of the stable, who would, strange want of sense and feeling! think
themselves degraded by paying any attention to the nursery; yet,
how many children are absolutely murdered by the ignorance of
women! But when they escape, and are neither destroyed by
unnatural negligence nor blind fondness, how few are managed
properly with respect to the infant mind! So that to break the
spirit, allowed to become vicious at home, a child is sent to
school; and the methods taken there, which must be taken to keep a
number of children in order, scatter the seeds of almost every vice
in the soil thus forcibly torn up.

I have sometimes compared the struggles of these poor children who
ought never to have felt restraint, nor would, had they been always
held in with an even hand, to the despairing plunges of a spirited
filly, which I have seen breaking on a strand; its feet sinking
deeper and deeper in the sand every time it endeavoured to throw
its rider, till at last it sullenly submitted.

I have always found horses, an animal I am attached to, very
tractable when treated with humanity and steadiness, so that I
doubt whether the violent methods taken to break them, do not
essentially injure them; I am, however, certain that a child should
never be thus forcibly tamed after it has injudiciously been
allowed to run wild; for every violation of justice and reason, in
the treatment of children, weakens their reason. And, so early do
they catch a character, that the base of the moral character,
experience leads me to infer, is fixed before their seventh year,
the period during which women are allowed the sole management of
children. Afterwards it too often happens that half the business
of education is to correct, and very imperfectly is it done, if