POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



715 



example of how very near a false popular 

 superstition may unwittingly come to the 

 truth. 



The Limits of Parental Discipline. — The 



point to which parental discipline may go 

 might be made a subject of fruitful study. 

 It is agreed, of course, that the child must 

 be trained and kept in a certain degree of 

 subjection for its own good and to prevent 

 its becoming a nuisance to society, and a 

 certain pliancy to the control of superiors 

 is, as a writer in an English journal well re- 

 marks, absolutely essential to the organization 

 of a household, a school, or a state. " Disci- 

 pline," this writer continues, " implies ready 

 obedience to orders of which the reason is 

 not understood ; but it should always rest 

 on the belief that these orders are given for 

 sufficient reasons, and not for the mere satis- 

 faction of those who give them in seeing 

 them obeyed." The theory of " breaking " 

 the will of the child, in which parents and 

 teachers indulge, is all wrong. The first 

 thing a superior has to learn " is that there 

 is no such thing as property in the character 

 of a human being ; that when the individu- 

 ality of a character has to be suppressed — and 

 of course the organization of society requires 

 that it must often be suppressed — it is sup- 

 pressed either for its own good or for the 

 good of others to whom consideration is due, 

 and that, beyond the limits of these obliga- 

 tions, individuality, far from being a hin- 

 drance and annoyance to be got rid of as 

 completely as possible, is a distinct gain to 

 the universe. The wish of some parents to 

 wield as much power over the wills and 

 characters of their children as they do over 

 the motions of the horses they ride or drive 

 is not only a foolish but an evil wish. To 

 get excellent instruments on which they can 

 perform as they would perform on a piano, 

 always eliciting exactly the particular vibra- 

 tion they desire and expect, is clearly not the 

 true object of family life. On the contrary, 

 character, far from being an instrument to 

 be performed on by others, should always be 

 a new source of life and originality, which no 

 one should be able to govern despotically 

 from the outside, and which, even from inside, 

 is in a great degree a mystery and a marvel to 

 him who has most power over it. The mere 

 notion of making character a kind of re- 



peater, which responds by a given number 

 of strokes to the parent's touch, is a radi- 

 cally absurd one. What a parent ought to 

 wish for is, indeed, instant obedience to 

 orders given for the child's good, and an 

 eager intelligence in the child to trust its 

 parent; but beyond this, as much that is 

 distinct and individual, and that has a sep- 

 arate significance of its own, as the child's 

 nature can provide." 



Vitality in Intellectual Work. — So far 



from intellectual work diminishing vitality, 

 says a writer in the London Spectator, the 

 chiefs of all the intellectual professions are, 

 and in recent times have been, men who 

 have passed the ordinary term of years with 

 undiminished powers. In politics the prin- 

 cipal leaders whom this generation has 

 known have been Earl Russell, Lord Palm- 

 erston, Lord Beaconsfield, and Mr. Gladstone, 

 and every one of them was at seventy in full 

 vigor, while the last, at eighty-three, is still 

 a mighty power in British politics. Prince 

 Bismarck remains at seventy-eight a force 

 with which his Government has to reckon ; 

 while the will of Leo XIII, an exceptionally 

 intellectual Pope, at eighty- three, is felt in 

 every comer of the world. " The most in- 

 tellectual and successful soldier of our time, 

 the man who had really thought out victo- 

 ries, Marshal von Moltke, was an unbroken 

 man at ninety and more years. No men 

 dare compare themselves in literary power 

 with Tennyson or Carlyle, Victor Hugo or 

 Von Ranke, and they all reached the age 

 which the author of Ecclesiastes declared to 

 be marked only by labor and sorrow ; as also 

 did Prof. Owen, whose life was one long 

 labor in scientific inquiry ; and so also has 

 Sir William Grove, one of the most strenuous 

 thinkers whom even this age of thinkers has 

 produced. We might lengthen the list in- 

 definitely ; but to what use, when we all know 

 that the most intellectual among lawyers, his- 

 torians, novelists, physicians, politicians, and 

 naturalists survive their contemporaries, usu- 

 ally with undiminished powers ? In all sta- 

 tistical accounts, the clergy, whose occupation 

 is wholly intellectual, rank first among the 

 long-lived. A little lower down in the scale 

 the most hale men among us are those who 

 have been doing intellectual work, often ex- 

 tremely hard work, through all their lives, 



