to nature, and when we have taken pains to make him bad we lament
his badness.

In this way the child passes six or seven years in the hands of
women, the victim of his own caprices or theirs, and after they
have taught him all sorts of things, when they have burdened his
memory with words he cannot understand, or things which are of no
use to him, when nature has been stifled by the passions they have
implanted in him, this sham article is sent to a tutor. The tutor
completes the development of the germs of artificiality which he finds
already well grown, he teaches him everything except self-knowledge
and self-control, the arts of life and happiness. When at length
this infant slave and tyrant, crammed with knowledge but empty of
sense, feeble alike in mind and body, is flung upon the world, and
his helplessness, his pride, and his other vices are displayed,
we begin to lament the wretchedness and perversity of mankind. We
are wrong; this is the creature of our fantasy; the natural man is
cast in another mould.

Would you keep him as nature made him? Watch over him from his
birth. Take possession of him as soon as he comes into the world
and keep him till he is a man; you will never succeed otherwise.
The real nurse is the mother and the real teacher is the father.
Let them agree in the ordering of their duties as well as in their
method, let the child pass from one to the other. He will be better
educated by a sensible though ignorant father than by the cleverest
master in the world. For zeal will atone for lack of knowledge,
rather than knowledge for lack of zeal. But the duties of public
and private business! Duty indeed! Does a father's duty come last.
[Footnote: When we read in Plutarch that Cato the Censor, who ruled