sion and increase your efficiency, you ought from common patriot. ism to retire from your posts, and surrender them at least to more earnest laborers.

Finally, all, we ask your sympathy and blessing, and promise to seek only your highest good.

E. O. H.

GOVERNMENT AN ELEMENT OF EDUCATION.

In the real processes of education, the processes by which the human mind unfolds into a thing of beauty and of power, a wise and firm discipline holds a chief place. The fundamental idea of government, it is true, is that of restraint; but it is the restraint of the string that enables the kite to float among the stars; or of the cylinder which confines, and thus elothes with an immeasurable might, the thin steam that had else been lost in the open air. It is a popular error, that the main purpose of good government, in the family and school, is the preservation of quiet and order; that obedience is only preliminary to the real business of the fireside and school room; and that, if by persuasion or sugar plums some tolerable quietness can be attained, all the objects of government are fully secured.

It is true, that an immediate and not unimportant end of family and school discipline, is the maintenance of so much order as will permit the processes of instruction to proceed without impediment or interruption, but it has a far higher utility than this. It is itself a potent agent of education, and a vital element of human progress and well being.

Government is a fundamental need of the human soul. We are the creatures of law. Over all without and all within us, it holds its high and resistless control. The vast universe around us is law built and law bounded. The pathway of progress is to us the pathway of law, and the grand problem of our life is to fulfil the laws that prescribe the methods and purposes of our being. To raise us to the comprehension and felt control of these laws must

be main aims of all true education. We must be trained as subjects of the divine government; but to the high moral impulses and restraints of that government, the soul of the little child cannot rise. He needs some interpreter or minister of the law to command and direct his obedience. He must be taught to obey the divine, by learning to obey the human. In that grand mould of moral law, in which God seeks to stamp the sublime rectitudes of his own character upon the human soul, the outlines are a world too wide for the stature of the child. The family discipline should act as a medium, to accommodate the pressure to the forming character of childhood, till the trained conscience has no longer any need of a human minister of the law, and the educated mind renders a ready and self prompted obedience to the principles of eternal rectitude. This is self-government-the self commanded obedience which the disciplined spirit pays to the great moral code which Deity has written upon the heart and conscience. This sublimest result of human education is the triumph and crown of correct discipline, and till this result is reached, the human soul is not educated to its sphere-a sphere, in all its varieties and extent, bounded by resistless, relentless law.

The success and well being of life demand that childhood should be subjected to the discipline of a strict control. Our nature is two fold. The passional part leaps into life full grown and armed. The intellectual nature requires the patient training of years, ere the regnant reason can hold the throne, and subject the propensions of the soul to the dictates of an enlightened conscience. Hence, to restrain the passions is as important, in right education, as to cultivate the understanding. A rigid discipline keeps the passions under restraint till reason can grasp the reins, and thus installs the child in possession of himself. It renders the will the servant of the judgment instead of the slave of the pas sions. Intellectual cultivation is generally impossible till the will is somewhat broken to restraint, but no mere cultivation of the intellect, however high, can supply the place of that discipline of the will which may render it the cheerful subject of law. Talent and education, in the hands of a man of unschooled passions, are but instruments of mischief and ruin. The world, perhaps, wit

nesses few more talented congregations than those that are seen within the halls of our great penitentiarics, and their preeminence in crime often proves at once the acumen of their intellect and the strength of their ungoverned passions. The unhappy Professor Webster charged his crime upon that ungovernable temper to whose tyrannical sway his parents left him a helpless victim.

The parent or teacher who fails to govern the child under his care, leaves that child to a struggie, often life-long, with insatiate passion, or consigns him to the tyranny of a will whose wayward impulses will, sooner or later, urge him to some fatal transgression. The subject of law without the power to obey law, the unhappy child finds his interior condition and external circumstances hopelessly at war. There is an antagonism in his undisciplined soul which must embitter life with a ceaseless and terrible conflict between duties and desires.

In proof of these positions we may appeal to all observation. How irritable and unhappy the ungoverned child. Its fretful impatience is but the unconscious pleading of its spirit for control: and who has not seen how calm and happy and affectionate the little one becomes when it is once thoroughly subdued by parental discipline. How quiet and studious and intelligent the school boy whose discontented and rebellious spirit has once been made to yield to the firm government of the faithful teacher. Till then he is the victim of a tyrannical will that refuses all restraint, and frets and fumes under the mildest and most benignant law. A stern discipline alone can relieve him from the stubborness of a lawless temper, and place him under the rightful and happier reign of reason and conscience He who, through foolish fondness, fails to jeach his child obedience to rightful authority, consigns that child to a life of unrest and discontent. He sells him to a slavery darker and more dreadful than that of the South, and happy he, if the child does not live to curse the parent who so falsely indulged,and pampered into power, the will that holds him in its bitter thralldom.

The sternly disciplined will contributes more to a high and honor. able success in life than even a cultivated taste. It will, doubtless, be found, on careful inquiry, that the truly great men of the world

owe much of their success to the strictness of the paternal government that curbed into order and regularity the wayward tendencies of their childhood. The current of their life gathered intensity and power from the very straitness of its channel. No sugar plum training nurtured, in our own Washington, that indomitable resolution and stern integrity on which a nation has reposed in confidence and safety. The Puritans were stern family disciplinarians: and the splendid history of their descendants bears noble testimony to the wisdom of their course.

All attainment becomes possible to the well governed pupil or school, and the education of such pupil or school will be sound, practical and permanent. Let but the great law of order be established, and all virtue and all wisdom will come to dwell in peace under its sway.

The pampered and petted child of genius may flash, meteor like, for an hour, athwart the skies of life; but it is left for the man, trained under the sanctities of law, to imitate the fixed star, in the sublime and lasting splendors of its path. To his disciplined spirit, law is no longer the yoke of an irksome and severe servi tude, fettering his free soul to the dull drudgery of a constrained righteousness, but the golden clue and guarded path to the heights of happiness and power.

We discuss not, now and here, the means of government, but its ends. Whatever be the methods adopted,the result should be prompt, cheerful and perfect obedience; and by whatever penalties discipline is enforced, this high result should be invariably secured. The pupil must be enabled to hold in restraint every errant impulse, and bend, in silent and graceful submission, to the lightest behest of rightful authority. The parent or teacher who has cultivated in a child, the power of such obedience, has opened to that child's feet the easy path to an energetic, intelligent and useful manhood. He has subdued for him "the hell dogs that beleaguer the soul," has quelled the antagonisms of his passional and intellectual natures, and has reduced the machinery of his mind near to the har. monious and powerful play of its normal state.

Finally, all discipline should have, as its specific aim, the good of the governed the development, in the soul, of the sublime power of

self-government. While it should secure present submission, it should also educate the will, the great motor of the mind, to regu. lar, certain and sustained action, and enable it to marshal the powers of the soul to meet all the demands and duties of earnest and active life. More useful by far, and far more needful, if but one can be had, is such education, than that which crowds the mind with the gathered stores of knowledge, or burdens it with the cumbrous formulas of science. "He that ruleth his own spirit is better than he that taketh a city." An appeal to the history of the men of high executive talent, the men of tireless energy, and indomitable perseverance, who have illustrated humanity by the might of their achievements, would amply confirm our views of the value of discipline. And so the fretful discontents, and unhappy, misspent lives of common men would, if read aright, often utter a terrible condemnation upon that absence of correct family government which so many parents excuse under the foolish plea of exces sive love for their children-a love that would leave those children to perish in the embrace of a serpent rather than snatch them with a strong, stern grasp, from its circling coils. Happy is it that this fundamental element of education lies within the reach of the humblest and most illiterate parent. Let him use it well and he may see again the old story illustrated; the sternly disciplined son of poverty and toil, rising to those high places of rank and power which the pampered child of wealth once claimed as his own proud birth right. "It is good to bear the yoke in one's youth." To the broad shoulders of trained manhood, it will be an ornament of grace, and an instrument of power.

CRAFTY men contemn studies, simple men admire, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that there is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, or to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.-Bacon.