task of bringing up children. How many of us here to-night 

 would undertake to produce a gooseberry bush, or grow a 

 parsnip, or cultivate a bed of asparagus properly ? Yet, adver- 

 tise for a nurse, and any ignoramus that cannot make a bed or 

 cook a souffle thinks herself, and is often thought, good enough. 

 It is a significent fact that a nurse's wages are less than a cook's. 

 A spoiled dinner or an uncomfortable bed appeal immediately 

 to the senses, but the hope of a life passes, by the conventional, 

 presently easy system, uncared for away. 



One result of this policy of assurance is a meddling and inter- 

 fering with Nature's ordinary laws of growth and health — bad 

 ventilation, especially at night, too little exercise, improper food, 

 and too much restriction and repression generally. Wordsworth 

 says : "To the solid ground of Nature trusts the mind that 

 builds for aye." Surely the natural wishes and feelings of the 

 child are a guide for its physical treatment worth at least as 

 much attention as the old wives' fables that hang about the 

 nursery. 



Were it not indeed for sympathy, ignorance might tell a sad- 

 der tale. Sympathy often teaches how to lead as well as why to 

 follow ; for though following, that is obedience, must be learnt 

 early, it is the obedience of love, not that of fear. The need of 

 punishment to enforce obedience is, I think, nearly always the 

 outcome of bad training at first. It would be out of place here 

 to discuss the data or standards of ethics ; the important point 

 is that the motives to right conduct of the child, and its rules 

 and sanctions should be as far as possible exactly the same as 

 the motives, rules, and sanctions of the man. The child's first 

 need is a power in himself of judgment as to the Tightness or 

 wrongness of things ; his next is the ability to follow the guide 

 of his own judgment manfully and well. The fear of parental 

 anger or the rod as a consequence of certain acts stigmatised 

 by parental authority, but nohow else, as "bad," or the expec- 

 tation of parental payments in the shape of bribes of various 

 kinds for " good " deeds, are "therefore evidently excluded from 

 right training, being mere makeshifts for the convenience of 

 the parent or teacher of a purely temporary character. They 



