d discerning few what he really is at his
best--their greatest earthly friend and benefactor. All I have seen of
American schoolboys impresses me that the feeling which dictates their
bearing toward their teachers is born of a clear-sighted and intuitive
appreciation of superior knowledge, worth or experience, and not of
conventional observance or necessity. It is generally said abroad that
American children are unruly, forward and irreverent toward their
parents and elders; and one reason assigned is that parents are careless
of teaching their children the little ceremonies and graduated
formalities of speech, "in which," as an English bishop recently alleged
in an after-dinner speech, "there is embodied so much wholesome
discipline that a careful attendance to the practice of them gives the
young man or woman an advantage not offered by any other method of
training." Spartan, but indigestible! A keener observer than the
bishop--the heresiarch Thackeray--wrote in his _Philip_: "I never saw
people on better terms with each other, more frank, affectionate and
cordial, than the parents and the grown-up young folks in the United
States;" and certain it is that the description is applicable to the
intercourse between teachers and pupils.

The faults of the latter are aimlessness and impatience; and their
misfortune--which is largely responsible for those faults--is that they
are too soon allowed to plunge into the quagmire called by euphemism
"society," and often whelmed in its sorry pleasures and petty
ambitions--too soon, also, invested with the right to manage their own
affairs and to choose their own associates, advisers, and even
instructors; in a word, permitted to breathe the invigorating spirit of
the Declaration of Independence before their constitutions are fitted
for its reception. This may sound trite enough, but I see no other way
of accounting for the intellectual--and, alas! moral--failure of so many
of the brilliantly-gifted lads whom I have known and loved in these
United States.

I might proceed to give a few illustrations of this resultless
restlessness, this dissipation of the youthful forces, to which I have
alluded; but there is one phase of my experience here which goes further
to prove its prevalence and baneful effects than a thousand instances
derived from my knowledge of boys in school or in the closer contact of
private tuition. From time to time there appear in the "Instruction"
column of the