rigid discipline, with many stripes and with terrible threats of a still worse punishment in the world to come, was the almost invariable lot of children until the last century was well advanced.  Yet has this drastic treatment of young children fulfilled its purpose?  Were the men of fifty years ago better conducted and more controlled than the men of to-day?  In any one family did a greater proportion turn out well?  Is it not true that at least among the educated classes the relaxation of nursery and schoolroom discipline which the last fifty years has seen has been justified by its results?  Is it not true that the childhood of our grandmothers was often lived “in fear, in restraint, in submission, in suffering subject to galling, unreasoning, unnecessary, arbitrary prohibitions and taboos, and to customary duties equally galling, unreasoning, unnecessary, and arbitrary.”  And though perhaps the grandmothers of most of us may not have been much the worse for all this discipline, is it not true that of the little brothers who shared the nursery with them a surprising number broke straightway into dissipation when the parental restraints were removed?  If we are to teach a child to be gentle to the weak it is not wise to beat him.  The qualities which we wish him to possess are not more subtle than the means by which we must aid him to their possession.

[Footnote 2:  The Principles of Rational Education, by Dr. C.A.  Mercier.]

Education comprises physical, mental, and moral training.  In earlier times physical strength and the power to fight well, alone were prized and were the chief objects to be gained in the education of youth.  Later, under the stress of intellectual competition for success in life, mental acquirements have come to occupy the first place.  We are only now learning to lay emphasis upon the supreme need for moral training.  Not that it is possible to separate the sum of education into its constituent parts, and to regard each as distinct from the others.  That many men of great intellectual activity, and many men pre-eminent for their moral qualities have harboured a great brain or a noble character in a weakly or deformed body, forms no argument to disprove the general rule that a healthy, vigorous physique is the only sure foundation upon which to build a highly developed intellect and a stable temperament.  In childhood the intimate connection between vigour of mind and vigour of body is almost always clearly shown.  A child with rickets, unable to exercise his body in free play, as a rule shows a flabbiness of mind in keeping with his useless muscles and yielding bones.  Such children talk late, are infantile in their habits and ways of thought, and are more emotional and unstable than healthy children of the same age.  The connection between bodily ailments and instability of nervous control is even more clearly seen in the frequent combination of rheumatism and chorea.  A very high proportion of older children