The thought may strike some, however, that children can receive moral discipline at home; that parents are best enabled to understand the disposition of their children, and can consequently apply the requisite training with more success than any one else; and, most of all, because it is their especial duty so to do. So we might say, with almost as much reason, that parents could teach their children the elementary branches of knowledge; in the first place, because it is in their province to know the peculiar turn of mind possessed by their children, and also for the equally plausible reason, that they are under a great obligation to educate them. Now, there is much truth in the observation of Seneca's, that people carry their neighbors' faults in a bag before them, which are easily to be seen, and their own behind them unseen; and, without doing parents too much injustice, we may say that they are inclined to carry the failings of their children tied up with their own. The fact is, generally speaking, parents are so confident that their children do not lack in honesty and integrity, at a time when these principles should be forcibly impressed upon them, that they let the occasion for moral training pass until bad habits are deeply rooted in their character. There are, we know, many cheering exceptions; yet, if moral instruction is neglected in the school, to a majority of the scholars that neglect will nowhere be provided for, until some bad results have ensued. To carry out, then, the primal purpose of our system of education, instructors should seek to mould the character of their pupils. Supervisors and committee-men should require a faithful discharge of this trust. When they come to examine the school, if the standard of intellectual attainments is not so high as might be desirable, they should yet bear testimony to its advancement, if they find that those "virtues which adorn life" have been held up in all their attractiveness to the imitation of the pupil.