able routine, and when he looks upon his pupils merely
as passive objects of his labors, whom he is to treat with simple
indifference while they obey his commands, and to whom he is only to
apply reproaches and punishment when they do wrong, such a teacher never
can take pleasure in the school. Weariness and dullness must reign in
both master and scholars when things, as he imagines, are going right,
and mutual anger and crimination when they go wrong.

[Illustration: School Master]

Scholars never can be successfully instructed by the power of any dull
mechanical routine, nor can they be properly governed by the blind,
naked strength of the master; such means must fail of the accomplishment
of the purposes designed, and consequently the teacher who tries such a
course must have constantly upon his mind the discouraging,
disheartening burden of unsuccessful and almost useless labor. He is
continually uneasy, dissatisfied, and filled with anxious cares, and
sources of vexation and perplexity continually arise. He attempts to
remove evils by waging against them a useless and most vexatious warfare
of threatening and punishment; and he is trying continually _to drive_,
when he might know that neither the intellect nor the heart are capable
of being driven.

I will simply state one case, to illustrate what I mean by the
difference between blind force and active ingenuity and enterprise in
the management of school. I once knew the teacher of a school who made
it his custom to have writing attended to in the afternoon. The school
was in the country, and it was the old times when quills, instead of
steel pens, were universally used. The boys were accustomed to take
their places at the appointed hour, and each one would set up his pen in
the front of his desk for the teacher to come and mend them. The teacher
would accordingly pass around the school-room, mending the pens, from
desk to desk, thus enabling the boys, in succession, to begin their
task. Of course, each boy, before the teacher came to his desk, was
necessarily idle, and, almost necessarily, in mischief. Day after day
the teacher went through this regular routine. He sauntered slowly and
listlessly through the aisles, and among the benches of the room,
wherever he saw the signal of a pen. He paid, of course, very little
attention to the writing, now and then reproving, with an impatient
tone, some extraordinary instance of carelessness, or leaving his work
to sup