obtain " de 
 1'empire, et de la domination." Very soon, I 
 am sure, the mother has to make it feel that she 
 herself follows a higher law than her own will ; 
 that she seeks the baby's welfare, body and soul, 
 and, having found the path to it, she cannot yield 
 to influences which would lead her to disobey this 
 direction. I believe this to be a fundamental 
 principle of influence. The child soon recognizes 
 that its mother is swayed by no variable mood, 
 by no self-will, anger, or impatience, but by a 
 steadfast love and devotion to duty; and this 
 becomes in time to it a guiding force. 
 
 Thus the training begun even in the first month 
 of its existence, continues as its life unfolds into a 
 larger consciousness of the external world around 
 it ; its senses become alive to more numerous and 
 to different impressions ; it suns itself in the love 
 shown it, and soon answers the smile upon its 
 mother's face ; its education is fairly begun. 
 
 And now, following the example of the gar- 
 dener who places the plants committed to his 
 care in the situation and soil which suits them, we 
 have to arrange that our human nursling shall 
 
Infant Life. 21 
 
 have the best conditions for growth that we have 
 power to command or to mould. And the first of 
 those conditions must be the continued personal 
 care of the mother for the child. It seems 
 strange that there should be any need for dwell- 
 ing upon such an apparently obvious duty ; and 
 yet, as Rousseau insisted upon the obligation of 
 French mothers to nurse and tend their infants at 
 the latter part of the last century, so at the end 
 of this, it is necessary to protest against those 
 customs, those claims of " society/' which make 
 many mothers give over entirely to others the 
 personal care of their children. I know many 
 young mothers will say, " I know nothing about 
 babies ; I should be afraid of the responsibility 
 you say I ought to take ; " or, " If I turn nurse, I 
 should destroy my husband's life, and my own 
 too." I maintain, nevertheless, that the first 
 duty laid upon mothers is to make themselves 
 fit for their responsibility. Young mothers natu- 
 rally must always lack experience ; but thought 
 and thoughtful observation, guided by a conscien- 
 tious devotion, will go far in this, as in all other 
 human obligations, to make up for actual expe- 
 rience, and the life of every day removes the 
 want little by little. Then, as to the second pro- 
 test, I take it as theoretically acknowledged that 
 both parents have joint responsibility in the edu- 
 
2 2 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 cation of the child ; and that though the mother 
 is pre-eminently fitted for the chief care of the 
 offspring, the best powers of both minds will be 
 needed for the gradual and complete develop- 
 ment of the young creature. In proportion as 
 this is granted, the father will be prepared to 
 make some sacrifice of time and comfort for the 
 sake of his child, and the mother, as guardian of 
 the household comfort and happiness, will do her 
 best to harmonize, when her babe is born, the 
 new and old duties. Her husband's brain is 
 active and hard -worked ; she must take care it is 
 not worried by a baby's crying, or incessant need 
 of attention. The man's evenings are his time 
 for rest and recreation ; however devoted to the 
 baby both may be, she must ensure that his 
 quiet reading or music is left undisturbed. It is 
 one of the hardest yet most necessary duties of 
 a woman's life to carry on with attention, har- 
 mony, and serenity the several parallel threads of 
 -her household life ; every one demands her con- 
 stant care, the relation between every one must 
 be kept, and she must be strong enough to fulfil 
 hourly, even momentarily, claims upon her intel- 
 lect, heart, and patience. 
 
 I do not propose, however, that the mother 
 should have no assistance in the care of her child, 
 but I do urge that the assistance she chooses 
 
Infant Life. 23 
 
 shall be entirely subordinate to her. She must 
 never give up to any one the personal oversight 
 of all that concerns it. Whatever assistant she 
 selects should be 'primarily healthy, and equable 
 and gentle in temper, child-loving and capable of 
 devotion, truthful, refined, and intelligent in com- 
 prehending and obeying the spirit as well as the 
 letter of directions. I know young women pos- 
 sessing such qualities are difficult to get, but they 
 are to be found ; and when such a nurse is met 
 with, the mother should treat her with a consi- 
 deration and kindness which will render her life 
 contented and happy. She must remember that 
 even the subordinate care of the best child is a 
 strain upon the powers of mind and body alike, 
 and that the more devoted and excellent the care, 
 the greater is the need of change and recreation. 
 Locke wisely says, " Children should, from their 
 first beginning to talk, have some discreet, sober, 
 nay, wise person about them, whose care it should 
 be to fashion them aright and keep them from 
 all ill, especially the infection of bad company. 
 I think this province requires great sobriety, 
 temperance, tenderness, diligence, and discretion, 
 qualities hardly to be had for ordinary salaries, 
 nor easily to be found anywhere. As for the 
 charge of it, I think it will be the money best laid 
 out that can be about our children ; spare it in 
 
24 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 toys, in silk, and ribbons, laces, and other useless 
 expenses, as much as you please." 
 
 Having secured the right kind of help, the 
 mother should arrange that the room, or rooms, 
 set apart for the child's special use should be as 
 near, instead of as far removed from her own 
 as possible ; indeed, that with due regard to 
 other claims, it shall live, as we have said, with 
 her, and that her eyes, ears, and intelligence 
 should take cognizance of all details of its food, 
 exercise, and rest, so that the routine she sets 
 about it may be subject to the immediate modifi- 
 cation or re-adjustment of her informed judg- 
 ment. The wind is cold, or in the east, and the 
 infant must be taken out of doors where it will 
 have shelter ; the heat is great, and customary 
 clothing must be exchanged for cooler ; its appe- 
 tite flags, or its sleep is less quiet than usual, and 
 the mother should be instantly roused to the im- 
 portance of increased watchfulness. No detail in 
 baby life is too trivial for such daily observation. 
 
 It is needless to say that the nursery of a child 
 must be in harmony with the means and style 
 of living of its parents ; but assuming this, the 
 child's room should be arranged after an ideal of 
 simple beauty. The room should be carefully 
 selected for its cheerfulness and sunniness ; a 
 south aspect is above all others desirable. The 
 
Infant Life. 25 
 
 walls should be covered with soft, delicate colour, 
 or a paper of good design above a serviceable 
 dado of wood. Walter Crane's paper of the 
 Sleeping Princess" is, L think, quite a model for 
 a nursery paper. The sleeping beauty discerned 
 by careful looking, in her screen of leaves, with 
 her attendants, and pet dog in deep repose, 
 awaiting the fresh stir of life typified in the prince 
 who is parting the concealing branches of her 
 bower, sometimes hidden, sometimes revealed, 
 must offer to a child endless occupation and 
 delight. In some of the illustrations of children's 
 books, designed by Walter Crane and others, 
 there are charming suggestions of what an ideal 
 child's room should be. A seat in the window, a 
 low cupboard to which children can have access 
 for their own possessions, may be surrounded 
 with associations of delight which last a lifetime. 
 When carpets of excellent colour and design are 
 easily procurable, there can be little excuse for 
 putting in the child's room a gaudy old-fashioned 
 covering. The present fashion of putting a car- 
 pet in the middle of the room with some border 
 round it, should remain permanent for a nursery, 
 as it renders extreme cleanliness and nicety easy. 
 But if the border be of stained or polished wood, 
 it should not be wide, as children are apt to slip 
 on such margins, and may strain themselves. 
 
26 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 Indian matting might be used if the wood were 
 discarded. Before the carefully guarded fire a 
 soft rug should be placed, an emblem of comfort 
 for the little one. Another rug of soft material 
 that can be easily cleaned should be at hand for 
 the child to crawl on, and lie on with a cushion. 
 Besides the toys and occupations of the child, 
 the other furniture should be chosen with regard 
 alone to the needs and happiness of the child ; 
 as much space as possible should be kept, and 
 nothing put into the room which the child may 
 not handle or touch. Ugly forms in furniture, 
 sharp corners and edges, against which the tod- 
 dling infant may fall, should be absolutely 
 avoided. The coal-box should be kept out of 
 the room, while tables made to the height of tiny 
 sitters (such as are used in Kindergartens), and 
 chairs to match with backs, and presently modern 
 school desks, adapted to the age of the child, 
 should be found in all good nurseries. Pictures, 
 or good photographs or engravings, should hang 
 on the walls : some of birds and animals, which 
 the child can soon understand, and some, I ven- 
 ture to suggest, above its quick comprehension, a 
 fine face, some early Italian Madonna, a copy of 
 Holman Hunt's " Christ in the Temple," or a bit 
 of some Greek frieze, about which the child's 
 thought will gradually twine. 
 
Infant Life. 27 
 
 In arranging in every direction for the right 
 training of the child, it is important that all the 
 servants of the household should be persons 
 capable, at least/ of respecting the educational 
 ideas of the parents, and incapable therefore of 
 falsehood or passion towards it, or of rousing its 
 fear. The child should see nothing but goodness 
 and kindness around it. Ruskin has said lately : 
 " All education to beauty is, first, in the beauty of 
 gentle human faces round a child ; secondly, in 
 the fields, fields meaning grass, water, beasts, 
 flowers, sky ; without these no man can be edu- 
 cated humanly. If the child has other things 
 right round it, and given to it its garden, its cat, 
 and its window to the skies and stars in time 
 pictures of flowers, and beasts, and things, in 
 Heaven and heavenly earth, may be useful to it. 
 But see first that its realities are heavenly." 
 
 And in pursuance of this fine teaching, let us 
 be careful by all manner of means not to trammel 
 the child with our merely conventional modes of 
 thought. It is perhaps too much to expect that we 
 can preserve the balance of its judgment w r holly free 
 until the intellect acquires force to judge justly, but 
 it should be our endeavour not to impose on it our 
 prejudices, our conventional customs, our class 
 distinctions ; we shall do it a serious injury if we 
 destroy its freedom from bias, its lowliness of heart. 
 
28 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 NURSERY MANAGEMENT. 
 
 "The most important part of education is right training 
 in the nursery." 
 
 Plato's Laws, Book I. (Joweti). 
 
 ONE of the first conditions of good nursery man- 
 agement is to make the child's routine of duty 
 pleasant to him. Abundant opportunities will 
 occur later on, to test and strengthen his virtue ; 
 at first establish a habit of goodness. Take care 
 that the child wakes to a cheerful day ; do not 
 rouse him brusquely, let him finish out his sleep, 
 speak to him on waking cheerily, associate your 
 coming with pleasant words and tones, remember 
 how soon may be struck the key-note to a Rosa- 
 mund's " Day of Misfortunes." Have the bath 
 and dressing things ready in orderly fashion ; un- 
 readiness in these small things is certainly bad 
 [ for him morally as well as physically. Let all 
 your movements and your handling be gentl.e and 
 , caressing. A child has a right to use even pas- 
 'sionate remonstrance if soap is smeared into his 
 eyes, or his skin is left half wet, or is rasped with 
 
Nursery Management. 29 
 
 a hard towel, and if his hair is combed roughly ; 
 such treatment would try the patience of an adult, 
 and is quite enough to fill a child's morning with 
 a vague sense of trouble. 
 
 With our endeavour to make the small duties 
 of the day pleasant to the child, we must simul- 
 taneously create a sense of their inevitableness. 
 There should be no question as to the necessity 
 of those things we consider good for him. We 
 must have a clear idea what this is, and this should 
 be carried out without debate, unless exceptional 
 circumstances, such as illness, come to disturb 
 the daily routine. In some households every 
 action of the child is allowed to raise discussion : 
 " Oh, must I go out ?" " Must I wash my hands ?" 
 " I don't like my hair brushed/' " I don't want 
 to go to bed." A gentle, loving firmness in such 
 matters w r ill soon make the youngest child accept 
 the routine we mark out for it as a matter of 
 course, and there will be no crying or discontented 
 remonstrance about each act. If there is, we 
 may be sure, in the case of a well-trained child, 
 there is something wrong with its physical health, 
 which should be investigated and set right before 
 the routine of its life in ordinary health is resumed ; 
 for there is nothing to which human nature either 
 in young or old more cheerfully submits than the 
 inevitable. 
 
3o Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 I cannot insist too strongly upon the necessity 
 of refinement in all dealings with the child. Even 
 refined mothers and good nurses are too prone to 
 disregard the personal reserve which is usually 
 strong in the children of educated parents. This 
 feeling, on the contrary, should be carefully 
 cherished, and trained to control the expression 
 and gestures of the little child. I am far, how- 
 ever, from wishing to make it prudish ; we need 
 not lead it to think the beauty of its little body 
 something disgraceful, because it is the custom in 
 civilized communities to wear clothes ; but it is right 
 for the adults surrounding it, and for the little one 
 itself, that it should be trained in all ways of per- 
 sonal decorum and perfect modesty. The same 
 refined watchfulness should be exercised over the 
 child's eating. When it begins to take food, it 
 should be taught to wait patiently for its bread 
 and milk to get cool ; it should expect it by slow 
 mouthfuls, and pause between them. All eager- 
 ness and greediness should be checked by the 
 mother, who sees that the little one has the food 
 proper for it, nicely prepared, while gentle words 
 present pleasant images to its mind. The best 
 lesson in manners is to banish all nursery meals 
 as soon as possible. As soon as the child can sit 
 up to the table of its parents in its high chair, it 
 should take its food with them, become accus- 
 
Nursery Management. 31 
 
 tomed to see delicacies it is not to have, or even 
 ask for, and behave with the refined quietness 
 and reserve of those about it. It is true, the 
 mother will be more ta,xed by the presence of her 
 child at meals, for she cannot relax her watchful- 
 ness while it is very young. I have seen mothers, 
 at table with their children, attending to every- 
 thing but them, and the little ones behaving in con- 
 sequence more like a set of young puppies than 
 children of decent parents. The mother has to 
 contrive to carry on many threads of life together, 
 but the consequent strain will be repaid in this 
 direction by the good manners of her children. 
 
 There are few things more degrading to the 
 moral nature than fear, " the expectation of 
 pain." Healthy being is impossible under its in- 
 fluence, and one of our earliest cares must be to 
 prevent its even entering the atmosphere of a 
 child's life. Timidity and courage are alike easily 
 developed, and it is the business of parents to 
 foster the latter while avoiding in every way to 
 call the former into growth. It is perhaps not too 
 much to say, that upon the impressions and influ- 
 ences of the first seven years of our life depends 
 our possession of the virtue of courage, or our 
 servitude to the demon of fear. 
 
 Man, both in his early and later years, has a 
 dread of the unknown ; to an infant everything 
 
32 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 is unknown, and it behoves its parents to watch 
 that no new experience should come to it with 
 fear. A sudden sense of helplessness in solitude 
 may be dangerously terrifying to a baby. The 
 dark is terrible, unless always associated with a 
 \ sense of security and the mother's encircling arms. 
 Children should never be put to sleep in a room 
 without some shaded light, and the nurse within 
 hearing of the slightest noise. If not thus quickly 
 reassured on waking by light and attendance, they 
 may suffer agonies of fear long before they can 
 explain what they are feeling. No children, how- 
 ever young, should ever hear disagreeable or 
 frightening things said in their presence. Ghost 
 and goblin stories, murders or terrible descriptions 
 of every kind, such as those in " Blue Beard " and 
 the " Forty Thieves," ugly, uncanny, mysterious, 
 or painful pictures, everything capable of exciting 
 fear, must be avoided by the entire household. 
 An imaginative child will contrive to build an 
 image of dread on the smallest mysterious sug- 
 gestion, which may haunt him for years. I have 
 known a very young child lie awake night after 
 night in agony after hearing two nurse- maids 
 speak of a murder ; the same child had a terror 
 she never forgot from a ghost story told her by 
 an indiscreet governess. Cases of other children 
 are known to me, who, after having been kept 
 
Nursery Management. 33 
 
 from all fear in their own home, heard ghost 
 stories told, for the first time, while visiting, and 
 grew to dread, all through the day, the approach 
 of bed-time, and die dark lonely bedroom in which 
 they lay awake. Many people who look back to 
 similar experiences in their childhood, hold that 
 some such " hardening " process is inevitable and 
 salutary. The battle between unreasoning instinc- 
 tive fear and reasonable courage must indeed 
 come in every young life ; but we should strive 
 that it should come when the faculty of reason and 
 the virtue of courage are cultivated into strength, 
 not when, as in early childhood, the instincts are 
 uncontrolled by any higher faculty, and unchecked 
 by any experience of fact. 
 
 Equally vicious but more visible in result, is the 
 influence of fear inspired by threatened punish- 
 ments, cross words, and angry gestures. We all 
 unhappily know the leaden look, the timid eyes, 
 of children subject to these evils. I have known 
 a sensitive child dread scolding and impatient 
 tones, even when not addressed to herself, with a 
 shrinking which almost made her a coward for 
 life. But the question of the punishment of 
 children has not its place here ; for the moment 
 we have not to deal with faults already engendered, 
 and in need of correction, but with the training 
 of the first blameless years of infancy ; and in this 
 
 c 
 
34 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 training the perpetual sunshine of the moral 
 atmosphere, the light and warmth of tenderness 
 and love, is of all things first needful. 
 
 I have said that a child should be kept in 
 ignorance of fear until it is old enough to learn 
 to be brave ; but the experience and the lesson in 
 courage may come unawares with some of the 
 first impressions of the external world. I saw the 
 other day a baby of ten months old touch with 
 her tiny finger some fur on a dress. It was a 
 new sensation to her, and she shrank from it with 
 a comical horror, rubbing her little hand on her 
 dress as though to get rid of some visible im- 
 purity. But the habit of examining new things was 
 strong in her, and she presently touched the fur 
 again and again, at first with a recurrence of her 
 horror, then with diminishing dislike. The un- 
 known became familiar to her, and gradually she 
 came to touch the passive " pussy " with almost 
 liking. The same child learnt to stroke a gentle 
 spaniel with complacency and love. 
 
 Patient endurance should be trained in the 
 youngest children by encouraging them to bear 
 pain well and bravely. If the infant tumbles 
 down, or knocks itself against a sharp edge, 
 sympathize with it, distract its attention, but do 
 not make a fuss over it, do not let the child 
 exaggerate its pain. A few encouraging words, a 
 
Nursery Management. 35 
 
 kiss, will make it proud to bear its trial bravely ; 
 and with the approval of its parents it will grow 
 even Spartan in its power of endurance. I have 
 known little children beg for the fearful pleasure 
 of being put on the narrow wainscot ledge of the 
 room, to learn to balance themselves, their father 
 standing near to catch them in his arms when 
 the balance could no longer be kept. It is im- 
 portant in this, as in all training, that children 
 should see the example of courage around them. 
 If their mother bears illness, and their father sharp 
 pain, without a murmur, they will feel a respect 
 for endurance which -will lead them to imitate it. 
 I have known children sustained by such courage, 
 who, in times of childish illness, took medicine 
 without a word of protest, and wrung their mother's 
 heart, while they rejoiced it, by the perfect patience 
 and self-containment with which they endured 
 pain and restlessness. Stories of heroism touch 
 the imagination of children, and awaken in them 
 a desire to make experiments in their own courage ; 
 and these experiments form a tradition from which 
 a brave child will be ashamed to turn. A little 
 girl, upon hearing some tales of the voluntary 
 endurance of pain by some Huguenot ancestors, 
 emulated their example by dropping lighted 
 sealing-wax upon her own hand behind a screen 
 which hid all but her face from her sisters. She 
 
36 Notes on the Early Training of Children, 
 
 succeeded in showing that she could bear pai-n 
 without the least sign of betrayal, and she carries 
 the scar to this day. Another little girl of six 
 was watching a swarm of bees by the side of her 
 father. A bee flew round and round her, and at 
 last settled on her face. " Be quiet, H.," her 
 father said, " don't stir, and then it won't hurt 
 you." So she remained perfectly still for some 
 seconds until the bee flew away, remarking, " that 
 if she were so quiet the bee would think she was 
 a post." I remember an old gentleman who had 
 come of a race of courageous ancestors, telling 
 me, that the one fear of his boyhood was the mill- 
 stream that ran near his father's house. He 
 longed to plunge into it, as into other streams, 
 but his dread of it withheld him. At last, 
 ashamed of his fear, he determined to conquer it 
 once for all, and one cold morning, when the light 
 was just coming, he got up from his bed, ran 
 hastily to the stream, and plunged in ; he no 
 longer acknowledged a fear. It was consistent 
 with this act of bravery, that the after-life of this 
 boy was remarkable for its moral courage. 
 
 I now come to the consideration of one of the 
 fundamental conditions of nursery, as well as of all 
 other management the requiring and giving of 
 obedience. One often hears great lamentations over 
 the difficulty of getting obedience from children. 
 
Nursery Management. 37 
 
 A mother will say, without apparent shame, " Oh ! 
 I can't manage him, he is beyond me!" or one 
 hears a child flatly refusing to go to bed, and 
 carried screaming 1 " and kicking upstairs. I am 
 strongly tempted to say that obedience will always 
 be given to those worthy of exacting it ; or rather, 
 that it is given to reasonable claims enforced in a 
 right way. Parents must take care that they are 
 fit to rule, that their government is good for the 
 child, good for the home ; their personal influence 
 should then be strong enough to obtain what 
 they wish with their children. They must not 
 be despots, demanding acquiescence in arbitrary 
 decrees made for their pleasure merely ; the child 
 must feel that every wish of his parents is in 
 harmony with their consistent and never-failing 
 endeavour to secure his welfare. I think even 
 an infant feels this, and that its mother, in grant- 
 ing or denying it the gratification it cries for, is 
 acting in obedience to a higher law than caprice. 
 Any infringement of this law is soon understood 
 to be not a matter of question, it is impossible. 
 But a mother may sympathize with the pain her 
 denial causes, and she should soften the refusal 
 by her loving words and gentle manner. Thus 
 the child grows to recognize, day by day, the law 
 by which she and he are governed, and the habit 
 of obedience is begun. 
 
38 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 We still unhappily hear of " breaking " a child's 
 will, but I hope the expression is only used by 
 very narrow or very ignorant persons. For it is 
 to the will, the outcome, the energy of the whole 
 nature, that we must look for all that is strong 
 and valuable in the future life of the young crea- 
 ture ; it is criminal to speak lightly of " breaking " 
 such a force. What we have to do with it in 
 early training is to direct it to desire what it ought 
 to desire, to strengthen, and to develop it. Let 
 us consider the way of doing this in very young 
 children. Take a time when the mother and the 
 child wish different things, say the hour for going 
 out, and he is intent in watching the kitten, or 
 is interested with a new toy ; he objects to be 
 dressed for his walk. Do not hastily snatch away 
 the plaything, or disturb his rapt attention ; turn 
 his thoughts to something different, something 
 which interests him in another direction, speak 
 gently in an animated, loving way, remind him 
 of the pleasures he will find in his walk ; and the 
 proof of your management being wise will be in 
 the child's will acting with yours. Again, if a 
 child in the drawing-room discovers an attractive 
 employment in pulling threads off a fringe, or 
 tries to draw towards him some bright china on a 
 shelf or low table, do not hastily take him up, and 
 put him down at the other end of the room, call- 
 
Nursery Management. 39 
 
 ing him naughty and " tiresome." Do not put 
 physical obstacles of any kind in the way of 
 his returning to his destructive amusement ; but 
 gently shake your head, and say, " No, no ! " And 
 immediately give him his own toys to occupy him. 
 Have blocks at hand, or let him play with a paper- 
 knife, or something new to him which he can- 
 not hurt ; make, in short, his obedience to your 
 rule pleasant and unconscious, and you will be 
 strengthening a habit which will assert its power 
 when obedience cannot be made agreeable. 
 
 If you do not succeed in dealing with the 
 child's wilfulness at any one time, do not be afraid 
 to acknowledge you were less wise than the 
 occasion demanded ; another time you will do 
 better. Training children is so great an art, that 
 with every desire and effort to get proficient in 
 it, some mistakes are almost unavoidable, and 
 you must not be unduly discouraged by them. I 
 repeat make the daily routine of the child's life 
 pleasant to him, its duties inevitable, and you 
 will find obedience will follow your just demand 
 of it. 
 
 With children whose training has not begun in 
 the cradle, respect certain considerations in th'e 
 exaction of obedience. Do not make a multitude 
 of laws. With children, as with adults, legis- 
 lation, unless absolutely necessary, is pernicious. 
 
40 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 Do not command what you have not the power 
 to enforce : in a struggle of wills the adult is 
 always liable to defeat. A child, as the weaker, 
 can certainly be turned out of a room, or locked 
 into a closet, but you cannot control its muscles 
 or its inclinations by force ; unless you can touch 
 the motive power within it you are actually 
 powerless. Almost before it can understand the 
 full force of what you say, explain to the child 
 the reason of the obedience you claim. The 
 youngest healthy child, is a reasoning creature, 
 and if he sees why a thing is or is not to be 
 done, his obedience will not only be more readily 
 given, but he will gradually gather the faith that 
 those about him are guided in their claims upon 
 him by a loving desire for his welfare. In saying 
 this I do not forget that the finest obedience is 
 given in faith, supported only by the authority 
 claiming it; but the reason is a valuable aid 
 in training towards the unreasoning, soldier-like 
 form of the virtue. Do not ask of a child tasks 
 beyond his strength. Remember his weakness, 
 and that every power and virtue in him is neces- 
 sarily feeble : if you do not apportion his trial to 
 his powers, active or passive, you deserve defeat, 
 and run the risk of injuring the growing goodness 
 of the little one. When it is hard for him to 
 give up his will to yours, encourage him by your 
 
Nursery Management. 41 
 
 loving approbation ; let him feel the sunlight of 
 your love in his struggle to do right. 
 
 There is another, and too much neglected, in- 
 fluence in the management of children which 
 we should not fail to exercise keeping faith with 
 them. They ought to be able to have entire re- 
 liance upon our word. I need scarcely say there- 
 fore, it is eminently necessary we should promise 
 nothing rashly, either of good or evil. We hear 
 a child confide to his companion, " Mamma said 
 she'd punish me if I slid down those banisters, 
 but I'm sure she won't, you know." Or, to 
 encourage a child's effort at self-government in 
 some direction, the mother promises to carry him 
 up to bed ; and we hear, " Mother promised to 
 carry me up to bed her own self, but she has 
 forgotten and gone out ! " Adults are quick 
 to acknowledge the necessity of steadfastness in 
 government for themselves ; it should not be 
 difficult to recognize the same necessity in the 
 management of children. 
 
 There is another form of keeping faith with 
 children which will present itself to the educator. 
 Their minds, as we have seen, soon become 
 occupied with some of the mysteries which sur- 
 round them death, immortality, but especially 
 their own origin, moves their wonder and curiosity. 
 And in answering their questions, we have very 
 
42 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 often to face the impossibility of telling them 
 all the truth about things unfitting their age, 
 while it is incumbent upon us to guard the trust 
 existing between them and us, and equally ne- 
 cessary that we should respond to their desire 
 for information in such a manner as to set their 
 minds at rest. The ordinary way of dealing 
 with these difficulties is either to say, " Little 
 children must not ask questions ; " or to try the 
 effect of evasion, " The storks bring little chil- 
 dren ; " or, " Your baby sister was found in the 
 cabbage bed ; " or, " The doctor brought baby 
 in the night." To either mode of answering, 
 the objections are obvious. To a child whose 
 questions are habitually encouraged, the first is 
 absurd, while evasion will scarcely satisfy intelli- 
 gent children. Loyal to the faith existing be- 
 tween parents and children, I think it is better to 
 explain that there are many things we will gladly 
 tell the child when he is older, but that we must 
 both wait for that time. Or we may make him 
 feel that the new baby is a heavenly gift to his 
 mother, in such a manner as to arrest further 
 questioning. But different children require varied 
 treatment ; I have known one sweet mother who, 
 with a directness and courage peculiarly beauti- 
 ful, gave her child, in answer to his questions on 
 this subject, something of the facts in simple, 
 
Nursery Management. 43 
 
 grave words, impressing him at the same time 
 that it was a matter sacred to him and to her, 
 and not to be lightly spoken of. Her confidence 
 was rightly taken 'and justified. Children have a 
 wonderful instinctive tact which may be relied on 
 to check questions on such subjects, if once we 
 communicate to them the serious reverence with 
 which we ourselves regard them. 
 
 We must habitually train ourselves to remem- 
 ber that our intercourse with children must always 
 be guided and controlled by a sense of our 
 educational responsibility to them : they are so 
 completely in our power, so unable to alter in- 
 fluences affecting themselves. Grown-up people 
 are too apt to ignore the presence of children. 
 They are perhaps full of their own interests and 
 wishes, and forget that children are not bits of 
 inanimate furniture. I need hardly point out the 
 many injurious ways in which this forgetfulness 
 acts. The acute little listeners hear perhaps in- 
 formation and gossip, harmless enough in itself, 
 but not fitting their age or discretion ; or things 
 are said in their presence which are destructive 
 of their reverence for others, or of their freedom 
 from conventional prejudices. This is irreparable 
 mischief. In other instances the results are less 
 morally harmful, but more embarrassing. " Oh, 
 Mr. S." a child may say, " I heard mother say 
 
44 Notes on the Early Training of Children, 
 
 you was going to marry with Miss A. ; " or, " I 
 heard Uncle R. say that Mr. D. was an old cur- 
 mudgeon/' And it is whispered (also in the pre- 
 sence of the children) " that little pitchers have 
 long ears/' and we must beware of " les enfants 
 terribles." I have known a sensitive child suffer 
 a small martyrdom from having subjects unfit for 
 her to hear discussed in her presence, both her 
 conscience and her sense of refinement being 
 outraged. Children of even four or five years 
 old are fairly reasonable creatures, and are cer- 
 tainly full of sensitive feeling. Their self-poise 
 and self-respect are grievously wounded by their 
 very existence being ignored. You hear a not 
 unkind mother say of the child at her knee, " Oh, 
 don't ask what is the matter ; Mary is sadly out 
 of temper to-day ; " or, " She has been sulking 
 ever since the morning." Now, if we try to under- 
 stand either state of feeling in the child, we may 
 discover it is suffering physically, or has been 
 jarred mentally by some stupidity on the part of 
 its nurse, or is smarting under treatment it be- 
 lieves to be unjust. It wounds it deeply to have 
 mis-statements made concerning it to indifferent 
 visitors, or to feel that the grown-up world about 
 it has no comprehension of it, and is full of 
 injustice. 
 
 Again, granting that a child is sulky and ill- 
 
Nursery Management. 45 
 
 humoured, we are bound to shield his dignity, his 
 reputation, so to speak, from indifferent visitors ; 
 and- he has a right to feel hurt and angry if we 
 fail in this consideration. Moreover, our influ- 
 ence is seriously impaired if the child finds that 
 we can speak lightly to others of some fault 
 which to him we have made of grave importance. 
 M. Taine, in a sketch of Prosper Merimee, tells 
 how once when, as a boy, he was severely scolded 
 for some fault, and had been sent out of the 
 room in tears and deep dejection, he heard 
 through the door, a laugh, and some one saying, 
 " The poor child ! how angry he thinks us ! " 
 " L'idee d'etre dupe le revolta," adds M. Taine ; 
 and he refers Merimee's self-repression, his suspi- 
 cion of confidence in after-life, to such treatment. 
 " To act and write as though always in presence 
 of an indifferent or mocking spectator, or be 
 himself that spectator/' was a marked trait of his 
 character. 
 
46 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE EMPLOYMENT AND OCCUPATION OF 
 CHILDREN. 
 
 " Behold the child among his new-born blisses, 
 A six years' darling of a pigmy size ! 
 
 # # # # 
 
 " Delight and liberty, the simple creed 
 Of childhood, whether busy or at rest." 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 " I deem it wise 
 To make him Nature's playmate." 
 
 Coleridge. 
 
 " ANATOMISTS tell us," says Professor Bain in his 
 " Education as a Science/' " that the brain grows 
 with great rapidity up to seven years of age ; it 
 then attains an average weight of forty ounces (in 
 the male). The increase is much slower between 
 seven and fourteen, when it attains forty-five 
 ounces; still slower from fourteen to twenty, when 
 it is very near its greatest size. Consequently, of 
 the more difficult intellectual exercises, some that 
 would be impossible at five or six, are easy at 
 eight, through the fact of brain growth alone/' 
 
Employment and Occupation of Children. 47 
 
 This important fact of rapid brain growth under- 
 lies the theory of educationalists concerning the 
 time when children should begin to receive serious 
 and systematic instruction should begin their 
 " book-learning." But like many other great facts, 
 it yet affects too little the practical mode of 
 education. It is true we are shocked to know 
 that Swift could read a chapter of the Bible 
 at three years old, and that John Stuart Mill 
 learned Greek at the same age ; but there still 
 obtains a great deal too much anxiety, at home 
 and at school, to press children on to learn from 
 books, and very little apparent content with the 
 period of fruitful idleness that every child should 
 enjoy. The fact that Professor Bain thus men- 
 tions, would seem meant to teach us, that we 
 must watch with the greatest care external mani- 
 festations of the development of the brain ; that 
 we must avoid stimulating a growing intelligence ; 
 and, content to let it grow after its own fashion, 
 hesitate to press upon it our means of develop- 
 ment. 
 
 Guided by these fundamental rules, we shall 
 come to recognize these first years as a time 
 above all valuable in the child's education. It is 
 a time given him to learn directly from objects, 
 instead of at second hand from books ; a time of 
 practice for the senses, when through the concrete 
 
48 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 the child arrives at ideas of the abstract ; when he 
 is, in fact, learning after his own fashion to spell out 
 the Universe, and discovering, bit by bit, his rela- 
 tion to the great system of things. Our parental 
 care can assist the child to learn these first great 
 lessons : how can we dare to mar them ? 
 
 This, then, is the task set before us : to see that 
 the infant is supplied with material for its obser- 
 vation, to help its experiments upon this material 
 when help is needed, and to secure free exercise 
 for its activity in all possible directions. 
 
 During the first two years of his life the child 
 takes matters pretty much into his own hands. 
 He is learning nearly all through his waking hours, 
 but he learns almost independently of us. The 
 light, and colour, and sounds which attracted his 
 earliest observation, continue to be his study as he 
 grows older ; indeed everything which his senses 
 discover awakens his wonder, becomes food for 
 his experiments repeated over and over again, and 
 the results are laid up in the storehouse of his 
 memory. The use of every muscle, and combi- 
 nation of muscles, has to become familiar, and 
 then perfect, by constant repetition ; he first 
 grasps the finger extended to him, then he draws 
 the object grasped to his mouth, but he has to 
 learn, through many mistakes, the distances that 
 lie between his hand, or his mouth, and surround- 
 
Employment and Occupation of Children. 49 
 
 ing objects. When he first tries to crawl, to 
 stand, or to walk, when he begins to make articu- 
 late sounds, his activity is again increased, and 
 his days are full of- the new accomplishments. We 
 have to do little more than to encourage his self- 
 sought lessons indoors, and out of doors, to learn, 
 as Dr. Abbott 1 wisely warns us, not to distract 
 his observation by a too rapid change of objects, 
 and to be ready with tender patience to carry him 
 again and again to one spot or another, to let him 
 handle, or smell, or hear the same thing over and 
 over again. The other day I showed a baby of 
 eleven months a vase full of chrysanthemums of 
 varied colours. The sight was so full of interest 
 to her it occupied her delighted attention for 
 nearly an hour. She watched the flowers solemn- 
 ly ; then I lifted the vase close to her little face, 
 and bade her smell them. She wished to grasp 
 one of them, but I showed her how to touch one 
 and another lovely disc of colour with her tiny 
 finger without harming it. We put the vase in 
 its place again, but once more she wished to have 
 the flowers near to her ; once more the examina- 
 tion of them went on ; again her sight, and smell, 
 and touch went through their pretty exercise, and 
 her sweet attention was given with a grave, pleased 
 happiness. It was a typical example of a child's 
 1 " Hints on Home Teaching." 
 
 D 
 
50 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 undisturbed, but assisted, learning from the objects 
 around it. 
 
 When the child seems to demand fresh material 
 for his activity, we must be guided by the interest 
 he shows in what we present to him, and furnish 
 him with that which seems next in the order 
 demanded by his natural development. Size, 
 form, number, weight, spaces, will probably next 
 attract his curiosity, and lead him to comparison. 
 Pictures, particularly those in colour prepared by 
 the good artists who have taken this department 
 of education into their hands, Walter Crane, the 
 Caldecotts, Kate Greenaway, show the child in 
 another form, the objects which are his alphabet, 
 and he listens with delight to the stones we tell 
 about the cats and dogs, the trees and children, 
 in the favourite books. His sympathy is awakened, 
 while his eyes are instructed and charmed. 
 
 But very soon the little one will demand more 
 of us ; observation, however fascinating, will not 
 alone satisfy him ; he must himself be busy. Toys 
 and games become his serious occupation. With 
 perhaps an inherited sense of the dignity of labour, 
 he begins to foreshadow the employment of his 
 later years; his imagination is impressed by the 
 work of the grown-up world, and he invents 
 mimic imitation of it. Supply a boy with wooden 
 bricks, and he will build towers, and bridges 
 
Employment and Occupation of Children. 5 1 
 
 farm-buildings, and railways. Give him a Noah's 
 ark, and he will arrange a stock-farm, or 
 Zoological Gardens ; a cart, and he becomes the 
 carrier, or the miller. With a doll, the girl 
 simulates the mother's labour of love ; she car- 
 ries it in her arms, she rocks and sings to it, 
 presently she will wash and sew for it ; no 
 trouble is too much for her. Give a child 
 a garden, and though he may first begin by 
 pulling up the plants to see if they are growing, 
 he will presently become a landscape or market 
 gardener. Children will find and make for them- 
 selves in games an infinite variety of employment 
 if we leave them to themselves with constant 
 regard to their spontaneous activity. 
 
 And training in all directions should go on 
 with new activities. It costs a child less effort, 
 perhaps, to destroy than to preserve or construct. 
 The baby is tired of its pictures, and throws them 
 hastily away, creasing or tearing the pages, 
 perhaps. It lies with us to smooth the rumpled 
 paper, to put away the book for another time, with 
 a playful word, to show the little one its mother's 
 love for useful or beautiful things. The blocks 
 that have been used in the creation of homesteads 
 and railways are scattered over the floor, a new 
 interest has come, and with a child's natural want 
 of foresight, the toys so cherished a few moments 
 
5 2 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 before, are now only troublesome, and to be got 
 rid of at any cost. The mother must remind him 
 that he will need his darling bricks again, and she 
 will lovingly encourage him to bravery and the 
 effort to put them back in their box, helping him 
 the while. Or the little one, from perhaps some 
 physical cause, is restless, and bemoans himself. 
 " I am tired of playing at this." " What shall I 
 do now ? " or, " I want something to do, mummie." 
 Kneeling on the floor beside him, the mother can 
 re-awaken his flagging pleasure in his game, can 
 rouse his imagination about it, direct it with fresh 
 interest. The cart can be travelling to and from 
 a new place, or it can become, in the wonderful 
 colour of a child's fancy, the instrument of another 
 merchant. Presently, when the effort has been 
 made, the mother, if she be wise, will avoid strain- 
 ing the patience too far, and will herself suggest 
 some fresh game. 
 
 Self-dependence, patience, perseverance, steady 
 effort to understand a thing, to get the best out of 
 it, determination to overcome difficulties, should 
 be first learned by children in their play, when 
 they become old enough to nlake conscious effort ; 
 and these beginnings of character should gain in 
 power every day. f 
 
 In the Kindergarten, we have a system which 
 recognizes the necessity of activity in little chil- 
 
Employment and Occupation of Children. 53 
 
 dren, and formulates their occupations ; and when 
 nurses are trained for their business, and have at 
 command some of Froebers wise and beautiful 
 ideas, the life of tiny children will, doubtless, 
 gain enormously in intelligence and happiness. 
 The ideas conveyed in concrete form, the gentle 
 leading from one mental step to another, the asso- 
 ciation of children in games and occupations, are 
 all delightful training, if kept subservient to a 
 paramount conception of education. But one of 
 the great difficulties in this period of life is to avoid 
 making occupations obligatory, and over-systema- 
 tizing. We have to respect the spontaneity of the 
 child ; we have to be careful not to disturb un- 
 necessarily its healthy absorption in its own ideas. 
 Children " grow in sun and shower," in " the 
 silence and the calm of mute, insensate things ; " 
 they have spiritual food imperceptible to our 
 coarser sight, and we must often stand aside and 
 meddle not. I remember one of my own children, 
 a little girl of six, being taken to the sea-side one 
 summer, and her spending not only hours, but 
 days in delighted contemplation of the new beauty 
 around her. Sitting under the foliage of some 
 tamarisks, she looked down at the sunny sea, 
 talking to herself and her doll ; she could scarcely 
 be persuaded to come in to her meals. I have 
 another vivid picture of a period, when another 
 
54 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 child seemed to live in his own thoughts, sitting 
 on early summer mornings, in his little chair, under 
 a verandah, watching the exquisite life of green 
 things and animals around him. One such morn- 
 ing he looked so quietly happy, that I put my arms 
 round him, and said, "You're a happy little boy to 
 enjoy this sweet day." He replied, as though he 
 had been pondering deeply on the subject, " The 
 cows are more amusing animals than the sheep, 
 mummie." The sheep were lying resting in the 
 shade. 
 
 A young teacher, experienced in High School 
 and other teaching, was remarking to me the other 
 day, that this sort of quiet life, when tKe child is 
 allowed to grow after its own fashion, receptive 
 of the best natural influences, is almost lost now 
 in the pressure of intellectual instruction. The 
 modern children are sent in their earliest years to 
 Kindergarten, and then to High Schools, or their 
 equivalents ; examinations begin early, and follow 
 one another in rapid succession. The little ones 
 have no time to think their own thoughts, select 
 their own intellectual food, or develop after their 
 own pattern. They have not even time for real, 
 refreshing play, this young lady lamented, "It 
 makes me quite sad. We are no longer bringing 
 up real, sweet, fresh children." 
 
 If this opinion is justified by wide experience, 
 
Employment and Occupation of Children. 55 
 
 and that it is so there is some evidence to show, we 
 may be assured that no possession of knowledge, 
 no intellectual cleverness, will compensate for that 
 want of assimilation of influence which is neces- 
 sary to the growth of fine human beings. It is 
 with the higher life of young creatures as with 
 their purely animal life : we can supply the body 
 with food, but it is the chemistry of the digestive 
 apparatus which converts this into nutrition ; a 
 more subtle chemistry is at work to assimilate 
 instruction, knowledge, influence, into material 
 for the development of faculty, of character, of 
 spiritual nobility. 
 
 As one means of combining occupation and 
 training with no stress upon the brain, we may 
 bring into our service the desire to be useful which 
 is so strong in children. This is shown indirectly, 
 as we have noticed, in the nature of their play. 
 It is observable in walks, which are apt to be very 
 monotonous and dull, if taken merely as a duty 
 to health. In the country, it is true, they may 
 become delightful, informal rambles in search of 
 flowers, ferns, or other natural objects ; but in bad 
 weather, a purpose in going out, a commission for 
 their mother, shopping, something which makes 
 the child of use, is as valuable in satisfying the 
 moral sense as it is in giving interest to physical 
 exercise. Easy household work, adapted to the 
 
56 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 strength of children, is another excellent factor in 
 training. Nothing is more delightful to children 
 than exercise of this kind; brushing with a toy brush, 
 dusting (learning delicacy of handling the while), 
 giving out stores with their mother, filling tea- 
 caddies and sugar-basins, all fulfil this sense of ser- 
 vice. I have watched the delight of little maidens 
 of five, six, and older, who were allowed on holidays 
 to have a wash of dolls' clothes, and who, under the 
 ' shade of a tree, with their tub, and soap and water, 
 went through the various stages of the process 
 with happy industry, stretching their delicate dry- 
 ing lines, and afterwards ironing the tiny clothes 
 with toy irons, heated safely by their nurse. A 
 little cooking stove, given to these same children 
 by a German friend, was also an incitement to great 
 efforts of skill ; Liliputian pancakes, puddings, 
 &c., were produced by its help, to the triumph 
 of the small cooks, who doubtless learned in the 
 amusement something of order, patience, and 
 contrivance. 
 
 Reading aloud to children occupies them in the 
 most fruitful manner at this period of life. To 
 those little ones who have been accustomed to 
 listen to stories from the time they could under- 
 stand a simple narrative at all, the effort of listen- 
 ing with intelligence and attention is slight ; to 
 those with whom this has not been a habit, some 
 
Employment and Occupation of Children. 5 7 
 
 little effort is required to listen with pleasure. 
 But some of the most cherished associations of 
 the family life often cluster round the " children's 
 hour " of reading ; association with the father 
 and mother s time of leisure, with the bright fire- 
 side, or the sunny afternoon under trees, with the 
 scent and sounds of happy summer around, when 
 the children sit entranced with the stories of 
 Grimm or Andersen, the " Feats on the Fjord," or 
 the "Water Babies." Perhaps to such readings 
 may be traced the beginning of a love of books, a 
 delight in literature, which is one of the supreme 
 happinesses of life. ' In the same educational rank 
 I would also put the learning of poetry by rote, 
 the learning it from the lips of the mother. I do 
 not mean the repeating of mere rhyme. I have a 
 great objection to giving children inferior litera- 
 ture. I shrink from teaching them doggerel of any 
 description after they can understand anything 
 better than the couplets we sing to them in lulla- 
 bies. Fortunately, in the abundant collections of 
 poetry that have been made for children, while 
 there are many poems entirely beyond their inter- 
 est, there are a number of our finest poems which 
 appeal to the world of children as thoroughly as to 
 older readers. There are others scattered amidst 
 the treasures of English literature, and it is these 
 which should be taught to children. The delight 
 
58 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 in rhythm is strong in little children, and simple 
 ideas clothed in this form appeal very quickly to 
 them, I have often been surprised to notice how 
 quickly and strongly. I have found children be- 
 tween four and six years of age, love, and repeat, 
 with touching emphasis and beauty, a large variety 
 of English poems, the Percy Ballads as a matter 
 of course, and Macaulay's fine modern ballads ; 
 some of Browning's lyrics, many of Tennyson's, 
 and scattered simple gems of Shakespeare, Cole- 
 ridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and many others. 1 
 
 To this time of learning without lessons I 
 should point as the period of all others for 
 acquiring fluency in speaking foreign languages. 
 Never again will it be so easy for the little ones 
 to learn a language, as it should be learned, by 
 hearing it spoken. The time will probably come 
 when the speaking a modern language will be put 
 in its natural place, before, not after, the learning 
 it from books, and when opportunities of ac- 
 quiring modern European languages will be made 
 a matter of international educational interest. 
 
 1 As there exist many opinions as to what is fit for very 
 little children (witness the numerous collections and selections 
 made for them), I may mention some poems which I have 
 always found great favourites : Tennyson's " When cats run 
 home," Wordsworth's " Lines written in March," Browning's 
 " The Year's at the Spring," from " Pippa Passes," Ariel's Song, 
 Coleridge's "What the Birds Say." 
 
Employment and Occupation of Children. 59 
 
 For the present, parents will do wisely to make 
 great efforts to give to their little ones the real 
 possession of French and German that can be got 
 from the companionship of French and German 
 maids or teachers. Few acquirements will prove 
 in after-life more useful or enjoyable ; and lan- 
 guages can be learned with perfect ease in the 
 ordinary daily life of the household. A child so 
 taught may sometimes translate a French idiom 
 into English speech, or give a German turn to a 
 sentence ; but this is a slight disadvantage in 
 comparison with the knowledge of the language 
 gained, and the natural ease with which it is 
 acquired. 
 
 Singing, as a training of ear and voice, and as 
 /a health-giving exercise, should be encouraged in 
 young children. We cannot tell how early the 
 pleasing sense of musical cadence affects a child. 
 In some children it is blended with the earliest, 
 haziest recollection of life at all, as though they 
 had been literally " cradled in sweet song ; " and 
 we may be sure that the hearing of musical sounds, 
 and singing in association with others, are for the 
 child, as for the adult, powerful influences in 
 awakening sympathetic emotion, and pleasure in 
 associated action. 
 
 Drawing and painting, from the first rude daubs 
 of colour and primitive scratches which children 
 
60 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 delight in, are employments which have educa- 
 tional value. With a little encouragement the 
 sight may be trained to notice slight agreements 
 or differences in form and colour, and the hand 
 led to use both as primitive means of expression. 
 
 For guidance in the more direct teaching with- 
 out books, which will almost inevitably be de- 
 manded by children in cultured homes, parents 
 should read the early chapters of Rousseau's 
 "Emile;" 1 for with all the writer's faults of con- 
 ception and practice, no one I know of has more 
 thoroughly insisted upon the child's learning 
 directly from nature and natural laws. Treading 
 in Rousseau's steps, we must seize the occasions 
 which arise in the daily life of every family, for 
 giving assistance to such learning ; and this assist- 
 ance is given best of all in the country, where, if 
 it were possible, all children should live for the 
 first ten years, at least, of their lives. A child \ 
 should only be employed or amused indoors 
 when the weather, or the time of year or day 
 makes it impossible for it to be out of doors. The 
 physical exercises which belong to out-of-door life 
 have immense fascination for children ; and the 
 educator will do wisely to teach and encourage 
 every physical art or skill in its due time and 
 season. Dancing, swinging, climbing, riding, 
 rowing, swimming, for girls as well as for boys, 
 
 1 Published by D. C. Heath & Co., Boston. 
 
Employment and Occupation of Children. 6 1 
 
 will not only promote physical development and 
 health, but will foster courage and those mental 
 and moral qualities necessary to the acquire- 
 ment of any skill, or the practice of it in asso- 
 ciation with companions. 
 
 The animals in the home of the child will fur- 
 nish many self-sought lessons : the examination 
 of "pussy's" teeth and fur, and retractile claws, 
 will suggest comparison of the differences to be 
 found in the spaniel or retriever ; and the child's 
 interest will be led to the big cats and dogs the 
 larger carnivora to be found in the countries 
 away from England. The horses and cows will 
 be examples of other kinds of animals, and grad- 
 ually the whole zoological divisions, with their 
 classes and families, will be almost imperceptibly 
 learned. The mother will illustrate each step by 
 pictures, visits, when possible, to the Zoological 
 Gardens, and descriptions of the habitat of foreign 
 animals. The same process will go on with the 
 familiar birds, reptiles, insects, and plants. The 
 rice pudding at dinner may suggest questions as 
 to the food stuffs, or where rice comes from ; and 
 the mother will procure pictures or examples of 
 the cereals : she will tell the child of the cultiva- 
 tion of rice in the plains of Lombardy and Patna, 
 and will try to make him realize, in a picturesque, 
 simple manner, the wonders which lie under the 
 
62 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 familiar objects of home. Plants and animals 
 will lead by an easy association of ideas to 
 geography. The mother will try to make the 
 child realize in this direction also what is dif- 
 ferent from his own experience. She will set his 
 imagination to work, she will give him material for 
 geographical ideas in the concrete ; she will take 
 him to a common and show him what a miniature 
 plain is, and allow him to make for himself a 
 range of mountains, with its spurs and valleys ; or 
 let him picture, in an old gravel-pit, the level of 
 the sea, with bays and capes, islands and isth- 
 muses. Then a map, first of the room, then of 
 the village or town, then of the country,, and so 
 on, becomes a symbol illuminated by ideas. 
 
 Sets of real measures are one of the most de- 
 lightful of toys, and teach in another direction. A 
 child will enjoy measuring a room or a lawn, when 
 he has mastered the divisions of the foot or yard 
 measure. He will be happy in proving for himself 
 that eight ounces equal the half pound of sugar, 
 and two pints one quart of water. Fractions are 
 no difficulty when thus taught in the concrete. 
 The idea of square and cubic measures are at 
 once clear, if both are shown by a wooden box 
 made a cubic foot in size, with a lid divided 
 into the 144 inches. Number early attracts the 
 attention of children ; and Mr. Sonnenschein's 
 
Employment and Occupation of Children. 63 
 
 " Number Pictures " will illustrate, in ways de- 
 lightful to them, numbers up to twelve. The 
 use of his cubes and staves will carry them fur- 
 ther in the appreciation of number ; but every 
 step in this, as in all other subjects, should be 
 taken upon the child's lead, never before. Simple 
 geometrical ideas will be helped by the use of 
 the Kindergarten sticks and cubes ; and the 
 placing of these will exercise the imagination 
 and tax the ingenuity and patience of the child, 
 besides giving him occupation day after day. 
 Children taught in this way invent endless games 
 for themselves. They will cause rivers to flow 
 through their gardens and create fountains ; they 
 will make locks and deltas ; and though they may 
 perchance neglect to turn off a tap, and will often 
 cover themselves with mud, w r hat happy hours 
 will be spent by them, in learning, or verifying a 
 few facts for themselves ! 
 
 The easy, natural teaching of physical laws 
 in obedience to the child's demand for it, can be 
 pursued indefinitely. The only barrier to such 
 instruction lies in the scientific ignorance of the 
 generality of parents. Indeed, such lessons de- 
 mand of parents a great deal besides knowledge. 
 The teaching must be clear, simple, natural, pic- 
 turesque ; it must be given in answer to questions, 
 and by encouraging, not stifling, the child's desire 
 
64 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 for information. It must not be given in preach- 
 ing ; the formal didactic fathers and mothers of 
 the type to be found in the books of Mrs. Marcet 
 and Miss Edgeworth are happily out of fashion, 
 and we do not desire to revive the school. 
 Parents will be assured of their success in this 
 kind of teaching, by the vivid interest with which 
 their children will pursue these beginnings into 
 the wider studies of the years that come after ; 
 and by the happiness which attends the acquisi- 
 tion of ideas, and tends to make the life of every 
 day joyful in activity, love, and reverence. 
 
Reverence. 65 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 SOME CARDINAL VIRTUES. REVERENCE. 
 
 " Let parents then bequeath to their children, not riches, 
 but the spirit of reverence." 
 
 Plato's Laws, Book V. (Jowetf). 
 
 IN the story of Christ placing the child in the 
 midst of the disciples disputing who should be 
 greatest, we have a typical example of the ideal 
 attitude of childhood. Without a thought of 
 self-aggrandizement, wholly unconscious, humble, 
 receptive, the little one stands by the side of the 
 great Teacher, a rebuke to those who were full 
 of selfish thoughts, an example of that mental 
 state that must be reached before the adult mind 
 can approach perfection. In its earliest stages 
 of development we see that the child exhibits 
 this ideal attitude. It is helpless, and it seeks 
 protection ; it is ignorant, and it seeks to learn, 
 and seems to the vision of those older 
 
 " Trailing clouds of glory . . . 
 From God who is our home." 
 
 But soon its individuality asserts itself, its activity 
 
 E 
 
66 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 increases, and with the exercise of new powers, 
 its sense of importance to those around it, and 
 delight in their appreciation keeps pace. In 
 more or less degree, it becomes cognizant of the 
 false estimates and conventional standards of the 
 world outside it. 
 
 A new task lies before us ; we have to guard 
 its humility, to teach it the true proportion of 
 things in the mental and moral worlds ; we have 
 to maintain its childlike attitude by training its 
 reverence, that mental state in which the spiritual 
 nature is fit to receive new truth and new influ- 
 ence ; that state in which individuality perceives 
 its small and lowly place in the great scheme of 
 things, in which self is lost in some great idea. 1 
 
 It is a significant fact that neither of the two 
 prominent modern writers on education Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer and Professor Bain treats of 
 reverence in its relation to moral education. I 
 believe the word does not occur in the chapters 
 treating of that division of their subject The 
 
 1 "Yet, however doubtful may be its position, if estimated 
 by its bearing on happiness and progress, there are few persons 
 who are not conscious that no character can attain a supreme 
 degree of excellence in which a reverential spirit is wanting. Of 
 all the forms of moral goodness, it is that to which the epithet 
 ' beautiful ' may be most emphatically applied. Yet the habits 
 of advancing civilization are, if I mistake not, on the whole, 
 inimical to its growth." Lecky's " History of European Morals" 
 
Reverence. 6 7 
 
 omission may be characteristic of the modern 
 spirit, and the critical attitude which is born of 
 it, or it may be that the ideal of human excel- 
 lence conceived by these writers on education 
 does not correspond with that standard which 
 exists vaguely in men's minds. It is true Pro- 
 fessor Bain says, 1 " The briefest glance at moral 
 teaching must not omit the topic of moral ideals. 
 It is in morality more especially that the teacher 
 works by putting forward grand, lofty, and even 
 unapproachable ideals ; the supposition being that 
 the charm and attractiveness of these will make 
 a far more powerful impression than any un- 
 varnished statement of consequences." But we 
 fail to find in his " classification " of "cardinal 
 virtues," his apprehension of " motives," or his 
 survey of the " relationships of society," any 
 strong stimulus to the approach of these ideals. 
 We rise from reading his chapter on " Moral 
 Education " with the melancholy impression that, 
 just at the most critical point of our task, we are 
 left by our guide without any sure support, and 
 with no fixed aim for the guidance of our steps. 
 " The earth is salted by the heroism of the few," 
 he says ; and we must be content, we read be- 
 tween the lines, if we produce average men and 
 women ; we shall then be sure to have well-in- 
 1 " Education as a Science." 
 
68 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 structed, intelligent, honest citizens, in whom the 
 self- regarding and social motives will be well 
 balanced, the emotions admirably controlled, and 
 the affairs of life conducted with a due regard of 
 all obligations. " Remember," says Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer, " that the aim of discipline should be 
 to produce a self-governing being." " The inde- 
 pendent English boy is the father of the in- 
 dependent Englishman." "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 ? " 
 
 But, alas ! for the results, if we educate for 
 what may be safely compassed with an eye open 
 to the mere " business of life." It is true, we 
 must train so that our boy will grow up to take a 
 useful and honourable place in the world, that he 
 should be self-restrained, governing himself by 
 the help of his conscience, that he should be- 
 come a good citizen with sufficient will, foresight, 
 and prudence to shape circumstances, rather than 
 be shaped essentially by them ; but we desire 
 this for him because we aim at the greater which 
 includes it. We will, with God's help, try our 
 best to train the boy for manhood, fitting him 
 for work and usefulness in the century in which 
 
Reverence. 69 
 
 he lives, but otherwise possessing character and 
 aspirations which belong to human excellence at 
 any time, and in any position. We cannot as- 
 suredly educate him, with all our pains, into a 
 finer human being than he is planned to become ; 
 but when can we assure ourselves we have ful- 
 filled the original plan of his nature ? When can 
 we say we have reached the limits assigned to its 
 development in any one direction ? It is a re- 
 verential attitude towards the possibilities in the 
 child's nature which will make great results in 
 education possible. 
 
 Going* back to a time of perhaps less doubt 
 and criticism than the present, we find Milton 
 holding this attitude, and speaking with far less 
 uncertainty either of what we should attempt in 
 education, or of the means to attain it. " The 
 end then of learning is ... to know God aright, 
 and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imi- 
 tate Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest 
 by possessing our souls of true virtue." And 
 again, " Here the main skill and ground-work will 
 be to temper them with such lectures and expla- 
 nations upon every opportunity as may lead and 
 draw them to willing obedience, inflamed with the 
 study of learning and the admiration of virtue ; 
 stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave 
 men and worthy patriots, dear to God and famous 
 
jo Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 to all ages." And again still, " Being perfect in 
 the knowledge of personal duty." 
 
 We find the same thought expressed by Plato, 1 
 " Every man ought to make up his mind that he 
 will be one of the followers of the God ; there 
 can be no doubt of that/' " Then what life is 
 agreeable to God and becoming to His followers ? 
 One only, according to the old saying that ' like 
 agrees with like, with measure, measure. . . . 
 Now God is the measure of all things in a sense 
 far higher than any man, as they say, can ever 
 hope to be. And he who would be dear to God 
 must, as far as possible, be like Him, and such as 
 He is." Now here we have given to us " grand, 
 lofty, and even unapproachable ideals," which 
 touch the noblest chords of the human spirit " to 
 fine issues." 
 
 I know we get on very difficult ground when 
 we seek to discover how far the present want 
 of fixity and earnestness in religious beliefs has 
 affected the ideal in human excellence. But what 
 we have to do as educators is undoubtedly to 
 find an ideal of perennial grandeur, and to train 
 towards it ; whatever we then attain will be at 
 least in the right direction. And parents, whether 
 they believe in a personal God, or in Humanity, 
 or Law, or Natural Religion of any kind, provided 
 1 Plato's Laws, Book IV. (Jowett). 
 
Reverence. 7 1 
 
 that they have a real, earnest belief which 
 governs the secret springs of their life, possess 
 the true source of influence. 
 
 The first dawn, of reverence comes vaguely to 
 the child through its relation to its parents ; it 
 can conceive no abstract notion of goodness, 
 love, wisdom. But the time comes with a larger 
 horizon, when the young creature is forced to 
 measure his parents against other standards. 
 Another idea of perfection arises in him, an idea 
 his parents themselves have fostered, and gra- 
 dually and naturally his love and respect grows 
 into another and bigger, but more indefinite 
 emotion reverence. A child will very early 
 touch upon the mysteries of its being, it will not 
 long be content with the small horizon of the 
 visible and the concrete. It will seek with its 
 infant intelligence to dive into the origin of things, 
 and to grasp with its childish thought death, 
 immortality, omnipotence. Here again is a begin- 
 ning which shall lead him, a child-like learner, 
 through the wonders of life, and even to the por- 
 tals of the grave. How infinitely beautiful and 
 touching is the duty laid upon parents in dealing 
 with this growth of spiritual life ! How sacred 
 is the obligation to deal with it in perfect truth! 
 I have known parents imbued with the doubt and 
 scepticisms of the modern life, who yet thought 
 
72 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 it good that their children should believe, while 
 they could, the orthodox religious views of the 
 time, supposing it to have a healthy influence 
 upon character ; and so the Bible reading, and 
 grace, and prayers were continued in the family 
 life with a sort of fetish devotion. 
 
 I have little doubt that this want of truth 
 between parents and children must come to a 
 disastrous end. We can only really teach what 
 we believe ourselves, and, whether that belief 
 embraces much or little, the reality with which 
 we hold it will make it a religious influence, or 
 the reverse. Let parents be assured that young 
 human creatures crave for spiritual food and 
 guidance under some form or other. I have 
 known parents who have ignored such craving, 
 believing, in their own well-poised philosophy, that 
 it came only from the teaching of priests or bigots. 
 And they have lived to discover their children 
 taking theological yokes and burdens of belief 
 upon them, which far transcended in severity and 
 narrowness the theology they first feared for them. 
 
 But reverence is not to be limited to the atti- 
 tude towards one great idea or personality. It is 
 the very basis of human excellence, and we have 
 to foster it in the training of all intellectual and 
 moral qualities. Throughout every stage of in- 
 struction, we must guard the humility of the 
 
Reverence. 73 
 
 child ; we must impress him through his percep- 
 tion and imagination with the vastness of know- 
 ledge, and the small amount he can ever hope to 
 master. So impressed, he is not likely to think 
 himself very clever or very grand if he makes a 
 little step in attainment. Do not criticize people 
 before him, particularly those who supply any of 
 his needs servants or teachers. I have known 
 children so prone to dwell on the small details 
 and defects of those about them, that larger 
 virtues and goodness were entirely lost sight of. 
 A child should live as much as possible in " ad- 
 miration," and should be taught that respect for 
 humanity which is the basis of all true courtesy. 
 In many small ways this may be made apparent 
 to the child. The old type of " manners " is re- 
 placed by a more natural and more affectionate 
 relation between parents and children, who no 
 longer stand with formal respect behind the chairs 
 of their fathers and mothers and address them 
 as "Sir" or "Madam." But if Punch is a true 
 mirror of manners, the change has been made 
 with a vicious jerk. Fathers are too often old 
 " Governors," who " fork out " liberal supplies of 
 money, and are looked upon as the convenient 
 source of much luxury. The mothers are a dif- 
 ferent edition of the same type, chiefly anxious 
 for the worldly prosperity of their children, and 
 
74 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 possessing little claim upon their respect or real 
 love. It is obvious that we as parents must be 
 worthy of respect, or we cannot claim it with 
 much expectation of getting it. Nevertheless, it 
 is hurtful to the training of reverence if we permit 
 unchecked, as many fond mothers thoughtlessly 
 do, any want of the outward respect due to parents. 
 In words and manners we must teach the child 
 reverential courtesy to the old, the weak, and to 
 those who serve him. Service must be regarded 
 as a favour, a kindness done to him, to be re- 
 quested, never a right to be ordered. Guard a 
 boy's chivalrous respect for women ; for servant- 
 maids as well as for his sisters ; in literature and in 
 life seek that his ideal of womanhood claims all 
 that is most worthy of reverence in him. . Stimu- 
 late reverence for great living men and women. 
 The reverence of people who are realized to be 
 alive at the present moment is a stronger motive 
 for noble aspirations than a feeling awakened 
 towards heroes whose lives can be less easily 
 compared to those of the children. It is said 
 that Pope never forgot the distant sight of Dryden 
 at a book-sale, and it is a great happiness to allow 
 children some personal knowledge of those they 
 are prepared to reverence. To take an intelligent 
 child to a lecture by a great scholar or discoverer 
 is not wasted trouble. 
 
Reverence. 75 
 
 Little children suffer greatly from shyness or 
 fear in the presence of strangers ; but if they live 
 much in their mothers' rooms they should be 
 led to overcome- the first impulsive rudeness, to 
 continue their occupations, and receive kindly 
 advances with respectful quietude. It is bad 
 training for the child, to let it stand with pouting 
 lips, or its fingers in its mouth, sullenly defiant, 
 or intrusive with offensive remarks such as, " I 
 don't like that lady, she's ugly." The mother 
 will do well to remark upon the kindness of her 
 friends who make advances to the children, to 
 notice some pleasant trait in them, and encourage 
 the little ones to do some small office for the 
 visitors ; the handing of a tea-cup, or moving a 
 book, will make the children lose their self-con- 
 sciousness in another feeling. 
 
 The want of reverence which is often declared 
 to be most characteristic of modern children is 
 attributed to the undue importance given by 
 anxious parents to their position in the household. 
 It is true that the welfare of their children, even 
 in the slightest particular, is of the greatest 
 moment to conscientious parents ; but it is the 
 interest of their moral and spiritual natures which 
 should be paramount, and these will never require 
 the sacrifice of other people's convenience. They 
 will never allow the peace and comfort of guests 
 
76 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 to be ignored in attention to trivial concerns of 
 the children of the family. And if these best 
 interests were always kept in view, we should not 
 see, as unhappily we often see now, the teacher 
 whose intellect the parents profess to admire, 
 served at table after a child of six years old, or 
 permitted to step into a carriage after her. Per- 
 haps the best training in reverence the children of 
 a family can have, will be in sharing in the life of 
 their parents, in being allowed to understand, as 
 far as possible, their aims and hopes in life, in seeing 
 them always ready to give up their own gratifica- 
 tion, even the pleasure of their children's society, 
 for the sake of some duty, or in allegiance to 
 some idea. If they see that the life around them 
 is something better than the gratification of selfish 
 pleasures, or even the fulfilment of immediate 
 duties, if they see that it means losing self in de- 
 votion to what is higher and better than oneself, 
 they will be helped to keep in mind the unapproach- 
 able ideal, and, fulfilling the truth contained in 
 Hawthorn's beautiful story of the Great Stone 
 Face, they will gradually grow in its likeness, and 
 learn the truth that Ruskin has expressed, " This 
 is the thing which I know . . . that in reverence 
 is the chief joy and power of life." x 
 
 1 Lectures on Art, " The Relation of Art to Religion." 
 
Truth. 77 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 SOME CARDINAL VIRTUES. TRUTH. 
 
 " Truth is the beginning of every good thing, both in heaven 
 and on earth." 
 
 Plato's Laws, Book V. (Jowetf). 
 
 THE apprehension of truth is an intellectual effort, 
 not an impulse of the moral nature ; and it is 
 necessary to bear this in mind in judging correctly 
 of the virtue of truthfulness. " Truth is the 
 beginning of every good thing : " " Truth is the 
 summit of being," says Emerson. " Certainly it is 
 heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in 
 charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the 
 poles of truth/' writes Bacon in his Essay. Such 
 sentences come into our mind when we ask 
 ourselves, how it is that truthfulness should be 
 regarded by the thoughtful educator, and by the 
 popular sentiment, as such an essential goodness 
 in character as to be the salt wherewith every- 
 thing else shall be salted. Truth in character 
 consists of that quality of mind which seeks to 
 
78 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 recognize the ultimate reality of things the 
 facts which have their origin in God and at- 
 tempts to form a harmony between this great 
 background of final truth and the individual 
 life. It is this mental quality in man, this at- 
 tempted interpretation of the highest and best 
 he knows, which claims our reverence and re- 
 liance, and leads us to put so high a value upon 
 the expression of his knowledge, of his inter- 
 pretation. 
 
 We seize here the idea that lies at the found- 
 ation of the anxiety about truthfulness which 
 pervades most parental minds. We need not be 
 surprised that this anxiety is generally unpercep- 
 I tive and unreasoning. Few discern what essential 
 truthfulness implies, or trace its alliance with the 
 simple telling of truth. But the educator perceives 
 that while his supreme duty lies in cultivating 
 the spirit of truth in the child, in securing that 
 clearness of the intellectual vision, that purity of 
 the moral nature necessary to the reception and 
 transmission of truth, he must also obtain the 
 accurate expression of his knowledge, i.e., he must 
 train him to be habitually truthful ; he must " tell 
 the truth." And indeed, unless a little child has 
 inherited some crookedness of character, or is in- 
 fluenced by any of the motives we shall presently 
 examine, it is natural to him to express in words 
 
Truth. 79 
 
 truth as he perceives it. It is after-influence 
 which causes him to become an unfaithful 
 medium. At the same time we cannot expect 
 that the precious nature of truth will appeal to 
 the understanding of very little children ; even 
 in the maturity of mortal life we only "see 
 through a glass darkly," and while their intellec- 
 tual powers are immature and feeble, it is folly to 
 look for anything like true appreciation of that 
 which lies at the foundation of human and eternal 
 relations. Such appreciation must grow with the 
 growth of the whole being. We must be content 
 to see it in its earliest and in its imperfect form, 
 to tend it, and strengthen it. In the course of its 
 growth we must be even prepared to see it waver 
 and falter in its allegiance, and must still 'sustain 
 our faith in patience, that eventually with the 
 consolidation of character, it will become steady 
 and strong, and, flame-like, embrace " the summit 
 of being." 
 
 I have known parents seriously unhappy at 
 the activity of the imagination in their children. 
 Their dramatic power has seemed to them sad 
 evidence of untruthfulness. But such unhappi- 
 ness is ill-founded. Before the child is burthened 
 with duties and responsibilities, while its own life 
 is unshaped before it, it is free to live in the dear 
 delights and beauty created by its own fancy. 
 
8o Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 With the fairy wand of his imagination, he can be 
 an Aladdin rubbing his lamp, or Robinson Crusoe 
 building his hut in the shrubbery, or a hunter 
 stalking buffalo in the copse of the meadow. He 
 will act out for days or weeks the little drama 
 that has seized his fancy, recounting his ad- 
 ventures to his brothers and sisters the while. 
 Or, to enliven a dull walk, he will imagine lions 
 and tigers in the familiar paths near home, and 
 will tell his mother, on his return, with innocent 
 gravity, that he has seen a lion on the common ! 
 But the lines between reality and drama are 
 generally clearly defined in the mind of the little 
 actor, and we must playfully enter into tlie spirit 
 of his play. 
 
 In this mimic world of imagination children 
 get an activity of feeling and of intellectual 
 exercise which is fitting them for the life of 
 the big world presently to open to them, and 
 are provided with a wealth of happiness to be 
 found, I believe, in no other way. It is a great 
 mistake to narrow the mind of childhood to the 
 grooves of our sterner and more commonplace 
 existence. The grooves will be formed all too 
 soon, and with them, we will hope, will come the 
 larger horizon, the deeper insight, belonging to 
 increased years. But with the appearance of 
 every new power, we must faithfully maintain our 
 
Truth. 8 1 
 
 reverence for nature, and as carefully obey her 
 dictates in leaving the child to live in the charmed 
 world of his imagination, as presently we must 
 set before him the duties which belong to his real 
 position in a world of lessons and other human 
 obligations. We cannot readily limit the part 
 imagination is intended to play in the child's 
 development. It begins to show itself^in games 
 and little dramas, but it is the handmaiden of 
 reverence, and helps to shape the " unapproach- 
 able ideals " by which, and for which, men live. 
 Even in practical life it may grow to " put a girdle 
 round about the earth in forty minutes," or steer 
 Columbus-like to unknown lands of thought. 
 
 In exaggeration we get a mild form of untruth- 
 fulness which claims our attention ; for if the habit 
 is indulged, a child not only becomes accustomed 
 to careless observation and inaccurate statements 
 of facts, but grows to confuse lines of thought. 
 He will tell you, en facon de parler, " There are 
 a hundred rooks on the lawn," or, " That snail is 
 half-way down the wall." He does not mean to 
 be untruthful, and it would be very wrong to treat 
 him as though he did. Nevertheless, as a matter 
 of training in observing the fact before him, and 
 of stating his impression of it, we shall do wisely 
 to recall him to the rooks and the snail. " You 
 don't mean a hundred rooks ; see, we can count 
 
 F 
 
82 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 them easily. There are only thirty ! " or, " You 
 said half-way down the wall ; let us measure." 
 
 The moral nature becomes more dangerously 
 involved when an untruth is told or acted to gain 
 a purpose. Here a variety of motives come into 
 play, and to judge at all correctly of any departure 
 from truthfulness it is necessary to unravel its 
 motive. ^Vith very little children, who cannot 
 yet understand why the obligation of strict truth- 
 fulness should be laid upon them, any small 
 motive of convenience, idleness, or desire is 
 sometimes sufficient to evoke from them a false 
 statement, or a misleading colouring. But 
 parents must not lay stress upon these childish 
 aberrations. The inaccuracy probably belongs 
 to a very passing phase in well-trained children, 
 and it will often disappear with better health, or 
 with stronger development of the intellectual 
 faculties ; and though we must watch well in such 
 cases, and always keep in view the relation of 
 small things to big, we may do a child a serious 
 wrong if we make much of these childish errors 
 of speech. Our training as a whole will justify 
 itself. 
 
 Among motives which instigate a serious want 
 of truthfulness, perhaps the most common is fear. 
 I have endeavoured to show before that this 
 should have no presence in a child's life. In 
 
Truth. 83 
 
 every direction it degrades the moral nature : in 
 this especially it tends to prevent him remaining 
 a medium of truth. He is guilty of some piece 
 of carelessness," he disobeys an order or breaks 
 a bit of cherished china, and under the influence 
 of fear he denies the fact, and runs the risk of 
 becoming habitually untruthful if the dread of 
 punishment is held over him. There are few 
 children who are made of such naturally heroic 
 stuff as the late Sir Henry Lawrence, who, when 
 enticed by his school-fellows to follow their ex- 
 ample and throw a ball in dangerous proximity 
 to a forbidden window, went straight to his mas- 
 ter, " doubtless amidst roars of laughter," says his 
 biographer, with, " I have come to say, sir, I have 
 broken a window." Indeed we have no right to 
 expect heroism from average young creatures yet 
 unfledged in morality. We may be happy if our 
 training eventually leads to it. 
 
 Love may be almost as powerful a motive to 
 untruth as fear, and some of the best children are 
 tempted by a mistaken idea of chivalrous gener- 
 osity to screen a companion from the consequences 
 of a fault by an untruth in word or deed. A boy 
 is asked about some wrong-doing that has gone 
 on in his presence, and refuses to state what he 
 knows about it ; indeed, he is proud if by some 
 semblance of untruth he can lead his master off 
 
84 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 the scent of discovery. Or a school-fellow uses 
 a " crib," or copies the sum of a companion and 
 passes it for his own ; or a boy has spent his 
 allowance, and makes a false excuse to get more 
 money from his father. Here we have another 
 variety of motives leading to untruth in several 
 forms, and the educator cannot shrink from facing 
 the problems brought to him as results of early or 
 mistaken training. 
 
 The generality of the world believe that punish- 
 ment can correct untruthfulness ; no discrimina- 
 tion of motive is thought necessary. Unreason- 
 able as it is, the several kinds of the evil are 
 treated in the same manner. Now, an intellectual 
 perception is not made clearer by punishment, 
 although pain may possibly quicken a child's 
 attention to a fact, or may deter him from making 
 a false statement concerning it. But can we 
 reasonably hope to make by, punishment a radical 
 change in the mind of one who allows various 
 trivial motives to swerve him from the truth ? And 
 this is what we have to set ourselves to do. Sup- 
 pose we accept as reasonable and discriminating 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer's theory of punishment, and, 
 when a child tells an untruth, refuse it credence 
 for a given period. Would not the child soon 
 get to feel that it was of little moment whether it 
 spoke truth or falsehood, since the consequences 
 
Truth. 85 
 
 were the same ? And would not a bitter sense of 
 injustice and anger and despair rise in its heart, 
 to the shutting out of any germ of better 
 life? 
 
 A different result follows from trusting a child. 
 I knew a little girl of three or four who found the 
 first frequent use of her tooth-brush very irksome, 
 and when her mother one day asked her whether 
 she had brushed her teeth, answered " Yes," when 
 she had neglected the duty. Her mother believed 
 her as a matter of course ; but the child imme- 
 diately woke to a sense that she was untruthful 
 to her mother who trusted her. She straightway 
 ran to her room for the duty she hated, and after- 
 wards fully deserved the trust she had abused. I 
 knew a French cook once who, after living two 
 years with her mistress, said, like the Rugby boy 
 
 of Dr. Arnold, " You cannot tell lies to Mrs. , 
 
 she always believes you." 
 
 Canon Farrar, in the course of a lecture de- 
 livered at Cambridge, under the direction of the 
 Teachers' Training Syndicate, told the following 
 story. I take it from the report in the Journal 
 of Education : 
 
 " At Harrow, two boys brought me exercises, 
 marked by the same grotesque mistakes. It 
 seemed certain that those exercises could not 
 have been done independently. Both boys 
 
86 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 assured me that there had been no copying. One, 
 whom I had considered a boy of high morale, 
 assured me of this again and again with passionate 
 earnestness. I said to him, ' If I were to send up 
 those two exercises to any jury in England, they 
 would say that these/ resemblances could not be 
 accidental, except by something almost like a 
 miracle. But you both tell me that you have not 
 copied. I cannot believe you would lie to me ; 
 I must suppose that there has been some extra- 
 ordinary accident. I shall say no more/ Years 
 after, that boy, then a monitor, said to me, ' Sir, 
 do you remember that exercise in the fourth 
 form ? * 'Yes,' I said. ' Well, sir, I told you a 
 lie. It was copied. You believed me, and the 
 remembrance of that lie has remained with me, 
 and pained me ever since.' I am inclined to think 
 that boy was more effectually taught, and more 
 effectually punished, than if I had refused to ac- 
 cept his protest." A well-known educationalist 
 took exception in the next number of the Journal 
 to Dr, Farrar's treatment of the boy. But I think 
 the result proved that his judgment, however 
 painfully tried, was fully justified. 
 
 But again and yet again the question will be 
 pressed upon us, " If ordinary punishments are 
 useless in dealing with untruthfulness, what are 
 we to do ? All children cannot come into our 
 
Truth. 87 
 
 hands free of the taint of untruthfulness ; how can 
 we make a liar truthful ? for it is not to be borne 
 that he remains a liar." First let us begin by 
 banishing from him as far as we can every possible 
 temptation to untruth, whether of fear or desire ; 
 foster his courage, first physically, giving him 
 tone. Then, fear being withdrawn, cultivate his 
 first feeble attempts to be morally courageous. 
 Let him see how you rejoice in his efforts to be 
 brave, and lead him from one step to another in 
 courage. In your intellectual teaching impress 
 him with the majesty of truth, and let him feel the 
 heroism of those men and women who, in their 
 simple fidelity to an abstract idea, have chosen 
 martyrdom rather than the gains of unfaithfulness. 
 Lead him to see how by painful labour and en- 
 thusiastic devotion investigators and discoverers 
 have added grains of truth to the sum of human 
 knowledge. But, above all, address yourself to 
 his moral nature ; strengthen in it the seeds of 
 rectitude. Hold up to him noble standards of 
 life, and so set yourself to develop the goodness 
 you find there, that the weak, the cowardly, the 
 untrue fades away. 
 
88 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 SOME CARDINAL VIRTUES. LOVE. 
 
 " O'er wayward childhood wouldst thou hold firm rule, 
 And sun thee in the light of happy faces ; 
 Love, Hope, and Patience, these must be thy graces, 
 And in thine own heart let them first keep school.' 7 
 
 Coleridge. 
 
 FEW things in ordinary life are more touching 
 than the faith shown by children in human good- 
 ness. I suppose that foundlings and children 
 from bad homes must be deficient in it, but that it 
 is widely distributed is patent to us all. Persons 
 have little virtue indeed, if they disappoint this 
 faith, or do not justify the appeal made to them 
 by the immaturity and dependence of childhood. 
 The child's relation to its parents first awakens 
 this trust At a few weeks old it begins to show 
 happy satisfaction in the presence of its mother, 
 and even distinguishes its father (who does not 
 supply its physical wants) with something of a 
 
Love. 89 
 
 dawning affection ; so soon does the young crea- 
 ture put out the feelers of its love. Members of 
 the household, especially other children and kin- 
 dred with a family voice, or resemblance of man- 
 ner to its parents, readily engage its attention ; and 
 thus in the centre of family life tender germs of 
 love awake and grow, and show promise of those 
 intense emotions which form the supreme hap- 
 piness or misery of after-life emotions which 
 should widen into the love of humanity, and, 
 stretching beyond the visible stimulants of feel- 
 ing, expend themselves in religious admiration, 
 and love of the unseen Spirit of the Universe. 
 In this direction again, we touch in earliest edu- 
 cation tiny threads which stretch beyond the 
 small and the transitory to what is eternal. 
 
 At first sight it seems that the natural exercise 
 of the child's affections has been so well provided 
 in its instinctive love for its parents, and in the 
 area of its home, that the educator has little to do 
 in developing this side of its nature ; but we pre- 
 sently discover that a larger capacity of emotion, 
 a finer quality of feeling, lies within our power of 
 training. Affection can never be purely selfish, 
 for its very existence demands a certain surrender 
 of self to an object out of self. But the parental 
 tie in its rudimentary form, only manifests, in com- 
 mon with the mother animals, devotion, protect- 
 
go Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 ing care, perhaps passionate attachment. Guided 
 by neither intellectual perceptions nor moral pur- 
 poses, parents alternately caress and strike their 
 children, and behave to them in every phase of 
 their growth with similar wants of consistency. 
 The higher manifestations of the parental relation- 
 ship can only be attained by careful self-restraint 
 and culture ; it has to grow fit for the obliga- 
 tions laid on it by thought, by insight, by stead- 
 fast intention ; it has to outgrow the selfishness of 
 love, and see in children, not objects ministering 
 to the gratification of its affection, but put under 
 its care for far other and higher purposes. 
 
 In children, too, we have first to take care that 
 their affections grow strong and healthy ; next, 
 that they widen, and touch in sympathy many 
 points of life, and lead in aspiration many chords 
 of feeling. How is this to be done ? It is 
 tacitly but universally acknowledged, that while 
 other powers of the child may grow under coercion, 
 its affections must develop spontaneously, or not 
 at all. As a general rule I think it is considered 
 of no great consequence if they do not develop. 
 Those who believe in the value of precepts tell 
 children they must " honour their father and 
 their mother," that " Little children (must) love 
 one another," and so on. It is taken for granted, 
 in the case of parents at least, that the affection 
 
Love. 91 
 
 of the child for them should spontaneously follow 
 the demand for it. But the sweet gift of love does 
 not come in obedience to a command, nor as a 
 necessary consequence of relationship, and though 
 nature is beneficent in making the first tie between 
 parents and children so close and ready for 
 growth and further development, parents must 
 cultivate these germs of love, and earn their place 
 with their growing children. 
 
 I shall shock the susceptibilities of some parents 
 in saying this, but I think upon reflection they 
 will agree with me. They will recall the many 
 cases where no real love, no actual confidence, 
 exists between children and their parents ; cases 
 where obedience, reverence, the happy companion- 
 ship which friendship creates, are all absent, and 
 a hollow semblance of these things shows that an 
 acknowledgment of the actual truth is too painful 
 to face. 
 
 Love begets love ; and though we sometimes 
 see a child passionately attached to those who 
 care little for it, this is an exception to the rule. 
 Kisses, caresses, the sweet little ways in which 
 tender fathers and mothers give relief to their own 
 feelings of happiness in their children, have not 
 only deep meaning, but real educational influence. 
 They do their part in creating that atmosphere of 
 warmth and love in which the tender feelings ex- 
 
92 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 pand and develop. I have known persons of 
 really warm hearts, who seemed to think it their 
 duty to exercise such Puritan self-restraint of feel- 
 ing towards their children as to make their home 
 so cold, so joyless, so irresponsive, that the exist- 
 ence of " sweetness and light " there seemed 
 impossible. Let us be assured that as plants turn 
 for very life to the sun, the child seeks his nurture 
 in love. We must not be niggards of its expres- 
 sion. We must not be afraid to show him how 
 much we love him, what joy his presence is to 
 us, how dear is the return of his love to us. 
 
 Is it necessary, in saying this, to guard against 
 the confusion of ideas which commonly prevails 
 between the love which acts with constant and 
 conscientious regard to the moral welfare of the 
 child, and that form of it which, being chiefly 
 selfish, seeks first its own gratification irrespective 
 of moral considerations ? Under the sway of the 
 first, " spoiling " is almost impossible ; under that 
 of the second, it is nearly unavoidable. 
 
 In conscious and unconscious nurture of the 
 affections, we intensify the natural feeling of the 
 child, we lead its growth, but we reflect what he 
 gives us ; he is happy in the return of his love. 
 We have next to encourage in him another form 
 of the affections, where he will get little or no 
 return : to lead him to love those who have no 
 
Love. 93 
 
 natural claim upon him, in a word to cultivate in 
 him the " social " affections. In this direction lie 
 the noblest planes of moral life, in which the indi- 
 vidual feels for the suffering, the joy, the welfare 
 of others as for his own ; and would project his 
 own happiness into the life of thousands unknown 
 to him; or in self- sacrifice lay down his mortal 
 life that others may truly live. To the little 
 child these sublime heights of life are veiled ; but 
 we, his guides, who see them dimly afar off, shall 
 fail in our responsibility to him if we do not lead 
 him by gentlest. steps on the shining road towards 
 them. 
 
 A little child of five or six years came to me 
 one day with a tender expression on her face, and 
 said, " I had a new thought in the village just 
 now when I saw the girl in a blue hood crying, 
 I thought I should like to be of use to every one 
 in the world." I tried to show her that, with all 
 our wish, this was impossible. " We can help one 
 at a time, though," she said, " and that is many 
 altogether." Here is an example of the right 
 chord of unselfish feeling being struck ; such 
 vibrations will guide us in our educational work. 
 
 In the care of animals we shall find an excel- 
 lent instrument. In these dumb " brothers and 
 sisters " of his race, the little child has one of his 
 earliest and best interests. In their activity, their 
 
94 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 playfulness, their attachment, the child finds a 
 part of the living world at once at the level of his 
 comprehension, and responsive to his sympathy. 
 The home of every child should provide some 
 animal for his playfellow. Whether in motion or 
 at rest, the kitten, a bird, even a guinea-pig, will 
 afford abundant scope for protracted observation, 
 and the needs of its life will lead affection into 
 active kindness, the doing something to promote 
 the welfare of a living thing. The earliest sense 
 of responsibility will grow side by side with this 
 affection ; and though it is unwise to rely too much 
 on this sense in young children, as their protective 
 care of animals is necessarily apt to be impulsive 
 and unreliable, they will gradually learn in the 
 companionship of their parents the importance of 
 feeding the cat, or of giving fresh water to the 
 bird. Many indirect advantages will follow the 
 exercise of such responsibility. The child will 
 learn the value of patience, of punctuality, of thrift 
 in the care of animals. He will not need experi- 
 ence like Maggie Tulliver's with the rabbits com- 
 mitted to her charge, to make him estimate the 
 importance of duties towards living animals. The 
 sympathy and imagination of children can be 
 easily awakened towards their dumb companions, 
 and this should be purposely done : it is the defi- 
 ciency of both capacities which leads them to the 
 
Love. 95 
 
 cruelty so often said to be natural to children. 1 I 
 have known a small child made so unhappy by 
 realizing the grief of a mother bird robbed of her 
 young, that she, could not be pacified until the 
 nest was restored to the tree whence it was taken. 
 I know another child who grieved intensely for 
 days at imagining the sufferings of her foreign 
 bird, that had been allowed to fly out of the room 
 into the dangers of a town garden. The mother 
 will encourage this sympathetic imagination by 
 making the child observe that his gentle offices 
 are needed by the favourite dog who requires the 
 door opened, or water given him when he cannot 
 supply either want himself. 
 
 As part of this training, little children who live 
 in the country should be carefully prevented from 
 knowing anything or seeing anything of the neces- 
 sary killing of animals. Like many other things 
 in life, this must hurt the tender susceptibilities 
 of children, and should be kept from their cog- 
 nizance until other considerations can put it in its 
 true proportion. A boy thus guarded will shrink 
 so much from the infliction of pain, that the love 
 of sport, in after-years, will with difficulty over- 
 come it. 
 
 I am inclined to think that tenderness to women 
 
 1 " Most cruelty, however," says Lecky, " springs from cal- 
 lousness, which is simply dulness of imagination." 
 
96 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 and little children is most often cherished by 
 gentleness begun to dependent* animals ; and 
 though I know there are loving men and women 
 who have little affection for them, there are few who 
 are notably good and loving to animals who have 
 not special kindness for dependants of higher race. 
 
 Educators have rarely disregarded the duty of 
 calling out in children the " social motives." We 
 all remember how Mr. Barlow and the mothers 
 and fathers in Miss Edgeworth's stories, rather 
 ostentatiously encouraged the relief of distress 
 by alms-giving. The study of Political Economy 
 has somewhat changed and widened our present 
 ideas of philanthropy; and the children of to-day 
 are not incited to give their pennies or coats to 
 beggars. At the same time we generally recog- 
 nize that little children can only understand 
 charity applied to individual cases. Larger plans 
 and reforms which affect individuals in masses, is 
 a conception of active kindness which appeals to 
 mature, not immature life. And I am sorry when 
 I see the names of children in the lists of sub- 
 scribers to charities. This seems to me a prema- 
 ture forcing of ideas, which is unhealthy, and 
 likely to encourage, not a wise benevolence, but 
 rather self-righteousness and vanity. 
 
 The social affections can be abundantly exer- 
 cised in the homes of most children ; they have 
 
Love. 97 
 
 little or no property to give away, but they have 
 as real possessions their thought, their activity, 
 their personal trouble to use in the service of 
 others. Children discover the value of these gifts 
 with delight. There is almost always in the 
 household some old, some very young, or delicate 
 person, to whom such service is acceptable. 
 Even the saving of trouble to others, fetching or 
 carrying, running errands to save the ringing of 
 the bell, is the small giving of one's self for the 
 sake of others ; and the details of daily life should 
 be sanctified by this idea, so that it becomes as 
 natural to the child to live for others as to seek 
 his own pleasure without reference to them. If 
 we have to deal with a child in whom the selfish 
 predominate strongly over the unselfish motives 
 of action, we must seek in the remote corners of 
 his nature for some regenerating spark of feeling. 
 We may find it in reward of patient search, in the 
 child's love for something or somebody ; it may 
 lurk even in a love of approbation, or sensitiveness 
 to pain, or even in restless activity. However 
 difficult it may be to find it, we cannot but believe 
 the germ of unselfish life exists, and that even 
 "the poorest poor" in spirit can be brought 
 to become " the givers out of some small bless- 
 ings." 
 
 Hard trials often come to little children in their 
 
 6 
 
98 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 intercourse with young companions. However 
 much they enjoy the society of other children, 
 there inevitably comes with it a clashing of wills, 
 the rousing of anger, perhaps jealousy, envy, and 
 other forms of uncharitableness. The presence 
 of the mother or of some older companion is 
 necessary to smooth matters at such times. Two 
 children desire the same toy, and quarrel over the 
 right each has to it. The mother can stop the 
 rising indignation and sense of injustice, by a 
 gentle appeal to the generosity or the perception 
 of justice in the children. I have often seen, in 
 such cases, both children melted into kindness, 
 and rivalling each other in their willingness to give 
 up the cherished plaything. In well-trained or 
 finely-organized children, in whom the social 
 motives are as strong as the selfish, the mere 
 appeal for the claims of others is sufficient to 
 bring out the one set of feelings and abase the 
 other. 
 
 Sympathy is to the moral world what genius is 
 to the world of intellect ; with a like delicacy of 
 insight, with imagination, and impersonal love, it 
 reads the secret truth of lives and understands 
 natures wholly different from itself. It is so fine 
 an attribute that it seems almost a gift rather than 
 the result of any training. But as educators we 
 must assume that every power may be latent in 
 
Love. 99 
 
 the child, and by taking for granted his posses- 
 sion of it, and by habitual appeal to it, we shall 
 doubtless develop more or less of answering feel- 
 ing. We often see how the living with finely 
 organized persons, sympathetic themselves, and 
 looking for sympathy in others, results in this effect. 
 One of the most powerful influences, however, in 
 the cultivation of the unselfish side of the child's 
 nature lies in the ideals of benevolence and self- 
 sacrifice presented to him in literature and life. 
 He reads of the labours of Howard and Mrs. Fry 
 in prisons, and determines, some day or other, to 
 imitate them ; or he is moved to tears over the 
 sufferings of noble martyrs, and thrills with desire 
 that he may be called upon for similar, though 
 humbler trial. And if he has been made to feel 
 the transcendent beauty of Christ's life, he will 
 have enshrined in his mind and spirit the noblest 
 example of perfect love, of absolute self-sacrifice 
 by which to shape his own faltering steps in 
 life. 
 
ioo Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SOME CARDINAL VIRTUES. OBEDIENCE TO 
 CONSCIENCE; DUTY. 
 
 " And through the heat of conflict, keeps the law 
 In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw." 
 
 " The Happy Warrior." 
 
 " To hate what you ought to hate, and love what you ought 
 to love from the beginning to the end, . . . this will be 
 rightly called education." 
 
 Plato's Laws, Book II. (Jowett). 
 
 THE various theories concerning the origin and 
 
 o o 
 
 nature of the conscience do not greatly affect 
 our work of practical education. Whether the 
 instinct we call conscience is innate to human 
 nature, or is inherited from generations who have 
 lived in obedience to their moral sense ; whether it 
 is a swift act of the judgment dividing right from 
 wrong, or is the result of authority or punish- 
 ment, 1 it is a power in the nature of children 
 
 1 " I have given it as my deliberate opinion, that authority 
 or punishment is the commencement of that state of mind 
 
Obedience to Conscience. , , 101 
 
 which, sooner or later, faces us, and with which 
 we are bound to deal. And we appeal to it almost 
 involuntarily from the earliest moments when the 
 child begins to exercise independent action. We 
 find ourselves saying, even to an infant, " You 
 must not do this," " You must try to be good." 
 This appeal, half-conscious as it is, joined with the 
 conscious moral training which is prompted by 
 our own allegiance to a standard of right, sets up 
 boundaries round the child's life. He gradually 
 learns there are some things he ought to do, some 
 that he ought not to do ; lines of simple morality 
 are marked out, all the influences of his little life 
 lead him gradually to form a standard of right 
 which will be ready for guidance in a time of need. 
 While life is easy, and it is pleasant to the child 
 to do what is required of him, this time of need 
 will be postponed ; the conscience " the some- 
 thing in our bodies," as a little girl of six once 
 put it to me, " which tells us when we are doing 
 right or wrong," will remain latent. But with 
 the growth of the child, and the increase of his 
 powers, conflicts will arise between his inclination 
 and the sense of right we have beeh quietly 
 nurturing ; some power must decide between the 
 
 recognized under the various names, conscience, the moral 
 sense, the sentiment of obligations." Bain on the "Emotions 
 and Will." 
 
IO2 Notes on the Early ^Training of Children. 
 
 two, and assign the victory. 1 In this power we 
 recognize a force which, if respected, will both 
 " guide and govern life." For if we once " admit 
 that the conscience is that in a man which points 
 to what is above him, which declares the supremacy 
 of a right that he did not mould, and cannot 
 alter/ 1 2 we shall accept the decrees of this power 
 as binding. That " right/' whether accepted as 
 representing the will of a perfect and loving Spirit, 
 or laws which may or may not interpret this 
 power, lays obligations on us. Various impulses 
 of love, imagination, judgment, also suggest pos- 
 sible duties. The conscience reviews these with 
 her clear vision, and decides whether they ought 
 or ought not to be adopted as part of the obliga- 
 tions of our lives. And if moral excellence is the 
 final aim of true education, our labour of train- 
 ing must be in a fair way of success when we 
 arrive at any period of that training, and see the 
 
 1 " Right conduct is felt to be something which we are not 
 free to do or not to do, but which imposes itself on us with 
 the force of some authority. It includes a distinct reference to 
 a law or command outside of us, to which we owe allegiance 
 or conformity ; whether conceived as imposed and enforced by 
 a human or by a Divine will ; or regarded in a more abstract 
 manner as something independent of all personal volitions, a 
 law imposed by the very nature of things." -James Sully 
 " O tit lines of Psychology ." 
 
 2 Maurice on the " Conscience." 
 
Obedience to Conscience. 103 
 
 young human being accepting in a large and 
 fine sense the obligations naturally imposed upon 
 him. 
 
 In notes which treat only of the early train- 
 ing of children, I can but indicate what belongs 
 to a period beyond that I am dealing with, and 
 show how the foundation is to be laid for that 
 excellence of character which should crown the 
 humble educational labours of every day. The 
 chief training of the conscience belongs to that 
 more distant period. With young children it 
 must be so gentle, so almost imperceptible, that 
 we keep latent the very power we are strengthen- 
 ing. I reiterate that the aim of all our early 
 training must be to develop the child's nature in 
 such a manner, that he loves goodness, and finds 
 it not only most pleasant, but most easy and 
 natural to do right ; and our success in this first 
 duty will be shown in the postponement of the 
 time of difficulty, of struggle and conflict. Typi- 
 cal childhood means this postponement of op- 
 posing desires, of imperative obligations ; a time 
 when the stern duties of life lie in the distance, 
 and the young human creature shares the enjoy- 
 ment of other young animals, and rejoices with 
 all nature in existence and development. It 
 would be too much to hope that during this 
 period there will be no conflict of inclination and 
 
IO4 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 higher obligation ; but our object should be to 
 defer the time of questioning and doubt, to let 
 the child's nature remain quiescent as far as may 
 be. It is possible to imagine that even adults 
 in a higher plane of existence may live without 
 conflict between the higher and lower impulses 
 of their nature, and will always spontaneously 
 choose the right and act it. Conflict between 
 right and wrong has its nobility, it is necessary 
 and beautiful, but only as a means to an end. The 
 activity of the conscience, aroused by conflict, in- 
 volves self-consciousness and self-contemplation, 
 and although some periods of growth seem to 
 originate in these mental states, I am inclined to 
 believe they shut out the highest aspects of truth, 
 which we apprehend when. self is held most quies- 
 cent, and are detrimental to healthy growth in the 
 very young. 
 
 We must rejoice, then, when the little child 
 remains in the period of childhood as long as 
 possible. During this time his parents, their 
 standard of right for him, their wishes, may form 
 his external conscience. This can only happen 
 when the sympathy i's strong between parents 
 and children, and when the education has been 
 wise ; but as the result of these conditions it is a 
 beautiful aspect and effect of training. The child 
 has absolute faith that his parents know the 
 
Obedience to Conscience. 105 
 
 right, and he accepts the decrees made for him 
 without question. It is enough for him that 
 " mother wishes me to do this ; " or " father 
 says I must not >do that." There is no conflict, 
 no unhealthy self-consciousness, in this sort of 
 conscientiousness. The appeal to his parents 
 is for the time infallible ; and, guided by their 
 obedience to duty, he learns, step by step, alle- 
 giance to moral obligations. I have known little 
 children accept this direction so entirely, that no 
 absence of their parents, no temptations, had 
 power to make it falter. They have often denied 
 themselves even harmless gratification, in their 
 scrupulous desire to be faithful to the duty they 
 believed was expected of them. 
 
 Under such guidance the child's appreciation 
 of moral law becomes stronger, and he gradually 
 begins to interpret it for himself, and apply it in 
 practice. The relinquishment, however, of the 
 standard and conscience of his parents for his 
 own is so imperceptible, that we can scarcely 
 mark it ; the one fades before the other, and at 
 some time the child shows us, often to our sur- 
 prise, that he has learned his lesson, that his own 
 sense of right is awakened, that his conscience is 
 no longer latent, but ready to guide him. Our 
 training has led up to this time, and it is reason- 
 able to expect the activity of this nascent 
 
io6 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 faculty, in common with all the other powers of 
 the child ; and yet it is essential, I think, for 
 its healthy growth that it should be allowed to 
 develop only in its own time and fashion. Every- 
 thing like over-stimulus must be avoided. . I know 
 there are excellent parents who consistently try 
 to stimulate the conscience of their children, and 
 strive to render their young lives governed chiefly, 
 if not wholly, by its rule. Perhaps most of us 
 have witnessed scenes where childish faults have 
 been magnified under such a system, where re- 
 peated efforts have been made to cause a child 
 to come to, or at least to acknowledge, a sense 
 of wrong-doing. Our hearts have ached to see 
 the continued punishments, the confinement, the 
 meals of bread and water, or blows, to get the 
 confession of a lie, or repentance, as it is called, 
 for an act of insubordination or disobedience ; 
 while on the part of the offender we have seen 
 pride, anger, shame, obstinacy, all rise up to 
 meet the irrational and mistaken discipline, and 
 we have been left doubtful whether the conscience 
 itself has ever been really touched. These 
 parents, in their efforts to make their children 
 virtuous and pious, are trying to awaken in them 
 a state of feeling belonging to their own mature 
 age, when every word and deed is governed by 
 the severe rule of the conscience. 
 
Obedience to Conscience. 107 
 
 We learn in Dr. Arnold's biography that " one 
 of the chief questions on which his mind was 
 constantly at work," in face of the difficulties of 
 moral training in public school life, was (Serm. 
 vol. iv. p. 19), " Can the change from childhood 
 to manhood be hastened without prematurely 
 exhausting the faculties of body or mind ? " 
 His biographer adds, " In the judgment of some 
 he was disposed to answer too readily in the 
 affirmative." The same question, framed to 
 suit a younger age than those Rugby boys, is 
 constantly presenting itself to other educators, 
 and it is too frequently answered practically by 
 attempts to antedate development In the 
 dilemma between the necessary exercise of the 
 moral sense, and the danger of its over-stimulus, 
 what course can we pursue ? I am well aware of 
 the difficulty of this part of our parental labours, 
 and that we must depend greatly on our educa- 
 tional instincts and our reverence for the child's 
 nature, for guidance in the matter. Under this 
 direction we shall find abundant material for the 
 exercise of the child's moral nature, whether he 
 is living under the influence of his parents' con- 
 science, or has himself awakened to feel his own 
 moral power. Were the life of little children less 
 natural, less free from affectation, we might often 
 imagine they had been born moral philosophers, 
 
io8 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 with a mission to investigate and settle difficult 
 questions in ethics, for their interest is prone to 
 wander from the small examples of right and 
 wrong in conduct immediately before them, to 
 abstract problems. Every one who lives sympa- 
 thetically with little children is aware of this ten- 
 dency in them. And this freshness of interest is 
 probably one of the appointed means of educa- 
 tion for their moral nature. If we mentally for- 
 mulate the manner in which the conscience should 
 ultimately develop, we shall recognize that its 
 perception of the right must be prompt and ready, 
 while it is not morbidly susceptible ; swift and 
 unerring in its decision, resting upon judgment 
 which is cultivated and balanced, and feelings 
 made delicate and strong through love love for 
 others, love of ideas. These qualities cannot be 
 of speedy or of early growth, although they are 
 the fruit of gradual development. Following 
 upon the perception of the right, " the moral 
 feeling thus touches the springs of the will, and 
 instantly sets it in movement. To see and feel 
 what is wrong in ourselves or another, is to shrink 
 from it. The thought of what is good, morally 
 worthy and noble, is immediately attended with 
 an impulse of desire or aspiration." 1 
 
 1 " Outlines of Psychology," p. 556. 
 
Obedience to Conscience. 109 
 
 When the child is ready to take this second 
 step in moral training, he becomes obedient to the 
 moral law, yielding up, if need be, to its demands, 
 personal inclination, comfort, pleasure. But this 
 obedience can only be shadowed forth in the 
 life of the little child. His conception of duty is 
 happily proportioned to the level of all his powers, 
 and it is only as life advances that the sense of 
 obligation grows with the growth of the whole 
 nature, and seeks not only to fulfil claims, but to 
 assume fresh yokes and burdens of duty. 
 
 The highest development of the conscience is 
 attained when this" larger conception of obligation 
 is reached, and the individual becomes a factor 
 in the world of morality. Towards this final and 
 ideal development, then, we have to work. And 
 we shall best attain our end, I think, by using- 
 means as impersonal to the child (if I may use 
 the expression) as possible. Fill his soul with 
 ideals of moral life, lead his imagination to dwell 
 on them, his love for goodness will cling to them, 
 and he will approach them by almost insensible 
 degrees. In the literature used by the child 
 every day of his life, we shall" 1 - find abundant 
 material for the impersonal exercise of his judg- 
 ment, the awakening of his feelings in morality. 
 In the simple scenes of life represented in good 
 stories for children, their indignation is moved 
 
no Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 by wrong-doing, their enthusiasm is roused by 
 heroism or patient virtue, far more strongly than 
 in their elders, to whom right and wrong are 
 not such fresh problems. The actual experience 
 of children is naturally very limited, and one 
 of the intense fascinations to them of suitable 
 literature consists in the enlarged horizon it 
 afifords them. I have known children apply the 
 lessons taken in this way from books with wonder- 
 ful clear-sightedness. 
 
 A little girl of six or seven was talking to me 
 about some mammas she had read of, who " tell 
 their children some things that are not true, to 
 please them." " G.'s mamma," for instance, who 
 " told her a little bird would fly out of the curtain ; 
 but it wouldn't, you know. I don't like such 
 mammas," she added ; " they may be very com- 
 fortable and agreeable mammas, but I don't like 
 them when they say such things ! " The same 
 little girl had been interested in a French book 
 which had been read to her and her sisters, and 
 said after it had been finished, " I hope you'll get 
 us another story like it : we like it so much better 
 than 'Sophie/ ' Sophie' is for little children: it 
 shows them how they get punished when they 
 don't 'bey their mammas ; because, you see " (with 
 much gesticulation), " Sophie's mamma told her 
 she must not go into the lime : but when Sophie 
 
Obedience to Conscience. 1 1 1 
 
 went into the yard she said to herself, ' What 
 beautiful lime ! I must walk through it ! ' and she 
 was nearly burned." " But," I said, " do you 
 think you don't: want showing that you should 
 obey your mother?" "Oh, no," R. said, with 
 much quiet scorn at the question ; " we know we 
 must, but it's only little children like baby who 
 want showing." 
 
 A child, after being strongly moved by the 
 Parable of the Talents, said to me, " I have been 
 thinking a great deal to-day about the ' talents : ' 
 I mean to try and use my talent well." 
 
 I had been reading with my own children some 
 story about obligations, and in the course of 
 conversation upon it afterwards, asked whether 
 they thought grown-up people really could do 
 what they liked. " No," said one of them, "'cos 
 they've got duties." 
 
 In proportion to the faithfulness with which we 
 have carried out the principles of early training 
 laid down in these " Notes," will be the value of 
 the impersonal exercise of the conscience. For 
 in this proportion will be habits of " unconscious 
 goodness" in our children, and their freedom 
 from faults. In association with other children, 
 also, they will learn many practical examples of 
 moral teaching. Parents who arrange as far as 
 they can all the influences which affect the early 
 
ii2 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 life of their children, will take special care as to 
 the character of their young companions ; but, let 
 the care be ever so great, it often happens that 
 the society of associates introduces quite new 
 elements into the atmosphere of the children, 
 suggesting fresh problems in morals. It is well 
 when these are brought to the mother for dis- 
 cussion or solution : but I have known cases of 
 undesirable influences set to work amongst chil- 
 dren by their companions, which were not dis- 
 cussed with the mother because they were con- 
 sidered too trivial or absurd. It behoves mothers 
 to be especially watchful of new influences upon 
 their children. 
 
 It has been nobly said, " Without hope there is 
 a thing called duty." It is this feeling of the 
 supremacy, the steadfast support of duty through 
 all the changes and troubles of life, we must 
 inculcate in our children, and Chatham's words 
 even to the young may sometimes prove a blessed 
 remembrance. Times of intense depression come 
 to all human beings, even to those full of faith 
 and hope and strength. The light of the sun is 
 hidden, joy is gone from the daily life, long de- 
 votion to duty, perhaps, has exhausted the very 
 springs of patience and energy, and life is not 
 worth living. At such times the poor human 
 creature is like a shipwrecked sailor, who sees 
 
Dtity. 1 1 3 
 
 one only chance of recovering a hold on life, of 
 realizing again the faith and trust that lie for the 
 moment dormant. That hold is something that 
 must be done that he must do, and if he clings 
 to the obligation even blindly, helplessly, it will 
 lead him into quieter waters ; he will presently 
 feel the ground again beneath his feet, he will 
 again feel his patience revive, he will see the 
 flowers bloom once more in the sunlight : the 
 springs of his life will be renewed, and existence 
 will grow full and sweet and radiant with God's 
 grace. We may indeed be thankful if our train- 
 ing results in a moral fibre which resists, and 
 grows above such common shocks ; but we shall 
 demand yet more of our child. It is not enough 
 that his conscience makes him strong to bear, 
 we expect that it will make him strong to do. 
 We shall not be content if the " right/' to him, 
 as he grows onward to man's estate, means the 
 current morality of his generation, in views of 
 trade, politics, social ethics. In accordance with 
 our training, we shall demand higher conceptions 
 of his duty. These, as the outcome of the whole 
 being, necessarily partake of the character of that 
 being. If his nature includes deep and warm 
 affections, if his imagination is active, his intellect 
 enlightened, his conceptions of duty will be broad, 
 and wise, and sympathetic, and he will enter into 
 
 H 
 
H4 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 the life of his time under their guidance. He 
 will not be satisfied with the grudging employ- 
 ment of one talent ; ten talents may be given 
 him, and he will use them with loving eagerness, 
 " as ever in (the) great Task-master's eye." 
 His conceptions of duty will enlarge with every 
 increase of moral and intellectual elevation, his 
 love and power of activity will grow, and he will 
 see with truer eyes how desired ends can be 
 attained. 
 
 If he has a spark of the genius of the seer, 
 the artist, the reformer, the philanthropist, in him, 
 he will acknowledge a constantly enlarging circle 
 of obligations, and, fulfilling faithfully the duties 
 claimed in the intimate relations of family life, he 
 will not be content without moving influences 
 which affect far larger areas. And in following 
 his ideas of duty, the opinion of others, of the so- 
 called "world," will not disturb his steps, for in 
 the under-current of his life will abide the know- 
 ledge that 
 
 "Let thy ghost thee lede ; 
 And trouthe thee shalt deliver, it is no drede." 
 
Rewards and Punishments. 1 1 5 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS. 
 
 " The best way of training the young is to train yourself at 
 the same time ; not to admonish them, but to be alway carry- 
 ing out your own principles in practice." 
 
 Plato's Laws, Book V. (fowetf). 
 
 / WE very rarely, if ever, see education emanci- 
 pated from the conventional ideas of reward and 
 punishment. Moralists and experience teach that 
 obedience to the moral and physical laws govern- 
 ing the universe is followed by happiness, disobe- 
 dience by pain, and this teaching has so affected 
 educational practice, that extraneous reward and 
 punishment have come to be considered an integral 
 part of the training of children. 
 
 Most educators ^ould agree that children 
 should be educated from their earliest life in such 
 a way as to avoid the necessity of punishment, 
 that this at least is the ideal to be striven for ; but 
 whether from "inherited defects/' or the bad early 
 
1 1 6 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 training of children, the majority will consider 
 such a standard of moral education as impossible. 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer states that "any ideal 
 system of discipline is hopeless. Parents are not 
 good enough." Nor are the children. "We are 
 not," he says, " among those who believe in Lord 
 Palmerston's dogma, that * all children are born 
 good/ On the whole, the opposite dogma, un- 
 tenable as it is, seems to us less wide of the 
 truth. " He lays great stress on the " inherit- 
 ance of defects by children in the average of 
 cases." 
 
 The only discussion which appears allowable, is 
 the mode of punishing or rewarding. The ordinary 
 use of both is seldom anything but empirical. 
 Educators have but vague ideas how " moral 
 excellence " (the chief aim of all education) is to 
 be attained. They agree that wrong-doing must 
 be followed by pain, right by pleasure ; but how 
 the arbitrary administration of either can effect 
 desired changes, is scarcely analyzed. 
 
 The traditional methods are those used in the 
 hope that they will produce the expected result. 
 And what are these ? 
 
 The stern doctrines of the Old Testament have 
 maintained a strong influence in the bringing up 
 of the young. u Chasten thy son while there is 
 hope ; and let not thy soul spare for his crying." 
 
Rewards and Punishments. 117 
 
 " Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt 
 deliver his soul from hell." And this idea of 
 saving the soul by the pain of the body, gratifies 
 so naturally the imperfect impulses of most 
 educators, that we find it believed in, and 
 practised, not only by those who are ignorant and 
 passionate, but by all grades of educators and for 
 all kinds of faults. 
 
 Corporal punishment is given in anger when 
 it must seem to the child as a consequence of 
 personal annoyance or indignation, or it is dealt 
 out with judicial calmness and deliberation, when 
 it must be necessarily more impressive. A child 
 at an elementary school cannot do his sums ; his 
 hands are caned by the teacher. Why ? to make 
 him see an intellectual problem with more acute- 
 ness ? Another child disturbs his father by making 
 a noise when quiet is necessary ; he is sternly told 
 to be quiet, but he presently forgets the command, 
 and, busy in his own way, repeats the annoyance. 
 The father takes it for granted he intended to be 
 disobedient, and boxes his ear. A little girl breaks 
 into open rebellion against her governess, or, be- 
 lieving that some injustice is done her, bursts 
 into a tempest of passion. Both are met by 
 sharp blows, or by banishment to bed, with hun- 
 ger, for the remainder of rhe day. A boy tells a 
 lie to his mother, or deceives her by pretending 
 
1 1 8 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 to go to school and absenting himself; or, with 
 confused ideas, takes, as his own, some property 
 of his parents. A " sound flogging " is sup- 
 posed to be the means of teaching him the 
 value of truth and the rights of property. A 
 little sister is found by another child an incon- 
 venient competitor for toys, and she slaps her to 
 remove her out of the way. Her mother slaps 
 the offender by way of teaching her kindness to 
 her sister. There does not seem much sequence 
 between this kind of punishment and these typical 
 offences between disobedience and the tingling 
 of a blow, untruth and insubordination and a 
 larger dose of physical pain. The pain is believed 
 to be strongly deterrent in its effects, and that 
 is held to be sufficient. Outward conformity to 
 established rules of order can at least generally 
 be attained, and there is hope that some inward 
 change of the volition follows upon the outward 
 conformity. Much questioning as to the actual 
 effects of physical pain on the moral nature is 
 useless and undesirable. If the corporal punish- 
 ment proves less efficacious as a deterrent than is 
 expected, educators trusting in it are very much 
 at a loss. 
 
 I know that one of the common arguments in 
 favour of corporal punishment over those that 
 appeal more directly to the moral sense of the 
 
Rewards and Punishments. 119 
 
 offenders, is that it is healthily restricted in its 
 effects, and can leave behind it no morbid sense 
 of wrong, no irritating self-measure. The child 
 has done wrong, r it has paid for it in physical 
 pain, and the memory of the pain will prevent the 
 recurrence of the offence. 
 
 I doubt whether the account is so easily set- 
 tled. Physical violence is hurtful to the moral 
 nature ; it rouses as a rule opposing physical 
 violence and fear, and too often leaves in the 
 mind of the victim a sense of injustice or anger 
 and hatred, instead of a true repentance. In 
 David Copperfield's ' history of his relation with 
 his step-father, we have a sad and touching 
 account of punishment which had these effects, 
 with the yearning for the active influence of love, 
 which he instinctively felt would have brought 
 opposite spiritual results. Boys, in talking of their 
 school-life, will tell you, as another effect, that 
 they get so callous to the indignity and shame of 
 physical chastisement, that it produces no other 
 result than to make them rather glory in bearing 
 it with decent courage. They grow to prefer it 
 to tasks, and other modes of punishment, because 
 it is soonest over. 
 
 When education is better understood, there is 
 little doubt that corporal punishment will be con- 
 sidered singularly irrational and unphilosophical, 
 
1 20 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 and that educators will then seek and find 
 intellectual and moral means for producing intel- 
 lectual and moral results. 
 
 The theory which advocates those punishments 
 which are the " true consequences " of conduct, 
 seems a far more reasonable guide. But it is 
 reasonable within very narrow limits. It is impos- 
 sible, as I have shown elsewhere, that the theory 
 as lately expounded by Mr. Herbert Spencer can 
 be carried out with logical consistency. "It is 
 the function of parents," he says, " to see tha 
 their children habitually experience the true con- 
 sequences of their conduct the natural reactions ; 
 neither warding them off, nor multiplying them, 
 nor putting artificial consequences in place of 
 them." 
 
 In some cases, no doubt, it is possible to let 
 a child learn the value of judgment and foresight 
 by allowing her to choose a wonderful " purple 
 jar " instead of a useful pair of walking shoes ; 
 but I have never read Miss Edgeworth's story 
 without bitter resentment against the cruelty of 
 Rosamond's mother; and I think most readers 
 of to-day will agree with me, that the child's 
 love for her mother, and faith in her wisdom 
 and goodness were dangerously jeopardized by 
 such a lesson in the smaller and self- regarding 
 virtues. 
 
Rewards and Punishments. 121 
 
 This theory of punishment is, however, sup- 
 ported by the child's sense of its justice. If the 
 noisy child, just now cited, had been sent to 
 play in a cold room by himself; if the untruth- 
 ful boy were to be steadily disbelieved until 
 he became convinced that it was bad policy to 
 tell or to act lies ; or the juvenile communist had 
 had his own jacket or toys taken away from him, 
 the children would have received some ideas, 
 however crude, of the moral laws they had dis- 
 regarded. The question to be considered is, at 
 what cost would these ideas have been gained ? 
 We cannot safely deal with one part of the child's 
 character in the giving of our lessons without 
 relation to the whole, and if we act to the child as 
 he has acted to others, will not his faith in our 
 goodness, his reliance on our judgment, his ideas 
 of right and wrong, receive a serious shock, which 
 no minor advantage will counterbalance ? 
 
 But if we discard both these modes of punish- 
 ment, what help can we get in our task of training 
 moral excellence in the child ? I shall be told 
 that some punishment is absolutely necessary 
 for those children who have had no good early 
 training. 
 
 In a very fine passage of the " Remorse," 
 Coleridge contrasts the two ways of treating the 
 wrong-doer, and after drawing a powerful picture 
 
122 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 of the conventional treatment of the criminal, 
 exclaims, 
 
 " With other ministrations, thou, O Nature, 
 Healest thy wandering and distempered child, 
 Thou pourest on him thy soft influences, 
 Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets, 
 Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters, 
 Till he relent, and can no more endure 
 To be a jarring and a dissonant thing 
 Amid this general dance and minstrelsy ; 
 But, bursting into tears, wins back his way, 
 His angry spirit healed and harmonized 
 By the benignant touch of love and beauty." 
 
 Here the wrong-doer is regarded as sick in spirit, 
 and he is brought back to health, i.e. goodness, 
 by the natural educational processes. We are 
 not considering, as Coleridge was, the wrong- 
 doing of adults, but I think the conduct of 
 erring children may be thus estimated. The 
 child's action when out of harmony with the 
 higher moral laws is wrong (wrung from the 
 right). His nature, as part of humanity, is 
 designed to love goodness, to do right ; we must 
 treat his failing from the law of his nature as 
 abnormal, and seek for influences, as we do in 
 the case of bodily sickness, which will restore 
 his soul to health. Nor can we be content with 
 outward conformity to goodness. We must be 
 assured that the character of the child is what it 
 
Rewards and Punishments. 123 
 
 seems to be, that its will is governed by the best 
 part of its nature. 
 
 In as far as reward is the antithesis of punish- 
 ment, what is true of the one is true of the other, 
 with the difference, that it is always more safe to 
 appeal in children to the love of pleasure than to 
 the fear of pain. At the same time, while punish- 
 ment brings in its train certain evils, extraneous 
 reward of good action stimulates vanity, pride, 
 all forms of self-love, and the development of the 
 selfish, as opposed to the unselfish part of the 
 nature. We may safely and freely allow the 
 natural rewards to follow upon good conduct ; 
 but it shows weakness in education to supplement 
 these by extraneous pleasures. A child learns 
 under a good teacher with extreme industry and 
 eagerness : he is rewarded by the pleasure he 
 feels in the acquisition of new knowledge, in the 
 exercise of his faculties, in the sympathy of his 
 teacher : it is something like " gilding gold " to 
 offer this child further stimulus in the shape of 
 prizes. Prizes for intellectual work have been 
 the invention of bad teachers ; certainly they are 
 not needed by those who thoroughly understand 
 their business. The same may be said of the 
 taking of places, and the system of " marks/' when 
 not used as a means of recording the progress of 
 pupils. 
 
1 24 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 At Dunmow, I believe, the flitch of bacon is 
 still given to couples who claim it for their year 
 of marriage passed without a quarrel. In French 
 stories we read of the virtuous girl of the village 
 being publicly rewarded. The inadequacy of such 
 rewards pointedly shows the mistake of the prin- 
 ciple ; while the common proverb, " Virtue is its 
 own reward," puts into shape the truth I am 
 trying to enunciate. The exercise of the moral, 
 no less than the intellectual, faculties, is followed 
 by the reward of pleasure, and the satisfaction 
 of the moral sense ; and we strengthen the child's 
 moral nature, we keep its purity intact, when 
 we rely on this natural pleasure : we weaken it 
 inasmuch as we encourage in its exercise mixed 
 motives. 
 
 No doubt extraneous rewards are admissible 
 sometimes, when we are trying to stimulate a 
 sluggish disposition, or are endeavouring to esta- 
 blish a habit. I have known the offer of small 
 pleasures act extremely well in such cases ; but 
 they were only used as leverage, and the 
 moral conduct aimed at was of so moderate a 
 pitch, that it was not degraded by an inadequate 
 measure. 
 
 To the order of natural rewards and punish- 
 ment belongs one of the most powerful forces 
 in the training of children the approval or dis- 
 
Rewards and Punishments. 125 
 
 approval of those they love. In proportion to the 
 excellence and beauty of the relation between 
 parents and children, in proportion to the love 
 between them, and the reverence of the younger 
 for the elder, will be the strength of this force. 
 It becomes an external conscience to the child, 
 but a conscience so tempered by mutual love 
 as to be a healthy, almost unconscious moral 
 sense. 
 
 Indeed, with the sort of training I have endea- 
 voured to describe in these pages training be- 
 gun in the cradle, and continued throughout the 
 growth of the child, with the love, and thought, 
 and devotion to ideals in education which may 
 be exercised by every parent, punishment is 
 wholly unnecessary. But I am well aware that 
 this early training is still rare, and that conse- 
 quently the dealing with faults in children is 
 almost inevitable. If the ordinary means of 
 meeting these moral difficulties is irrational and 
 unphilosophical, what other methods are left to 
 educators ? 
 
 In previous chapters I have endeavoured to 
 show how some of these faults should be treated 
 how untruth will fade away under the growth 
 of courage and a truer conception of the nature 
 of truth how anger and selfishness must be con- 
 quered by gentleness and appeals to unselfish- 
 
126 Notes on the Early Training of Children. 
 
 ness how disobedience must not be risked, 
 as obedience can never be enforced, and can 
 only be obtained by demands upon right feel- 
 ing and so on. I am quite aware that 
 special cases will require special educational 
 treatment, that the variety given us to deal 
 with by nature is so abundant, that in spite 
 of acknowledged resemblances and differences, 
 every child is individual in certain particulars, 
 and requires some treatment peculiar to itself. 
 In the family such treatment is possible. We 
 often see in schools how individuals suffer by 
 being part of a system which must be adapted 
 to the needs of the majority. 
 
 As a general principle, in dealing either with 
 " inherited defects " of children, or the results of 
 their bad training, I urge that we should lay as 
 little stress as possible upon faults. We must 
 studiously avoid to rouse them : for in activity 
 they grow and strengthen as virtues do, in rest 
 they may grow weak and die. 
 
 We must fix our attention and our loving 
 energy upon all the good traits in the faulty child, 
 we must watch every tender germ of better life 
 in him ; we must love his soul, even if he is not 
 personally dear to us we must so love it that 
 we rescue it from the power of evil, and give our 
 unwearied devotion to its development in good- 
 
Rewards and Punishments. 127 
 
 ness. We must not be suspicious of evil motives, 
 we must avoid the temptation of watching for 
 wrong-doing encourage the child's efforts to do 
 right by accepting them as what we expect from 
 him. What priests do in the heights of their 
 office^ educators must do on the lowly plains of 
 their duty, in faith, and hope, and a humble 
 patience. 
 
Home, Kindergarten, and Primary School Education 
 
 in their vital relations to each other (former title " Lectures to Kinder- 
 gartners"). By ELIZABETH P. PEABODY. 5*^ by 7^ inches. viii+225 
 pages. Cloth. Price, by mail, $1.10. Introduction price, $1.00. 
 
 A MOTHER'S REVIEW OF THE BOOK. 
 
 TV TEITHER the title of this book nor a glance at its Table of Con- 
 -L ^ tents can give any idea of its transcendent value to every man 
 or woman who has assumed, or has been charged with, the great 
 responsibility of understanding and of wisely training a little child. 
 For it is not a manual of Kindergarten methods, or a catalogue of the 
 " Gifts," with instructions for their use. 
 
 The first lecture was delivered to a popular audience in Wesleyan 
 Hall, Boston, in 1872, for the avowed purpose of enlisting their interest 
 in FroebePs System of Education, that they might see what is the 
 right, the best, thing to do for a little child, and call upon the community 
 to do that thing for all the -children in their midst. 
 
 With a keenness of insight for which she was already famous, and 
 with an enthusiasm for his principles which only she, his best American 
 interpreter, could feel, Miss Peabody expounded to her awakened and 
 delighted audience the cardinal doctrines of her great master. After 
 the lapse of fifteen years, one can recall, in going over these pages, the 
 combined force of eloquence and of logic with which she convinced 
 her hearers that, "Every child should be studied reverently, (i) to see 
 what he is ; (2) to see what conditions HE requires for the fullest and 
 most beautiful growth ; and then he should be surrounded by those 
 conditions, and helped to grow, with as little handling of his individu- 
 ality as possible." That, 
 
 " A noble moral development is indispensable to a right intellectual 
 one." That, 
 
 "To govern is not the whole thing. The question is, how we 
 govern." That, 
 
 "It requires more ability and culture to. educate children of three 
 than those of ten or fifteen years." That, 
 
 "The Kindergarten system cannot be improvised by any bright 
 woman who wishes to establish an Infant School, but must be studied 
 humbly and diligently at the feet of its great founder " ; and that the 
 fittest preparation for the care of a little child is, a " profound study of 
 
EDUCATION. 
 
 the laws of mental nature, in order to work reverently among them, 
 instead of arbitrarily, in defiance or irreverence of them." 
 
 The pathetic account of Froebel's own childhood, and the description 
 of his first meeting with the Baroness Marenholtz Von Bulow, unite 
 with the humorous and practical illustrations of the lecture to brighten 
 the face of a serious philosophy, and tempt one who has just laid 
 the book aside to take it up again and re-read the whole, line by line, 
 and precept by precept. 
 
 The remaining seven lectures were delivered from time to time 
 throughout the country, in the various training schools for Kinder- 
 gartners. But they have nothing to do with the technique of Kinder- 
 gartning, except in so far as the plays, the songs, and the occupations 
 exemplify and enforce the principles of Froebel, principles which she 
 was ever anxious to root in the hearts of all who heard her, and which 
 ought to be ready on the lips and busy in the heart of every mother, 
 nurse, and teacher. 
 
 Indeed, the second and third lectures, " The Nursery" and "Dis- 
 cipline" (in the good sense of " teaching by experience") deal with 
 the child from the first sweet hour in which 
 
 " The babe by its mother 
 Lies bathed in joy," 
 
 to the time when its best interests demand that it shall be " sent to 
 school." 
 
 These two lectures are chiefly valuable to the Kindergartner as 
 showing what the child-nature is, and how it is unfolded, and as sug- 
 gesting to her what remains to be done, in case the child has been born 
 among people who " do not believe that anything better can be done 
 for children than to kill the time between the mother's arms and the 
 season when they are taught to read." But what of the significance 
 of these lectures to mothers ? 
 
 I say, frankly and positively, that I do not know of a printed line, 
 outside the Bible, that is so capable of being an inspiration, and a 
 guide to the best motherhood ! What wonder? Good nursing is the 
 first word of Froebel's gospel of child nurture. "The loving mother 
 is the first gardener of the human flower." " It is in response to her 
 ministrations that the senses are first called into exercise." " It is 
 because she has faith in him, that the child is able to take his first 
 step, and so gains faith in his own power." 
 
EDUCATION. 
 
 And Miss Peabody, speaking for him, would teach the young mother 
 how to play with the baby, so that play shall be at once a delight and 
 a means of education ; how to develop and train the senses, without 
 pampering them ; how to prevent " color-blindness, and the want of 
 4 an ear for music,'" by deliberate exercises of the sight and hearing; 
 how to guide the will, and how " to mould his heart in her heart," that 
 she may "be the mother of the soul as well as of the body of her 
 child." 
 
 Having expressed in the strongest possible terms her conviction that 
 nothing can take the place of the mother's love and the mother's care 
 of the child's life in its beginning, Miss Peabody hastens, in her 
 fourth lecture (" The Kindergarten ") to an equally well-fortified posi- 
 tion in defence of her belief that no home can be so good for a child 
 of four to six years as the discipline of a well-ordered Kindergarten. 
 For here the movement plays, the songs, and the occupations not only 
 give joy to the child's social nature, but teach invaluable lessons of 
 order, neatness, obedience to law, justice, self-control, co-operation, and 
 the pleasure of acting for the sake of making others happy. This, and 
 the succeeding lecture on " Language" which is singularly original 
 and suggestive, must prove of great interest to teachers of all grades, 
 as well as to parents and to readers generally. 
 
 But the section of the book which is most characteristic of its gifted 
 author, is the portion embraced in the two lectures, "A Psychological 
 Observation^ Under this to non-professional readers somewhat 
 forbidding title is told a story which I have read again and again with 
 amazement and with tears of joy. It is the story, in detail, of a little 
 boy who came into Miss Peabody's care when he was four years and a 
 half old, an intellectual chaos, "without form and void." His 
 own mother, then dying, pronounced him non compos ; but under his 
 teacher's genial power, he " came out out of his prison-house," gradu- 
 ated at last at Harvard, and at the Vienna Medical School, and fell at 
 Fredericksburg, at the head of his regiment, a skilful surgeon, a heroic 
 soldier, a grand man. This " study" alone is worth double the price 
 of the book. 
 
 And what, then, shall be said of the closing lecture, that on*'^- 
 ligious Nurture" ' f (Nurture, mark you, not teaching.) The central 
 thought of the book from first to last is, that the new-born child is 
 " fresh from the presence of its Heavenly Father," a living soul, and 
 "knows God before God is even named to him." The perpetual warn- 
 
EDUCATION. 
 
 ing of the book is, " to preserve this faith," to '* use language so as 
 more clearly to define, and not to blot out the divine vision." Children 
 should never be talked to " in the language of theological science," if we 
 wish them " to love God, instead of being afraid of Him." We should 
 remember that " knowledge may be a power without being a good" 
 that "an imposed or artificial conscience almost certainly forecloses the 
 natural or inspired conscience." " Unless you have unaffected sponta- 
 neity of faith yourselves, you should not dare to talk about God to the 
 child." What can you do if you are already in the pulpit, or in the 
 vSeat of the Sabbath-school teacher? 
 
 Read this book before another Sabbath dawns, and find out what is 
 your duty. 
 
 PRESS NOTICES. 
 
 Educational Courant, Louisville : 
 No one can read this book without im- 
 bibing higher and juster ideas regarding 
 childhood, and no one should undertake 
 to teach children without having first 
 read this volume. Nay, we go further, 
 and say that every mother and every 
 nurse would be a hundred-fold better 
 prepared for their sacred charge, were 
 they familiar with the contents, and ani- 
 mated with the spirit, of this volume. 
 The talented authoress carries convic- 
 tion because she never stops to discuss 
 the theory of the Kindergarten, but ex- 
 plains its purpose and its motive, and 
 that, too, in such a way as evinces an 
 unbounded faith in its efficacy. Her 
 convictions are so sincere as to carry 
 along those of the reader, who soon be- 
 comes en rapport with her. It is because 
 of this charm, this power of the book 
 to lift the reader out of and beyond self, 
 that we regard it as the ablest defence of 
 the Kindergarten that has yet been writ- 
 ten. We cordially commend the book 
 to each and every teacher. (Sept. , 1886.) 
 
 The Week, Toronto, Ont.: Not only 
 conductors of Kindergartens beyond the 
 reach of Miss Peabody's kindly voice, 
 but all others who are brought into con- 
 tact with children in any way, will wel- 
 
 come this publication of her lectures. 
 Pestalozzi and Froebel have had no more 
 apt disciple, and none who has done bet- 
 ter work in the dissemination of their 
 ideas. She unites the clearest compre- 
 hension and elucidation of their views 
 with much original thinking, and pre- 
 sents the whole in a form that is most 
 acceptable to the general reader, whether 
 practically interested in her subject or 
 not. Miss Peabody is extremely abstract 
 in most of her premises ; but her reason- 
 ing is so beautifully direct, her own in- 
 sight so clear, and her English so irre- 
 proachable, that one follows her with an 
 exhilarated sense of acquiring new truth 
 in an unthought-of direction. While her 
 book bears evidence of ripe scholarship, 
 it is not too profound to be useful ; and 
 while it abounds in practical information, 
 it has qualities that would make it a valu- 
 able addition to the library of any Con- 
 cord philosopher. (Sept. 16, 1886.) 
 
 Every Other Sunday, Boston: It 
 contains suggestions and advice that are 
 as well adapted to the wants of mothers 
 as to the Kindergarten teacher, and 
 should find its way into every home. 
 We specially commend to mothers the 
 lectures on "The Nursery" and " Disci- 
 pline." (Feb. 6, 1887.) 
 
EDUCATION. 
 
 Woman's Magazine, Brattlebord ', 
 \ 7 t. : How blessedly types multiply the 
 power of wise ajid loving words ! is our 
 first thought upon reading this book. 
 Here is the wonderful teaching of the 
 Kindergarten brought within the grasp 
 of every mother. None reading it could 
 lightly esteem the sacred office, or think 
 of the little body as other than the home 
 of the soul, reaching out to her for guid- 
 ance. The last lecture but one shows 
 how the thought of God the Heavenly 
 Father and of death may be under- 
 stood by a little child, without fear or 
 terror. It is full of the spirit of Him who 
 set the little ones " in the midst," and 
 said, "Suffer them," i.e., hinder them 
 not, " to come unto me." (Nov. i, 1886.) 
 
 The American, Philadelphia : This 
 little book possesses a double interest, 
 that of its author, and that of its subject. 
 Miss Peabody is one of the most remark- 
 able personages that New England has 
 produced ; and a book that contains so 
 much autobiographical detail as this has 
 therefore an especial charm for those who 
 know anything of her worth. For the first 
 time we get here a glimpse of the strong 
 and unconventional mind to which she 
 owed her first training; and her mother 
 must have been no ordinary woman. 
 
 Not only in Boston, but in other cities, 
 notably our own, this contemporary 
 of Channing and of Margaret Fuller has 
 been sowing the seeds of educational re- 
 form for these years past, and winning 
 attention, not only by the worth of the 
 ideas themselves, but by the enthusiasm, 
 the originality, the perennial freshness, of 
 her presentation of them. Of that, this 
 book is a proof, if the general public 
 need any. ( Oct. 23, 1886.) 
 
 Utica Morning- Herald : It ought 
 to find a ready acceptance in all house- 
 holds, where it will not fail to prove sug- 
 gestive and useful to the parents. It is 
 by no means a book of merely ordinary 
 merit or value. (Sept. 3, 1886.) 
 
 The Christian Register, Boston: 
 The time is not distant when the Kin- 
 dergarten system will be considered an 
 essential part of every public primary 
 school. To be successful, Kindergarten 
 study must be thorough, not superficial. 
 Miss Peabody's lectures will help to keep 
 high the intellectual and moral standard, 
 on which the Kindergarten method should 
 rest. (Dec. 30, 1886.) 
 
 The Progressive Teacher, New 
 
 Orleans ; The time is at hand when 
 every primary teacher is expected to 
 know and apply many of the principles 
 of the Kindergarten, and no better book 
 can be recommended for their study. 
 ( Oct. 15, 1886.) 
 
 The School Bulletin, Syracuse, 
 N. Y. : The lectures are made entertain- 
 ing by the fertility of illustrative anec- 
 dotes employed. Miss Peabody ranks 
 among women with Dr. Barnard among 
 men for her life-long efforts in behalf of 
 education. 
 
 The Pioneer Press, St. Paul, 
 Minn. : The lectures of Miss Peabody 
 may justly be recommended. A child- 
 loving, enthusiastic, highly intellectual 
 woman, she communicates her spirit to 
 the reader, and excites curiosity to 
 breathe the very atmosphere of the 
 child-garden. Those who have only su- 
 perficially regarded the Kindergarten 
 system fail to perceive its wonderful 
 inner meaning, and are inclined to treat 
 it lightly, and to characterize its opera- 
 tions as baby-play. Such persons may 
 well be advised to read Miss Peabody's 
 exceedingly interesting book ; for if they 
 do, their hearts will be enlisted in the 
 cause of the child. {Aug. 23, 1886.) 
 
 Boston Journal : It is full of wise 
 suggestions and helpful hints, adapted 
 to be useful to all who have anything 
 to do with the care and training of 
 children. (Sept. 18, 1886.) 
 
EDUCATION. 
 
 Providence Journal : Miss Pea- 
 body's devotion to Kindergarten educa- 
 tion is well known. The success of her 
 efforts in this department is the joy and 
 satisfaction of the declining years of her 
 long and useful life. The experience and 
 investigations of a life of literary culture 
 devoted to philanthropy are embodied 
 in this little work. All mothers and 
 teachers of little children should make a 
 study of the invaluable system of educa- 
 tion it presents. (Jan- 16, 1887.) 
 
 The Star, New York : It would be 
 difficult to name a book so full of the 
 true spirit of parenthood as this, and so 
 useful as it is likely to prove to mothers 
 and fathers in the training of their 
 children. 
 
 North Carolina University Mag- 
 azine : We commend the book to all 
 who have the training of children. Any 
 one of the lectures is worth the price of 
 the book. (December, 1886.) 
 
 The Commonwealth, Boston : No 
 teacher or mother can peruse these pages 
 without a deepening sense of the possibili- 
 ties and responsibilities attendingherguar- 
 dianship of the unfolding intelligence of 
 a little child. (August, 1886.) 
 
 The Critic : The system of educa- 
 tion which Miss Peabody was so influ- 
 ential in introducing in this country 
 needs now no further recommendation, 
 as it is almost universally acknowledged 
 to contain the germ of the best possible 
 methods for beginning the education of 
 the young child ; but these lectures are 
 still interesting and full of suggestion. 
 (Oct. 2, 1886.) 
 
 The Presbyterian Observer, Bal- 
 timore, Md. : It is a valuable aid, not 
 only to Kindergartners, but to teachers 
 generally, to parents, to all, in fact, who 
 are brought in contact with children in 
 
 any attitude or relation. That gross 
 injustice to children is of too common 
 occurrence, even at the hands of those 
 who love them best, no observer of 
 childhood will deny. How to care for 
 them that they may "grow in wisdom 
 and stature, and in favor with God 
 and man " ; that their threefold nature 
 may be developed as their Father in 
 Heaven undoubtedly purposed it should 
 be developed, is a problem of grave im- 
 portance. Miss Peabody's researches in 
 this direction render this problem less dif- 
 ficult of solution ; and we heartily com- 
 mend her work to those having helpless 
 childhood in their keeping most help- 
 less as to parentage and environment. 
 (Sept. 16, 1886.) 
 
 B. D. C., in The Index : Miss Pea- 
 body has given us, in neat, readable 
 form, the remarkable lectures which she 
 has read at various times during her 
 long period of interest in the educational 
 methods of Froebel, which she has done 
 so much to establish in America. The 
 story of little T., who had been carefully 
 withheld from any religious teaching, but 
 whose young soul opened like a prized 
 gentian in the sunshine to his wise teach- 
 er's story-telling, will be dear to every 
 transcendentalist who believes in the 
 life within as well as the life without the 
 child. Any abbreviation of it would spoil 
 it ; but we ask every mother who is con- 
 sidering the great question how to 
 develop her child's spiritual nature 
 to ponder it well in her heart. Miss 
 Peabody has been in large sense the 
 educator of two or three generations ; 
 and her wonderful union of deep spiritu- 
 ality, holy religion, and enthusiasm for 
 humanity, with broad intellectual free- 
 dom of thought, has kept her ever fresh 
 and young, so that she can meet the 
 school-girl of to-day with the same en- 
 thusiasm, and the same recognition of 
 her inner life, and the same sympathy 
 with her efforts and trials that she gave 
 to her first pupils sixty years ago. Such 
 
EDUCATION. 
 
 a life prolonged to the age of over eighty 
 years, and still full of courage, happiness, 
 and peace, is a benediction on the city 
 where she dwells ; and she well deserves 
 the dear, familiar name bestowed on her, 
 "the Grandmother of Boston." We 
 trust she will employ the years yet 
 granted to her in telling stone's from her 
 rich past, so that all her grandchildren 
 may learn her lessons of wisdom and 
 of love. (Sept. 30, 1886.) 
 
 Lynn Transcript : While addressed 
 primarily to those fitting for teachers of 
 the Kindergarten system, these lectures 
 contain very much that parents them- 
 selves ought to read and reflect upon. 
 (Aug. 27, 1886.) 
 
 London Literary World : Every 
 parent and teacher should make the 
 plans suggested here his familiar s.tudy. 
 (Oa.S, 1 
 
 The Advocate of Peace: The va- 
 
 rious topics are treated in a calm, lucid, 
 lively, and instructive manner by one 
 mature and exceptionally apt to teach 
 with sympathy and sound judgment. The 
 book should be read by all parents, and 
 is essential to the library of every Kinder- 
 garten teacher. (September, i 
 
 The Commercial Gazette, Cin- 
 cinnati, O. : Miss Peabody is one of the 
 best living exponents of the system. Her 
 book will be in wide demand, as she is 
 no longer able to speak from the plat- 
 form. (Aug. 14, 1886.) 
 
 "Worcester Daily Spy : Miss Pea- 
 body's lectures are direct and practical. 
 They are interesting, too. The methods 
 of training described and the whole Kin- 
 dergarten system are developed from a 
 few simple principles, and the process of 
 development is illustrated by pertinent 
 facts and anecdotes. ( Oct. 8, 1886.) 
 
 Normal Teacher : We can recom- 
 mend this book to our readers as coming 
 from one who has tested her theories in 
 actual practice. (October, 1886.) 
 
 South Western Journal of 
 Education: Whoever wishes to com- 
 prehend the meaning of the word Kin- 
 dergarten should read this book. We 
 quote one sentence from the author, and 
 we thank her for writing it : " The one 
 fatal thing is to wound the child's heart." 
 (October, 1886.) 
 
 Florida Chautauqua, Cincinnati, 
 O. : This book should be read carefully 
 by every teacher, whether he instructs 
 primary pupils on not. The educational 
 principles so beautifully presented apply 
 to education in all grades. 
 
 The Syracuse Standard: Those 
 teachers who wish to learn about Kin- 
 dergartner methods can do no better 
 than secure it. (Aug. 23, 1886.) 
 
 The Independent, N. Y. : We take 
 pleasure in being able to direct the 
 teachers of Primary and Kindergarten 
 schools to so intelligent arid useful an 
 essay from the pen of a lady who is, on 
 the whole, the most competent authority 
 on the Kindergarten method in this 
 country. (Sept. 30, 1886.) 
 
 The Chicago Tribune : It will be 
 warmly welcomed, not only by teachers 
 and others who are interested in the 
 Kindergarten system, but by all thought- 
 ful and conscientious people who are 
 endeavoring to learn the principles upon 
 which the development and training of 
 children should rest. The work is full 
 of beautiful and beneficent thoughts, and 
 will be an inspiration to many a per- 
 plexed mother, and to many a jaded and 
 doubting teacher, for it furnishes not 
 alone enthusiasm and faith, but a store 
 of practical suggestions that are of great 
 value. (Sept. n, 1886.) 
 
8 
 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 Indiana School Journal: This 
 book is especially valuable to the coun- 
 try teacher, who must of necessity deal 
 with all grades. (October, 1886.) 
 
 Milford (N.H.) Enterprise: The 
 book is one of more than ordinary.merit, 
 and will be found more interesting to the 
 general public than might be suggested 
 by the title-page. It is full of practical 
 suggestions for teachers of any school, 
 for matrons of children's homes, and es- 
 pecially, it seems to us, to all heads of 
 families where children make up the 
 home circle. In fact, every mother 
 should become a thorough Kindergart- 
 ner, and no better text-book has yet 
 been written on this subject for mothers. 
 (Aug. 17, 1886.) 
 
 The Teacher, Philadelphia : It is a 
 rare treat. Probably nobody certainly 
 no woman is better able to speak upon 
 this subject than Miss Peabody. She 
 has the wonderful strength of mind, the 
 quick sympathy, the determined energy, 
 which is necessary to carry forward a 
 great educational reform, especially a 
 reform affecting the education of chil- 
 dren, and in her " Lectures " these quali- 
 ties stand boldly out. (November, 1886.) 
 
 Canada School Journal: The 
 
 book is one which every teacher, and 
 especially every teacher of children, 
 should read and ponder. (Sept. 15, 1886.) 
 
 Boston Daily Advertiser : It can- 
 not fail to prove of immense value to all 
 interested in the education of the child, 
 and in the study of child nature. In it 
 are embodied the results of well-directed 
 observations of child life, which, apart 
 from their bearing upon the special work 
 of Kindergarten teachers, indicate the 
 extent to which a systematic objective 
 study of children may be the means of 
 enlarging and improving in a practical 
 way the study of psychology. 
 (Sept. 8, 1886.) 
 
 The New York School Journal : 
 
 The books are multiplying rapidly now- 
 adays that teachers are glad to have, 
 but this seems to be among the indis- 
 pensable ones. 
 
 North Carolina Presbyterian, 
 
 Wilmington, N.C. : The lecture on " The 
 Nursery" is of inestimable value to moth- 
 ers, and teaches our young women that 
 truly "the mother's heart is the best 
 school-room." These lectures are in- 
 tensely interesting, and every mother 
 should have a copy. They would, we 
 are sure, enjoy it and find it of great aid 
 and comfort to them. (November, 1886.). 
 
 London Journal of Education: 
 
 It is a significant fact, that ten years ago 
 no such prominence would have been 
 assigned to Froebel. People who are 
 groping after "method," "a scientific 
 basis," or " a wide outlook " for the 
 educator, find in Froebel an unexpected 
 friend and prophet, and enforce his 
 teachings after their own fashion. 
 
 Wisconsin Journal of Educa- 
 tion : The lectures are very suggestive 
 and contain a most admirable discussion 
 of the Kindergarten. (September, 1886.) 
 
 New England Journal of Edu- 
 cation : It is a great gain to the litera- 
 ture of Kindergarten work. The issue 
 of such a book, under the circumstances 
 that have developed this, speaks volumes 
 for the advance of the science of Kinder- 
 garten work. It is a book for teachers 
 of higher grades as well, I had almost 
 said more than for the instructors of little 
 folk. (August, 1886.) 
 
 Central School Journal: It 
 
 should find its way into the hands of all 
 classes of teachers, especially those of 
 the primary grade. (September, 1886.) 
 
 Education, Boston : It forms an ad- 
 mirable presentation of the subject. 
 
EDUCATION. 
 
 121 
 
 Rosmini*$ Method in Education. 
 
 Translated from the Italian of ANTONIO ROSMINI SERBATI by Mrs. 
 WILLIAM GREY, whose name has been widely known in England for 
 many years past as a leader in the movement for the higher education 
 of women. 5^ by 7^ inches. Cloth. xxvi+ 363 pages. Price by mail, 
 $1.50; Introduction pVice, $1.40. 
 
 HTHIS is a work of singular interest for the educational world, and 
 especially for all those who desire to place education on a scientific 
 basis. 
 
 It is an admirable exposition of the method of presenting knowl- 
 edge to the human mind in accordance with the natural laws of its 
 development; and the disciples of Frcebel will find in it not only a 
 perfectly independent confirmation, but the true psychological estimate 
 of the principles of FroebePs kindergarten system. We believe that 
 this 'translation of the work of the great Italian thinker will prove 
 a boon to all English-speaking lovers of true education on both sides 
 of the Atlantic. [Ready in October. 
 
 Mr. Thomas Davidson, Orange, 
 N.J.: It is one of the most careful works 
 of the ablest and most comprehensive 
 thinker of the nineteenth century, a man 
 of whom friend and foe alike speak with 
 reverence as of a saint, and who, indeed, 
 was a saint. (Feb. 20, 1886.) 
 
 The University, Chicago : Any 
 American student of pedagogy, who, 
 after working in the German literature 
 of the subject, has found relief by turn- 
 ing to the French writers, will experience 
 the same pleasant impression on becom- 
 ing acquainted with the educational liter- 
 ature of Italy, Lightness and clearness 
 
 are among its valuable qualities ; while no 
 one that has undertaken Siciliani or Ros- 
 mini will deny its depth and solidity. To 
 an American schoolman it is a wholesome 
 lesson to survey the foreign pedagogic 
 field and to learn that the great questions 
 which press for solution at home are the 
 questions among other peoples also, 
 where they may often be seen in more 
 advanced stages of development, or even 
 already settled. By no means do we 
 lead the world in education. We are a 
 vigorous younger child in the great 
 family of cultured nations, becoming 
 now old enough to respect our elders. 
 
 Lectures to Kinder gar tners. 
 
 BY ELIZABETH P. PEABODY. Published at the urgency of a large 
 number of Kindergartners, inasmuch as Miss Peabody is no longer able 
 to speak viva voce. $% by 7/^ inches. Cloth, viii-f 225 pages. Price by 
 mail, $1.10; Introduction price, $1.00. 
 
 n^HE first of these lectures introduced and interested the Boston 
 
 public in Kindergarten education. The seven others are those 
 
 which, for nine or ten successive years, Miss Peabody addressed to 
 
122 EDUCATION. 
 
 the training classes for Kindergartners, in Boston and other cities. 
 They unfold the idea which, though as old as Plato and Aristotle, and 
 set forth more or less practically from Comenius to Pestalozzi, was 
 for the first time made into an adequate system by Froebel. The 
 lectures begin with the natural exemplification of this idea in the nursery, 
 followed by two lectures on how the nursery opens up into the Kinder- 
 garten through the proper use of language and conversation with 
 children, finally developing into equipoise the child's relations to 
 his fellows, to nature, and to God. Miss Peabody draws many 
 illustrations from her own psychological observations of child-life. 
 
 Habit and its Importance in Education. 
 
 An Essay in Pedagogical Psychology. Translated from the German of 
 DR. PAUL RADESTOCK by F. A. CASPARI, Teacher of German, Girls' High 
 School, Baltimore ; with an Introduction by DR. G. STANLEY HALL, Pro- 
 fessor of Psychology and Pedagogy, Johns Hopkins University. 5 *^ by 7^ 
 inches. Cloth. 1x4-117 pages. Price by mail, 65 cents; Introduction 
 price, 60 cents. 
 
 pROFESSOR RADESTOCK has devoted some of the best years 
 of his life to practical teaching and a research into the principles 
 at the base of most habits. His book contains an able and practical 
 discussion of: 
 
 I. Value and Limits of Education ; Force and Value of Habit*, 
 Various Definitions of Habit. II. Relations between Psychology and 
 Physiology ; Cause and Effect of Sensorial Impressions ; Various Ways 
 of extending Impressions. III. Relations of Concepts to each other. 
 
 IV. Properly associated Habits ; Habit and Habitude ; Principle of 
 Associated Practice; Repetition; Habit in the Organic World; Re- 
 sults of Habit ; Negative and Positive Use of Power ; Division and 
 Concentration of Power ; Aim of Human Education ; Object Lessons. 
 
 V. The Intellect; Memory and Imagination; Process of Logical 
 Thinking ; Conception Series ; Laws of the Association of Ideas ; 
 Talents resulting from a Combination of the Imagination and the 
 Intellectual Faculties. VI. The Will; Influence of Habit on the 
 Entire Psychological Life ; Value of Associates and Environment ; 
 Habitude of Personal Action; Advantage of School versus Home 
 Education. VII. Special Habits; Cleanliness; Punctuality; Neat- 
 ness; Endurance; Self-Control; Obedience; Politeness; Attention; 
 
EDUCATION. 
 
 123 
 
 Diligence ; Unselfishness ; Exercise ; Study. VIII. Moral Habits. 
 
 IX. Extreme Habituation, 111 Effects of; Three Theories concerning 
 the Emotions ; Necessity of Change in Instruction ; Punishments ; 
 Higher ^Esthetic Feelings ; Prejudice ; Pedantry ; Law of Relativeness ; 
 
 X. Habit and Free Will ; Genius ; Insanity. XI. An Appendix. 
 
 Bacon says : " Since custom is the principal magistrate of man's 
 life, let men, by all means, endeavor to obtain good customs. Cer- 
 tainly, custom is most perfect when it beginneth in young years ; this 
 we call education, which is in effect but early custom." 
 
 The translator has done her work admirably, and has given us 
 entire the little book in which Dr. Radestock has rendered his chief 
 service to education. 
 
 The subjoined extracts from letters and reviews will 
 aid teachers, normal-school classes, and students of 
 psychology generally, to form some idea of the estimate 
 placed upon the booh by competent judges : 
 
 John Dewey, Instructor in Philoso- 
 phy, Ann Arbor Univ., Mich. : Radestock 
 has been for some time favorably known 
 by means of his psychological mono- 
 graphs, of which this upon Habit is no 
 doubt the best, as it is also without doubt 
 the most suggestive and fruitful of all 
 monographs upon this most important 
 of educational subjects. Personally I 
 have been greatly interested in the wide 
 range of psychological knowledge shown, 
 and in the command of the best methods 
 and results of the newer and more exper- 
 imental psychology. In the hands of a 
 competent teacher, it would make an 
 excellent introduction to the later methods 
 of looking at all kinds of psychological 
 subjects. (May 7, 1886.) 
 
 Nicholas Murray Butler, Acting 
 
 Prof, of Ethics and Psychology ', Columbia 
 Co!!., N. Y. : Radcstock's book is a most 
 engaging little work, and I trust that 
 teachers may be led to read its words 
 and reflect on its precepts. I knew of 
 its announcement, but did not know that 
 it was ready; otherwise it should cer- 
 
 tainly have had a place in our " Course 
 of Reading." (April 30, 18 
 
 J. W. Stearns, Prof, of Science and 
 Art of Teaching, Univ. of Wis., Madi- 
 son : It is a very interesting and valuable 
 study for those who care about knowing 
 the psychological basis of teaching. You 
 have certainly conferred a great favor 
 upon teachers by placing so admirable 
 a treatise within their reach, and I hope 
 it may become widely known. 
 (May 26, 1886.) 
 
 S. N. Fellows, Chair of Mental and 
 Moral Philosophy and Didactics, State 
 Univ. of la. : I have read it with great 
 interest, and regard it as a valuable con- 
 tribution to pedagogical literature. It 
 should find a place in every teacher's 
 library. It may certainly be affirmed 
 that good habits are next in importance 
 to good principles, if not of equal impor- 
 tance. And this book is full of valuable 
 suggestions to the educator who would 
 aid liis pupils in forming right habits. 
 (May 25, 1886.) 
 
126 
 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 Popular Educator : The subject is 
 certainly a very important one, and the 
 author is an eminent psychologist. The 
 book is well printed, tastefully and 
 strongly bound, moderate in price, and, 
 as Dr. Hall observes in his preface, both 
 translator and publisher " merit the 
 thanks of those American teachers who 
 are interested in the psychological basis 
 of their vocation." (June, 1886.) 
 
 Intelligence, Chicago: The impor- 
 tance of right habits as a product of 
 school training is receiving more and 
 more attention. In this line of thought 
 and practice every reflective teacher will 
 find this essay of great value. It is the 
 product of a master who has the skill 
 and power of presenting deep scientific 
 principles in a very clear and simple 
 manner. (June 15, 1886.) 
 
 Central School Journal : Dr. Paul 
 Radestock, who has attained to a wide 
 degree of eminence as the author of sev- 
 eral brilliant psychological monographs, 
 has presented here a most admirable 
 and comprehensive brochure upon the 
 subject of " Habit in Education." Dr. 
 G. Stanley Hall, of Johns Hopkins, has 
 edited the work, and the publishers, 
 Messrs. D. C. Heath & Co., whose mark 
 is a synonym of high excellence, have 
 dressed the book with taste and neat- 
 ness. (July, 1886.) 
 
 The Christian Register : The im- 
 portance of habit in education is a trite 
 maxim of teachers and moralists; but 
 the subject has not received the full state- 
 ment that it has needed from a psycho- 
 logical standpoint. This work is an im- 
 portant one, and demands the earnest 
 study of teachers. 
 
 / Extracts from Rousseau } s Emile. 
 
 Containing the Principal Elements of Pedagogy. With an Introduction 
 and Notes by JULES STEEG, Paris, Depute de la Gironde. Translated by 
 ELEANOR WORTHINGTON, recently of the Cook County Normal School, 
 111. 5X by 7> inches. Cloth. 157 pp. Price by mail, 85 cts.; Intro- 
 duction price, 80 cts. 
 
 " There are fifty pages of the Emile that should be bound in velvet and gold." 
 
 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 T N these pages will be found the germ of all that is useful in present 
 systems of education, as well as most of the ever-recurring mistakes 
 of well-meaning zealots. 
 
 The book has been called "Natures First Gospel on Education" 
 Among its pregnant texts, are : The Object of Education ; The New- 
 born Child ; The Earliest Education ; Maxims to keep us True to 
 Nature ; The Cultivation of Language ; Childhood to be loved ; 
 Neither Slaves nor Tyrants ; Reasoning should not begin too soon ; 
 Well-Regulated Liberty ; The Idea of Property ; Falsehood ; The Force 
 of Example ; Negative or Temporizing Education ; The Memory ; The 
 Study of Words ; Physical Training ; Clothing ; Sleep ; Training the 
 Senses ; Drawing ; Geometry ; The Voice ; The Age of Study ; Curi- 
 
EDUCATION. 
 
 127 
 
 osity as an Incentive; Things rather than Symbols; A Taste for 
 Science ; Experimental Physics ; Nothing to be taken upon Authority ; 
 Learning from Necessity ; The Forest of Montmorency ; Robinson 
 Crusoe ; The Pupil at the Age of Fifteen ; Results. 
 
 The eighteenth century translations of this wonderful book have the 
 disadvantage of an English style long disused. This new translation 
 has the merit of being in the dialect of the nineteenth century, and wi4i- 
 thus be enjoyed by a wider circle of readers. 
 
 In Educational Theories, Oscar Browning says concerning this 
 book: Probably no work on the subject of education has produced 
 so much effect as the "Entile* 
 
 The following extracts from letters and reviews serve 
 to show with what cordiality this new edition has been 
 received : 
 
 G. Stanley Hall, Prof, of Pedagogy, 
 Johns Hopkins Univ. : I have examined 
 your convenient edition of the " Emile," 
 and shall recommend it to my educational 
 classes. 
 
 W. H. Payne, Prof, of Pedagogics, 
 University of Michigan : I have spent 
 considerable time in reading the " Emile " 
 and in comparing certain parts of the 
 translation with the original. Miss Wor- 
 thington has made a version of real 
 merit; Rousseau's thought has been 
 transferred to English with great accu- 
 racy, and much of the original grace of 
 style has been preserved. The teachers 
 of the country are indebted to you for 
 this invaluable contribution to the litera- 
 ture of the profession. (Dec. 15, 1884.) 
 
 J. W. Dickinson, Sec. of Mass. 
 Board of Education : It should be in the 
 hands of every teacher in the State. 
 
 Francis W. Parker, Prin. Cook Co. 
 Normal School: Teachers need to go 
 back to the man who gave such an im- 
 mense impulse to reform in education. 
 
 R. H. Quick, in "Educational Re- 
 formers " : Perhaps the most influential 
 
 book ever written on the subject of edu- 
 cation. 
 
 London Journal of Education: 
 
 The amazing originality and boldness of 
 the book, its endless suggestiveness, are 
 too often ignored by English critics, who 
 forget that nearly all our brand-new 
 theories are to be found in " Emile." 
 
 School Bulletin, N. Y. : The 
 " Emile " is far the most influential of all 
 the historically great books in pedagogy. 
 
 Philadelphia Press: There is no 
 need to praise it. The present translation 
 ought to be in the hands of every teacher 
 and parent. 
 
 Boston Advertiser: Such a book 
 as this ought to be read by every one 
 who claims to be interested in any way 
 in the cause of education. 
 
 Normal Echo, Lexington, N.C. : 
 This little book contains many gems 
 that have shone through the rubbish of 
 more than a century. Though so old, 
 they are elemental truths, and carry with 
 them the freshness of youth. The book 
 should be read by all teachers. 
 
128 
 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 Christian Union, N. Y. : The trans- 
 lation by Miss Eleanor Worthington is 
 very well done indeed, retaining much of 
 the charm of Rousseau's incomparable 
 style. 
 
 Normal Advocate, Holton, Kan.: 
 We know of no book that we would 
 rather have every teacher and every par- 
 ent in America read than the "Emile." 
 (Feb. 15, 1885.) 
 
 Correspondence Univ. Journal : 
 The publishers have shown their usual 
 sagacity in bringing out the book at this 
 time. Perhaps no other work on educa- 
 tion has had the influence of Rousseau's 
 " Emile." 
 
 
 
 Fortnightly Index, Ann Arbor: 
 By all means read the " Emile." 
 
 Chautauquan : It is the work which 
 aroused Pestalozzi and Frcebel; but it 
 has been for many years practically a 
 dead volume, particularly to English 
 readers. Old, poorly translated, long, 
 and with many tedious digressions, teach- 
 ers and mothers, who ought to have been 
 reading it, were repelled by its difficulties. 
 Some time ago M. Jules Steeg removed 
 these barriers from his French country- 
 men by arranging a volume into which 
 he gathered the most valuable portions of 
 " Emile" ; and now one of our country- 
 women has removed the difficulties for 
 English readers by a clear translation of 
 M. Steeg's work. It is a book worth 
 possessing ; and educators ought to wel- 
 come this practical and satisfactory ar- 
 rangement of Rousseau's great book. 
 
 Educational Record, Montreal : 
 M. Jules Steeg has rendered a real ser- 
 vice to teachers by his judicious selec- 
 tions. 
 
 The University, Ann Arbor: Of 
 the genius of Rousseau and the value of 
 his thoughts, philosophers have talked 
 
 and written for more than a hundred 
 years, and there seems nothing to add to 
 the volume of his praises ; but those who 
 present us with the very kernel of his 
 philosophy, stripped of the husks, cer- 
 tainly deserve our gratitude. 
 
 Literary World, Boston : It should 
 attract the attention of the many who 
 have not had the courage to attack the 
 original : they will find here the cream of 
 Rousseau. 
 
 Southwestern Journal of Edu- 
 cation, Nashville : It possesses all the 
 vigor and freshness of a new novel ; while 
 its sound principles of education com- 
 mend themselves not only to teachers, 
 but to every parent and lover of children. 
 
 North Carolina Teacher: Every 
 teacher ought to be familiar with the 
 remarkable thoughts of " Emile." It 
 contains the germ of all that is useful in 
 the present system of education. 
 
 Christian Union, N. Y.: To this day 
 the influence of the " Emile " is felt. For 
 by it was inspired Pestalozzi; and by 
 Pestalozzi was taught Froebel.the founder 
 of the kindergarten system, and one of 
 the foremost educators of our day. The 
 book itself also, despite a great deal that 
 was purely fanciful and romantic, had in 
 it most excellent material for thought, 
 and many sagacious observations for 
 teachers and parents. 
 
 Boston Advertiser : The selections 
 have a special importance, as showing 
 how Rousseau followed up the physical 
 and moral development of the child, 
 and as illustrating how the teacher may 
 *' thrill with life the teaching of facts, and 
 aid the mind in giving birth to its ideas." 
 
 Christian Register, Hostsn : This 
 famous book has not outlived its useful- 
 ness. There are few mothers and edu- 
 
EDUCATION. 
 
 129 
 
 cators of the young who could not profit 
 by its wise suggestions. 
 
 Pilot, Boston: The present version 
 is in good English, and will no doubt 
 find many readers who would have been 
 repelled by the proportions of the origi- 
 nal, and by the antiquated translations. 
 
 The School Herald : " Emile " is 
 one of the educational classics of the 
 world. The three-volume novel, however, 
 which, at its first publication a century ago, 
 produced such a sensation among bish- 
 ops and dons, would be too wearisome a 
 work for modern readers. This version 
 is in a style altogether commendable for 
 clearness and simplicity, and should be 
 widely read by teachers who would know 
 the thoughts of one of the most brilliant 
 of philosophers on education. 
 (Dec. 15, 1886.) 
 
 Journal of Speculative Philoso- 
 phy: No single book ever made so 
 much noise in the world. It was the 
 gospel of the latter half of the eighteenth 
 century. Condemned by church and 
 state, its principles were accepted and 
 practised in private, especially in Ger- 
 many and Switzerland. Three cele- 
 brated educators were inspired by it 
 Basedow, Pestalozzi, and Frcebel. This 
 will be enough to recommend it to the 
 
 attention of all those who are at present 
 discussing the kindergarten, and the en- 
 largement of the scope of education, 
 from the nursery to the university. 
 (October ; 1085.) 
 
 Schoolmaster, London : We com 
 mend the " Emile " to every one inter- 
 ested in the education of the young. 
 
 The Teacher, Philadelphia: From 
 the day of the appearance of " Emile " 
 to the present, Rousseau's best theories 
 have been promulgated by a continuous 
 line of disciples; and they are reflected 
 in all the recent improvements made in 
 courses of instruction for young children. 
 A perusal of this work will show some 
 of our " advanced thinkers " how old all 
 that is best in the " New Education " is. 
 
 The Pennsylvania Journal of 
 Education : The " Emile " effected a 
 genuine and needed reformation in the 
 home and school education of children, 
 and indeed of their treatment in general. 
 The abridgment before us is far more 
 useful than the original would be. It 
 gives all that is essential, and even more, 
 of the French philosopher's educa- 
 tional theories ; all the gems of his work, 
 and they are many and of the finest lus- 
 tre, with none, or at least very little of the 
 dross. 
 
 Pestalozzi's Leonard and Gertrude. 
 
 Translated and abridged by EVA CHANNING. With an Introduction by 
 G. STANLEY HALL, Professor of Pedagogy in Johns Hopkins University. 
 5 l /i by 7/^z inches. Cloth. 193 pp. Price by mail, 85 cts.; Introduction 
 price, 80 cts. 
 
 HTHIS is a carefully abridged translation, in which the gist of five 
 large volumes is compressed into a book of less than two hundred 
 pages, which, while retaining much of the quaint simplicity of the 
 original, avoids its repellant prolixity and converts the reader's task 
 into a pleasure. 
 
130 
 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 It is a book which all teachers should read with care, for it com- 
 prises within modest limits the whole substance of the Pestalozzian 
 theory of education. 
 
 In this charming, instructive, and suggestive union of a capital story 
 and a pedagogical treatise, Pestalozzi sets forth his radical, far-reaching 
 views of the true scope and end of education as well as of the true 
 method of attaining that end. 
 
 Under its wit and wisdom, its humor and pathos, he inculcates the 
 strongest moral lessons or the most helpful doctrines of political, 
 social, and personal education. 
 
 Every mother should read the book, for, as Oscar Browning says in 
 his " Educational Theories," " a mother who follows the principles incul- 
 cated in this book can educate her children as if she were the posses- 
 sor of all the sciences. 1 ' 
 
 This volume and the " Emile " gave rise to a revolution in educa- 
 tional matters, and they will be found to contain the best, because 
 the original and simplest, statement of the great principles that must 
 guide every successful teacher. 
 
 It is this book on which Pestalozzi's fame as an author mainly rests, 
 and this book was dictated by an earnest desire to lift up the lower 
 classes of Switzerland to found a Republic of thought, of capabilities, 
 of work. 
 
 R. H. Quick, in "Educational Re- 
 formers" : No wonder that the Berne 
 Agricultural Society sent the author a 
 gold medal, with a letter of thanks ; and 
 that the book excited vast interest, both 
 in its native country and throughout 
 Germany. It is only strange that " Leon- 
 ard and Gertrude" has not become a 
 favorite, by means of translations, in other 
 countries. 
 
 The Natipn : Its effect, not only in 
 Germany, but throughout Europe, was 
 great and immediate. Every teacher will 
 be stimulated and instructed by reading 
 this quaint and thrilling educational ro- 
 mance, quite apart from its great histori- 
 cal importance. 
 
 The New York Independent : As 
 a story it is effective and interesting. As 
 
 a theory of education it is ideal, with a 
 strong touch of Rousseau Utopianism in 
 it a Utopianism, however, which con- 
 sists very largely in the attempt to con- 
 struct human society on the basis of the 
 Sermon on the Mount. 
 
 Harvard Advocate : Pestalozzi's 
 style is vividly realistic ; the characters 
 of the book are strongly drawn. The 
 work of abridgment was a difficult one ; 
 Miss Channing has, however, been suc- 
 cessful, and the story loses nothing in 
 force and interest under her hands. 
 
 Ann Arbor University : It not 
 only has the ir.erit of being educational, 
 but charmingly portrays German peasant 
 life in the eighteenth century. It can be 
 heartily recommended to all, its very 
 blemishes being wholesome. 
 
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 WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN 
 THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY 
 WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH 
 DAY AND TO $I.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY 
 OVERDUE. 
 
 MAY 11 1935 
 
 
 
 
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