these schemes appear to mean making choice less. I mean fortifying it, keeping it true to itself, making it more. Control that diminishes the quantity of choice is one thing; control that raises the quality, quite another. How important is this distinction and how frequently it is forgotten! Words like "limitation," "control," "authority," "obedience," are words of majesty, but words also of doubtful import. They carry a freight of wisdom or of folly, according to the end towards which they steer. In order to sanction or discard limitations which induce obedience, we must bear that end in mind. Let us stop a moment, and see that we have it in mind now. Old educational systems are often said to have erred by excess of authority. I could not say so. The elective system, if it is to possess the future, must become as authoritative as they. More accurately we say that their authority was of a wrong sort. A father may exercise an authority over his child no less directive than that of the master over the slave; but the father is trying to accomplish something which the master disregards; the father hopes to make the will of another strong, the master to make it weak; the father commands what the child himself would wish, had he sufficient experience. The child's obedience accordingly enlightens, steadies, invigorates his independent will. Invigoration is the purpose of the command. The authority is akin--secretly akin--to the child's own desires. No alien power intervenes, as when a slave obeys. Here a foreign will thwarts the slave's proper motions. Over against his own legitimate desires, the desire of a totally different being appears and claims precedence. Obedience like this brings no ennoblement. The oftener a child obeys, the less of a child is he; the oftener a slave, the more completely he is a slave. Roughly to say, then, that submission to authority is healthy for a college boy, argues a mental confusion. There are two kinds of authority,--the authority of moral guidance, and the authority of repressive control: parental authority, respecting and vivifying the individual life and thus continually tending to supersede itself; and masterly authority, whose command, out of relation to the obeyer's wish, tends ever to bring the obedient into bondage. Which shall college authority be? Authority is necessary, ever-present authority. If the young man's choice is to become a thing of worth, it must be encompassed with limitations. But as the need of these limitations springs from the imperfections of choice, so should their aim be to perfect choice, not to repress it. To impose limitations which do not ultimately enlarge the youth they bind is to make the means of education "oblige against its main end."