?" Does not the welfare of the country
imperatively demand that we give those who are to be the only educators
of the children in their first and decisive years, a thorough, slow, a
well-founded and finished education?

Order, in any of its manifestations, is not natural to the race. But the
very nature of civilization forces it upon us. We may yield our will at
first to its demands, or we may oppose, but it will not take a very long
time in the latter case for the demands of social life to give us so
great an amount of annoyance, that the pain of the inconvenience
incurred will far outweigh the pleasure of lawlessness in this respect.
Here, also, the mother is supreme, though the teacher should come to her
aid very effectually when the school-days begin, and here I touch a
subject which demands a little more attention than has hitherto been
paid to it, for too much cannot be said of the great significance of
rules as educators in girls' schools. It is allowed in very large
schools, and where boys and girls are brought together, that there must
be strict rules, because large masses cannot be successfully managed
without; but it is generally taken for granted in a girls' school, and
where the numbers are small, that very little or no discipline is
required or even desirable. This view follows logically enough if one
assumes that the object of discipline is the present good of the school
as a whole. But if we assume that its prime object is the future benefit
of the pupils, individually, it will follow that the size of the school
is not an element which should enter into the question at all, and this
is the basis which I assert to be the only true one.

I do not deny that there may be too many rules. One may endeavor to
hedge pupils around with arbitrary prohibitions, but any attempt at
this, like any other unreasonable action, will soon result in its
opposite, so that the two extremes are ultimately the same in effect.
Many persons speak and act as if they believed rules to be in
themselves only a necessary evil, of which the less we have the better,
and an entire absence of which would be the desirable state. Rousseau
might be said to be the leader of this class, educationally speaking,
for this is pre-eminently the doctrine which he teaches, though I fancy
that those who object most to rules are not often aware that they are
arraying themselves under his banner.

That school-work should go on in regular routine, that