"The main duty of those who care for the young is to secure their wholesome, their entire growth; for health is just the development of the whole nature in its due sequences and proportions: first the blade--then the ear--then, and not till then, the full corn in the ear; and thus, as Dr. Temple wisely says, 'not to forget wisdom in teaching knowledge.' If the blade be forced, and usurp the capital it inherits; if it be robbed by you, its guardian, of its birthright, or squandered like a spendthrift, then there is not any ear, much less any corn; if the blade be blasted or dwarfed in our haste and greed for the full shock and its price, we spoil all three. It is not easy to keep this always before one's mind, that the young 'idea' is in a young body, and that healthy growth and harmless passing of the time are more to be cared for than what is vainly called accomplishment." Dr. JOHN BROWN. Moral Education December 11 "Remember that the aim of your discipline should be to produce a _self-governing_ being, not to produce a being to be _governed by others_. Were your children fated to pass their lives as slaves, you could not too much accustom them to slavery during their childhood; but as they are by-and-by to be free men, with no one to control their daily conduct, you cannot too much accustom them to self-control while they are still under your eye. This is it which makes the system of discipline by natural consequences so especially appropriate to the social state which we in England have now reached. In feudal times, when one of the chief evils the citizen had to fear was the anger of his superiors, it was well that during childhood parental vengeance should be a chief means of government. But now that the citizen has little to fear from any one--now that the good or evil which he experiences is mainly that which in the order of things results from his own conduct, he should from his first years begin to learn, experimentally, the good or evil consequences which naturally follow this or that conduct. Aim, therefore, to diminish the parental government, as fast as you can substitute for it in your child's mind that self-government arising from a foresight of results....