which we can pursue for any length without finding it run up in time into almost every other part. The methods of discipline and the methods of instruction are, as we observed before, intimately connected, and accordingly it cannot be out of place to return here to the subject of authority and persuasion, which we referred to slightly in our last paper, but which deserves to be further considered. The point which we wish to notice more particularly now is, the opposition which is sometimes supposed to exist between what is called ruling by persuasion and ruling by authority. Now, when these two things are represented as antitheses one to the other, we suspect that there is some great fallacy lurking somewhere or other. The term 'ruling by per'suasion' is, to our apprehension, somewhat ambiguous. Persuasion (it should be suasion, persuasion is not a correct term) may be either successful or not successful: in other words, suasion may become persuasion, or it may not. Now, if I try to persuade you to do a thing, and succeed in persuading you to do it, I rule by persuasion; but if I try to persuade you to do a thing, and do not succeed in persuading you to do it, do I then rule by persuasion--do I rule at all? I use suasion; but do I rule? Certainly not: if I use nothing more than suasion, and you are not persuaded, I do not rule; it is then you who rule, since you, having the option in your own hands to do or not to do, choose not to be persuaded, and therefore (by the hypothesis) not to do. When, therefore, ruling by persuasion is set in contrast and opposition to ruling by authority, we do not distinctly understand what is meant. Is it meant that persuasion is always successful with children; that you can always be sure of persuading them to do what it is right for them to do? If this is meant, we understand it, and have only to try the experiment on any fair average of children, and await the result; but there is probably no person, come to years of discretion, who would maintain this. Is it meant, then, that when persuasion is not successful, one does yet in such case still rule by persuasion? Is it not clear that, in spite of persuasion, one does not rule? How, then, can this be called ruling by persuasion, when it is not ruling at all? This is the difficulty we see in the very term ruling by persuasion. But is there not a similar ambiguity in the term ruling by authority? We think not. The person who tries to persuade merely, and, by the hypothesis, uses nothing more than persuasion, leaves the option to do or not to do, with the child; whereas the person who rules by authority reserves to himself the right of ordering or not ordering a thing to be done. Here then is no such break down, as in the mere persuasion theory; the child has not the power to question and dispute the propriety of the thing to be done it is not put to him in that way. It is'do this, and he

'does it;' he takes 'no' for an answer. What, then, is the practical difference between the two methods? We believe it to be nearly this. He who rules by persuasion merely, ought, by his theory, to give in when he cannot persuade; but yet his very office, and position, and comfort, and general sense of propriety, force him at times to insist on his authority, as he is obliged to call it, and thus necessarily appears to the child unjust, inasmuch as he obliges him to do what he does not think just, which he has himself allowed that he ought not to oblige him to do. At the very least, by shifting the ground of obedience, he must appear capricious. On the contrary, he who rules by authority trusts uniformly to his own judgment, never to the child's; he has only one ground on which he rests the child's obligation to obey, namely, his own knowledge and judgment of what is right. But knowing that he has the authority, and that the child acknowledges and owns it, he is seldom obliged to exert it abruptly. He can afford to use the tone or even language of persuasion, because he knows, and the child knows, that there is, and is acknowledged to be, authority to back it. In the one case authority is rejected and persuasion fails, in the other authority is maintained and persuasion, if used, succeeds.

But there is another view which may be taken of this subject. Persuasion and authority are in fact the same in this, that they both express a desire to have something done; and they differ in this, that persuasion leaves it to the child, while authority reserves it to itself, to say whether the desire shall be complied with or not. If, then, the judgment of the child is the safer to trust to, undoubtedly mere persuasion is better; but if on the other hand the judgment of the parent or master is the safer, undoubtedly authority is preferable. To take a very commonplace example, a master who should entreat a large number of boys to be quiet, and try to persuade them to be so, they knowing that he will not go beyond persuasion and entreaty, whether they are quiet or not, may be said to be attempting to rule by persuasion. A looker-on would probably think it anything but ruling. On the contrary, a master who should request to have silence, the boys knowing that he will go beyond a request, if they are not silent, may be said (quoad hoc) to rule by authority, though apparently using the words or tone of persuasion. Ill-informed persons suppose that the persuasion system is kinder than the other; but it is no such thing it is weaker, but not kinder. Real kindness is discreet, and relies on sound judgment, but does not humor and truckle to the whimsies of those who cannot judge. Children cannot know what is best for them; and to treat them as if they did know is anything but kind, because anything but wise. They

ought to be made to do, not what seems best to them, but what is best for them.*

We are not ignorant that to the many some of the opinions expressed here may seem overstrained and uncalled for. Indeed it could not be otherwise, if these opinions are true. But there will be others to whom they will appear nothing new, but only an objective exhibition of their own subjective feelings. This also could not be otherwise, if the opinions expressed are true. Although to many it may seem an unimportant matter whether a lax or a firm system of discipline be adopted in schools, to others it will appear a question of the greatest moment; and while some may fancy that there is after all no great difference except in words, others will know that the difference is one of things and realities; they will know that if a general laxity of school discipline were but once to become prevalent in this or any other country, for but two generations, nothing more would be needed but the addition of two or three more principles which generally accompany such a state of things, to ensure for our posterity a puny, weakly character, and a poverty-stricken impotency of intellect. There would be dwarfs in those days. There would be no help for a country in which such a system should prevail: there never has been found any, where such a system has become predominant. The citizens of a state were once the pupils of the schools; and the pupils of the schools will one day be citizens of the state and to suppose, or to act on the supposition, that there is no connexion, or little connexion, between the discipline of schools and the order of a state, is a piece of the most glaring short-sightedness. We said that nothing else would be needed but the addition of

This reminds us of a passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews (xii. 9, 10), which, as it may have led or may lead to some misapprehensions on this subject, may be worth explaining here. It is this: We have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live? For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but He for our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness,' &c. Now the word for chastened (Taidevov), is the same as that used above for corrected (πaidevrǹs); the only difference is that one is the verb, and the other the noun. The meaning is trained or educated: maideia is the common word for education. Again, 'they chastened us after their own pleasure,' does not mean that they castigated us just as they pleased, but they taught, trained, and educated us as seemed to them fit; and the antithesis intended in the passage is this, that while our fathers after the flesh have trained and educated us as they thought best, the Father of spirit trains and educates us as is really best. They may have been mistaken, but He cannot be they consulted our apparent good, He our real good. The word pleasure is rarely used exactly in this sense now. Wielif uses will, Thai in tyme of fewe daics taughten (¿ñaidɛvov) us bi her (their) will.'

two or three more principles which generally accompany the state of things on which we have been remarking. Such principles are some of those which we treated in the former paper, as, for example, that the study of the dead languages is useless, or not so useful as many other things; that it is of no use to work for working's sake; that it is undesirable to overload the memory with mere words, as people talk, with poetry, oratory, and so forth, and that it is better to impart facts, useful facts in science and natural history. These and such like favorite dogmas are the universal concomitants of a weakened and effeminate system. They are the plausible outside put upon plans which would produce nothing but shallowness and conceit. The truth is, that a strong, firm discipline, and a strong, broad system of classical institution form the very best base on which can be raised the superstructure of a great national character.

Such warnings as these are more especially needed now, when we hear so much of English notes to classical books, of literal translations, whether interlinear or marginal, of selfinstructing manuals, of easy explanations of abstruse subjects, of epitomes, compendiums, and so forth; now when the most empirical methods find a place in our schools, and are actually encouraged where it might have been expected they would have been most stringently proscribed. The cribbing books, as boys call them, which are now so widely used, are among the worst signs of the classical education of the day.

There is a great deal, perhaps, which may be said against Latin notes to Latin and Greek school books; we do not deny it but that which may be said, is not that which is said. If Latin notes do harm, we are quite certain that such English notes as we generally get do more. We shall find out in course of time, perhaps, that the scholars who were formed when there were no notes but in Latin, were not inferior to those who have been produced by the prosody-made-easy methods of the day. It would possibly be unfair to intimate a suspicion that some who have written notes, have written them in English because easier to them to write, rather than because easier to the pupils to read. We believe there was not near so much rubbish written in Latin notes as there is in English. Our own opinion is that if a boy cannot read, for example, Heyne's notes to Virgil or Döring's to Horace (we are not saying that Heyne's or Döring's notes are all that they ought to be), he has no business to read Virgil or Horace at all. He ought to go through his Delectus again.

One of the great objections, and a very serious objection, to English notes (and the same will apply to American notes), is that they are so easy to read: they may be read so quickly;

there is so little delay in the perusal, so little dwelling of the eye, and therefore of the mind, so little thought needed for reading English notes; they may be read almost between sleeping and waking, read while coming up to the lesson, or read, say stealthily glanced at, while going through the lesson. And we all know that what is easiest to read is often the most difficult to remember, especially when we get at once to the result without ourselves going through the process of working it out. This again is another great objection to the English and American note system now in vogue, that it precludes the pupil from exercising the mind in finding out the thing to be found, in arriving by his own strength at the point required, in solving the problem for himself; from this, the most gratifying and wholesome, because the most exercising and most gymnastic, part of learning, the pupil is constantly debarred. For a single glance at a few pages of, say, Anthon's Horace, will convince any one that it is not the difficult things which a studious boy could not find out if he tried (supposing him fit to read the author at all), it is not these merely, or these mainly, which are explained, as they call it, but the easy things which a lazy boy would not try to find out. Lessing said that if he had the choice offered him between truth and the investigation of truth, he would unhesitatingly choose the latter; and though the terms in which he expressed this decision have something like an air of levity, yet there is after all a certain basis of reality and soundness beneath it. There is nothing more delighting and invigorating to the mind, because nothing calling its powers into more healthy exercise, than the pursuit and discovery of knowledge: this of course is trite enough, and every one would admit it in general terms, every one would agree to it—until it was to be applied to a practical case. But such a system as we are remarking on, proceeds in entire neglect of this principle; such a system, we should say, so far from whetting the appetite by a chase, does away with the chase, and chokes the mind with food which it is unable to digest. A mental obesity is the natural result of such a diet, and, if the complexion counterfeits the hue of health, it will be only the hue, for it cannot be more than skin-deep. Far different the result of a healthy regimen, which affords exercise proportioned to the strength, excites a strong and natural appetite, and imparts all along the tone and vigor which will enable the frame to cope with the exercise and the food.

Connected with this subject, though perhaps indirectly, is another of some interest. We allude to what is commonly called the love of reading in children. Some persons, we conceive, lay far too great a stress on this peculiarity, as if it were a certain, necessary, and unmixed good; as if, this being secured,

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