Page:Books and men.djvu/15

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CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT.
5

with one accord honored and revered her memory. Only it is not altogether surprising that her husband, whose ministerial functions she occasionally usurped, should have thought his wife at times almost too able a ruler, or that her more famous son should stand forth as the great champion of human depravity. He too, some forty years later, promulgated a system of education as unrelaxing in its methods as that of his own childhood. In his model school he forbade all association with outside boys, and would receive no child unless its parents promised not to take it away for even a single day, until removed for good. Yet after shutting up the lads in this hot-bed of propriety, and carefully guarding them from every breath of evil, he ended by expelling part as incorrigible, and ruefully admitting that the remainder were very "uncommonly wicked."

The principle of solitary training for a child, in order to shield it effectually from all outside influences, found other and vastly different advocates. It is the key-note of Mr. and Miss Edgeworth's Practical Education, a book which must have driven over-careful and scrupulous mothers to the verge of desperation.