EDUCATION OF CHILDREN. 231 



satisfactory progress in worldly prosperity, and has lived a better 

 and brighter life." 



EDUCATION OF CHILDREN. 



Among the chief of the duties and responsibilities of the heads 

 of the Home, that which embraces the education of children is para- 

 mount in importance, and ought to be the subject of earnest and 

 anxious forethought, and of unremitting and watchful care. The 

 object of all parents ought to be, and is, except where unnatural and 

 abnormal conditions exist, to bend the utmost energies and to strain 

 every available resource to so equip the youth or maiden for their 

 future life, as to best insure their happiness and prosperity. To this 

 end, therefore, it is primarily of importance that youth should be 

 endowed with a sound mind in a sound body mens sana in cor pore 

 sanOf and this embraces as well the health of the morals, for all 

 experience goes to show that there can never be perfect or lasting 

 physical ana intellectual vigor without moral health. These three 

 graces of manhood and womanhood go hand in hand through life ; 

 whenever one is absent, the others are certain to languish and 

 decay. It is unfortunately the great defect of American domestic 

 education that the moral side of life is not regarded, as it ought to 

 be, as strictly essential to and belonging to the duty of physical and 

 mental education. Perhaps no people in the world are so lavishly 

 liberal in their treatment of the youth as are the people of America. 

 The great masses of our citizens, having to carve their own fortunes 

 out of their capital of industry and energy, find always the gratifi- 

 cation of a laudable ambition which had been denied to themselves, 

 in the effort to improve the social, intellectual and material fortunes 

 of their children. The clerk or mechanic, forced by the hard exi- 

 gencies of his early circumstances to forego many of the graces, 

 refinements and luxuries of life, now that thrift and energy have 

 made him the master of ample competence, finds peculiar pride and 

 pleasure in taking care that his children experience none of the pri- 

 vations which he so well knows how to appreciate. The mother who 

 in the springtide of her own existence was compelled to self-denial, 

 is prone to take a lavish satisfaction, in indulgence in dress and social 

 pleasures to her daughters. In both cases the instinct is natural 

 and laudable ; but it also contains the element of the very greatest 

 danger to which children so situated are exposed in their education. 

 Such indulgence is too apt to lead to pride of person, of position, and 

 of purse, which warp ana pervert the noblest, highest and most gen- 

 erous instincts of manhood and womanhood, and expose those so 

 educated in false kindness, to the ever present risk of being 

 stranded upon the shoals of utter helplessness by the first unex- 

 pected tempest of adversity. If the father, while denying no 

 wholesome luxury or refinement of life to his son, were also to 

 ground him upon those solid virtues of self-denial which he in his 



