“It was no part, however, of my father’s system to exclude books of amusement, though he allowed them very sparingly. Of such books he possessed at that time next to none, but he borrowed several for me; those which I remember are the ‘Arabian Nights,’ Cazotte’s ‘Arabian Tales,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ Miss Edgeworth’s ‘Popular Tales,’ and a book of some reputation in its day, Brooke’s ‘Fool of Quality.’” In one respect, it must be conceded, Mill’s early education was deficient—it depended altogether too much on the knowledge to be gained from books, and not enough on direct study of the laws and beauties of Nature. But against this stands the unquestionable fact that it did establish in him lifelong habits of industry and thoroughness, and an abiding joy in intellectual achievement; and, more important, it had the happy result of habituating him to regard himself as consecrated to a life of labour for the public good. As to the “wrong” done to Mill by “robbing him of the joys of childhood,” one of his biographers, Professor William Minto, justly observes: “Much pity has been expressed over the dreary, cheerless existence that the child must have led, cut off from all boyish amusements and companionship, working day after day on his father’s treadmill; but a childhood and boyhood spent in the enlargement of knowledge, with the continual satisfaction of difficulties conquered, buoyed up by day-dreams of emulating the greatest of human benefactors, need not have been an unhappy childhood, and Mill expressly says that his was not unhappy. It seems unhappy only when we compare it with the desires of childhood left more to itself, and when we decline to imagine its peculiar enjoyments and aspirations. Mill complains that his father often required more than could be reasonably expected of him, but his tasks were not so severe as to prevent him from growing up a healthy, hardy, and high-spirited boy, though he was not constitutionally robust, and his tastes and pursuits were so different from those of other boys of the same age.” Mill was never a college student, and was for the most part self-educated after his sixteenth year. But had he been sent to college at an early age, as his home training amply warranted, there is every reason to think he would have acquitted himself as brilliantly as did the Thomson boys, and as did Karl Witte, another noteworthy example of the possibilities open to all parents. Indeed, Witte’s case is in some respects the most interesting and instructive on record. For one thing his father has left a minutely detailed account of the methods employed in his education; and there is ground to suspect that at the outset of life Karl Witte was below rather than above the average in mentality.