The compensating satisfaction which they bring must be very vivid, since it counterbalances so many sufferings. In order to love them, we have no need to be convinced that they will respond to our cares, and one day repay them. If there be in the human heart one disinterested sentiment, it is parental love. Our tenderness for our children is independent of reflection. We love them because they are our children. Their existence makes a part of ours; or, rather, is more than ours. All that is either useful or pleasant to them, brings us a pure happiness, springing from their health, their gayety, their amusements. The chief end which we ought to propose to ourselves, in rearing them, is to train and dispose them so that they may wisely enjoy that existence which is accorded them. Of all the happy influences which can be brought to bear upon their mind and manners, none is more beneficial than the example of parental gentleness. The good Plutarch most eloquently advanced this doctrine in ancient time. Montaigne, Rousseau, M’Kenzie, and various writers of minor fame among the moderns, have reproduced his ideas, and, by their authority, have finally effected a happy revolution in education. I delight to trace the most important ideas thus reproduced by enlightened and noble minds in different ages. It is chiefly by persevering in the system of the influence of gentleness that we may expect an ultimate melioration in the human character and condition. But scarcely has any such salutary change been effected, before minds, either superficial or soured, see only the inconveniences which accompany it; and, instead of evading or correcting them, would return to the point whence they started. We hear people regretting the decline of the severity of ancient education; and maintaining the wisdom of those contrarieties and vexations which children used to experience; ‘a fitting discipline of preparation,’ say they, ‘to prepare them for the sorrows of life.’ Would they, on the same principle, inflict bruises and contusions, to train them to the right endurance of those that carelessness or accident might bring? ‘It is an advantage,’ say they, ‘to put them to an apprenticeship of pain at the period when the sorrow it inflicts is light and transient.’ This mode of speaking, with many others of similar import, presents a combination of much error with some truth.