THE

EDUCATION OF CHARACTER.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

In the history of all countries and all ages, we find that there are periods of time peculiarly propitious for the introduction of improved methods of conducting public and social affairs. Many circumstances appear at such times to conduce, not only to the creation of certain wants, but to their supply. Intelligence is then called upon to mark the different indications of this universal or widely-extended demand; and the resources of ingenuity, wisdom, wealth, and influence are taxed in proportion to the greatness of the occasion, or the necessities of the case. Sometimes the want is individually felt, without being generally recognised as such; and the danger is then imminent, that any single individual proposing a supply may be charged with officiousness or folly. Sometimes the want is generally recognised, but the supply is looked for from quarters whence it is impossible that it should come.

B

Such, it appears to me, is the situation of England at the present time as regards the great question of Education. An alarming want is experienced, and universally recognised, a want of something calculated to enlist a large portion of the community on the side of right instead of wrong; to bring them within the pale of decency, order, and moral rectitude; in short, to make them better members of society than they now are,friends instead of enemies to the welfare of their country and their fellow beings.

Seeing that, in the order of Providence, punishment in the form of suffering has been made a necessary consequence of all violation of established law, punishment has very naturally, and not without reason, been resorted to in the case of offenders generally. In this manner prisons have been constructed, and prison discipline enforced, not only to the restraint of the offender so as to prevent further injury to society, but also with the hope of carrying out, in its full operation, the wholesome discipline of punishment as a remedial process. By degrees, however, this method of dealing with offenders has been discovered not only to be exceedingly expensive and troublesome to the State, but wholly unproductive, to the individuals thus operated upon, of any lasting good.

It is needless to enter here into those facts, so generally understood and acknowledged, which have marked the almost universal giving way of public opinion with regard to the salutary nature of punishment voluntarily inflicted upon one man by another, as a means of reclaiming the guilty, or instilling better inclinations and principles into the mind of the offender. There has indeed been some danger of too great a reaction in the