whose principles have been found wanting. Now too the time is come when the pupil may be introduced to that high philosophy which unfolds "the causes of things." The history with which he is engaged presents a view of society in its most advanced state, when the human mind is highly developed, and the various crises which affect the growth of the political fabric are all overpast. Let him be taught to analyze the subject thus presented to him; to trace back institutions, civil and religious, to their origin; to explore the elements of the national character, as now exhibited in maturity, in the vicissitudes of the nation's fortune, and the moral and physical qualities of its race; to observe how the morals and the mind of the people have been subject to a succession of influences, some accidental, others regular; to see and remember what critical seasons of improvement have been neglected, what besetting evils have been wantonly aggravated by wickedness or folly. In short, the pupil may be furnished as it were with certain formulæ, which shall enable him to read all history beneficially; which shall teach him what to look for in it, how to judge of it, and how to apply it.

Education will thus fulfil its great business, as far as regards the intellect, to inspire it with a desire of knowledge, and to furnish it with power to obtain and to profit by what it seeks for. And a man thus educated, even though he knows no history in detail but that which is called ancient, will be far better fitted to enter on public life than he who could tell the circumstances and the date of every battle and every debate throughout the last century; whose information in the common sense of the term, about modern history, might be twenty times more minute. The fault of systems of classical education in some instances has been, not that they did not teach modern history, but that they did not prepare and dispose their pupils to acquaint themselves with it. afterwards; not that they did not attempt to raise an impossible superstructure, but that they did not prepare the ground for the foundation, and put the materials within reach of the builder.

That impatience, which is one of the diseases of the age, is in great danger of possessing the public mind on the subject of education; an unhealthy restlessness may succeed to lethargy. Men are not contented with sowing the seed unless they can also reap the fruit; forgetting how often it is the law of our condition, that "one soweth and another reapeth." It is no wisdom to make boys prodigies of information; but it is our wisdom and our duty to cultivate their faculties each in its season, first the memory and imagination, and then the judgment; to furnish them with the means, and to excite the desire of improving themselves, and to wait with confidence for God's blessing on the result.

THE

DISCIPLINE OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

This article appeared in the Quarterly journal of Education of 1835, as a reply to a previous censure in that Miscellany of the "Flogging and Fagging" as practised. at Winchester School.

LIBERAL principles and popular principles are by no means necessarily the same and it is of importance to be aware of the difference between them. Popular principles are opposed simply to restraint— liberal principles to unjust restraint. Popular principles sympathize with all who are subject to authority, and regard with suspicion all punishments-liberal principles sympathize, on the other hand, with authority, whenever the evil tendencies of human nature are more likely to be shown in disregarding it than in abusing it. Popular principles seem to have but one object-the deliverance of the many from the control of the few. Liberal principles, while generally favourable to this same object, yet pursue it as a means, not as an end; and therefore they support the subjection of the many to the few under certain circumstances, when the great end, which they steadily keep in view, is more likely to be promoted by subjection than by independence. For the great end of liberal principles is indeed "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," if we understand that the happiness of man consists more in his intellectual well doing than in his physical; and yet more in his moral and religious excellence than in his intellectual.

It must be allowed, however, that the fault of popular principles, as distinguished from liberal, has been greatly provoked by the long-continued prevalence of principles of authority which are no less illiberal. Power has been so constantly perverted that it has come to be generally suspected. Liberty has been so constantly unjustly restrained, that it has been thought impossible that it should ever be indulged too freely. Popular feeling is not quick in observing the change of times and circumstances: it is with difficulty brought to act against a longstanding evil; but, being once set in motion, it is apt to overshoot its

mark, and to continue to cry out against an evil long after it has disappeared, and the opposite evil is become most to be dreaded. Something of this excessive recoil of feeling may be observed, I think, in the continued cry against the severity of the penal code, as distinguished from its other defects; and the same disposition is shown in the popular clamour against military flogging, and in the complaints which are often made against the existing system of discipline in our schools.

The points which are attacked in this system are two-flogging and fagging; and we will first consider the question of flogging. We have nothing to do with arguments against the excessive or indiscriminate use of such a punishment: it is but idle to attack what no one defends, and what has at present hardly any real existence. The notion of à schoolmaster being a cruel tyrant, ruling only by the terror of the rod, is about as real as the no less terrific image of Bluebeard. The fault of the old system of flogging at Winchester, alluded to in your last Number, was not its cruelty, but its inefficiency; the punishment was so frequent and so slight as to inspire very little either of terror or of shame. In other schools, eighty or a hundred years ago, there may have been a system of cruel severity, but scarcely, I should imagine, within the memory of any one now alive. But the argument against all corporal punishment applies undoubtedly to an existing state of things; and this argument, therefore, I shall proceed to consider.

"Corporal punishment," it is said, "is degrading." I well know of what feeling this is the expression; it originates in that proud notion of personal independence which is neither reasonable nor Christian, but essentially barbarian. It visited Europe in former times with all the curses of the age of chivalry, and is threatening us now with those of Jacobinism. For so it is, that the evils of ultra-aristocracy and ultra-popular principles spring precisely from the same source-namely, from selfish pride-from an idolatry of personal honour and dignity in the aristocratical form of the disease-of personal independence in its modern and popular form. It is simply impatience of inferiority and submission-a feeling which must be more frequently wrong or right, in proportion to the relative situation and worthiness of him who entertains it, but which cannot be always or generally right except in beings infinitely more perfect than man. Impatience of inferiority felt by a child towards his parents, or by a pupil towards his instructors, is merely wrong, because it is at variance with the truth: there exists a real inferiority in the relation, and it is an error, a fault, a corruption of nature, not to acknowledge it.

Punishment, then, inflicted by a parent or a master for the purposes of correction, is in no true sense of the word degrading; nor is it the

more degrading for being corporal. To say that corporal punishment is an appeal to personal fear is a mere abuse of terms. In this sense all bodily pain or inconvenience is an appeal to personal fear; and a man should be ashamed to take any pains to avoid the tooth-ache or the gout. Pain is an evil; and the fear of pain, like all other natural feelings, is of a mixed character, sometimes useful and becoming, some. times wrong and mischievous. I believe that we should not do well to extirpate any of these feelings, but to regulate and check them by cherishing and strengthening such as are purely good. To destroy the fear of pain altogether, even if practicable, would be but a doubtful good, until the better elements of our nature were so perfected as wholly to supersede its use. Perfect love of good is the only thing which can profitably cast out all fear. In the meanwhile, what is the course of true wisdom? Not to make a boy insensible to bodily pain, but to make him dread moral evil more; so that fear will do its proper and appointed work, without so going beyond it as to become cowardice. It is cowardice to fear pain or danger more than neglect of duty, or than the commission of evil; but it is useful to fear them, when they are but the accompaniments or the consequences of folly and of faults.

It is very true that the fear of punishment generally (for surely it makes no difference whether it be the fear of the personal pain of flog. ging, or of the personal inconvenience of what have been proposed as its substitutes, confinement, and a reduced allowance of food,) is not the highest motive of action; and therefore, the course actually followed in education is most agreeable to nature and reason, that the fear of punishment should be appealed to less and less as the moral principle be comes stronger with advancing age. If any one really supposes that young men in the higher forms of public schools are governed by fear, and not by moral motives; that the appeal is not habitually made to the highest and noblest principles and feelings of their nature, he is too little aware of the actual state of those institutions to be properly qualified to speak or write about them.

With regard to the highest forms, indeed, it is well known that cor. poral punishment is as totally out of the question in the practice of our schools as it is at the universities; and I believe that there could no where be found a set of young men amongst whom punishment of any kind was less frequent, or by whom it was less required. The real point to be considered is merely, whether corporal punishment is in all cases unfit to be inflicted on boys under fifteen, or on those who, being older in years, are not proportionably advanced in understanding or in character, who must be ranked in the lower part of the school, and who are little alive to the feeling of self-respect, and little capable of being

influenced by moral motives. Now, with regard to young boys, it ap pears to me positively mischievous to accustom them to consider themselves insulted or degraded by personal correction. The fruits of such a system were well shown in an incident which occurred in Paris during the three days of the revolution of 1830. A boy of twelve years old, who had been forward in insulting the soldiers, was noticed by one of the officers; and though the action was then raging, the officer, considering the age of the boy, merely struck him with the flat part of his sword, as the fit chastisement for boyish impertinence. But the boy had been taught to consider his person sacred, and that a blow was a deadly insult; he therefore followed the officer, and having watched his opportunity, took deliberate aim at him with a pistol, and murdered him. This was the true spirit of the savage, exactly like that of Callum Beg in Waverley, who, when a "decent gentleman" was going to chastise him with his cane for throwing a quoit at his shins, instantly drew a pistol to vindicate the dignity of his shoulders. We laugh at such a trait in the work of the great novelist, because, according to our notions, the absurdity of Callum Beg's resentment is even more strik. ing than its atrocity. But I doubt whether to the French readers of Waverley it has appeared either laughable or disgusting; at least the similar action of the real Callum in the streets of Paris was noticed at the time as something entitled to our admiration. And yet what can be more mischievous than thus to anticipate in boyhood those feelings which even in manhood are of a most questionable nature, but which, at an earlier period, are wholly and clearly evil? At an age when it is almost impossible to find a true, manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging a fantastic sense of the degradation of personal correction? What can be more false, or more adverse to the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind which are the best ornament of youth, and offer the best promise of a noble manhood? There is an essential inferiority in a boy as compared with a man, which makes an assumption of equality on his part at once ridiculous and wrong; and where there is no equality, the exercise of superiority implied in personal chastisement cannot in itself be an insult or a degradation.

The total abandonment, then, of corporal punishment for the faults of young boys appears to me not only uncalled for, but absolutely to be deprecated. It is of course most desirable that all punishment should be superseded by the force of moral motives; and up to a certain point this is practicable. All endeavours so to dispense with flogging are the wisdom and the duty of a schoolmaster; and by these means the amount of corporal punishment inflicted may be, and in fact has been,