It is easy thus to state in general terms the objects of education, and the need for discipline. To apply these principles to the individual is a task, the immeasurable difficulty of which we are only beginning to appreciate with the failure of thirty years of compulsory education before us. A recent writer[2] gives it as his opinion that the aim of education is to equip a child with ideals, and that this task should not be difficult, because the lower savages successfully subject all the members of their tribe to the most ruthless discipline. Their lives, he says, "are lived in fear, in restraint, in submission, in suffering, subject to galling, unreasoning, unnecessary, arbitrary prohibitions and taboos, and to customary duties equally galling, unreasoning, unnecessary, and arbitrary. They endure painful mutilations, they submit to painful sacrifices.... How are these wild, unstable, wayward, impulsive, passionate natures brought to submit to such a rigorous and cruel discipline? By education; by the inculcation from infancy of these ideals. In these ideals they have been brought up, and to them they cling with the utmost tenacity." One might as well contend that it was easy to teach all men to live the self-denying life of earnest Christians because some savage tribe was successful in maintaining among its members a universal and orthodox worship of idols. The ideals set before the child are too high and too complex to be inculcated by physical force, or even by force of public opinion. A rigid discipline, with many stripes and with terrible threats of a still worse punishment in the world to come, was the almost invariable lot of children until the last century was well advanced. Yet has this drastic treatment of young children fulfilled its purpose? Were the men of fifty years ago better conducted and more controlled than the men of to-day? In any one family did a greater proportion turn out well? Is it not true that at least among the educated classes the relaxation of nursery and schoolroom discipline which the last fifty years has seen has been justified by its results? Is it not true that the childhood of our grandmothers was often lived "in fear, in restraint, in submission, in suffering subject to galling, unreasoning, unnecessary, arbitrary prohibitions and taboos, and to customary duties equally galling, unreasoning, unnecessary, and arbitrary." And though perhaps the grandmothers of most of us may not have been much the worse for all this discipline, is it not true that of the little brothers who shared the nursery with them a surprising number broke straightway into dissipation when the parental restraints were removed? If we are to teach a child to be gentle to the weak it is not wise to beat him. The qualities which we wish him to possess are not more subtle than the means by which we must aid him to their possession. [Footnote 2: _The Principles of Rational Education_, by Dr. C.A. Mercier.]