or amusement.

It is scarcely possible to overrate the importance of acting with
judgment towards children.

From the smallest beginnings, incurable defects of mind and permanent
disease of body will gather strength, grow and obtain the mastery, till
they carry off the sufferer, or implant vices that, like evil spirits,
will torture the victim during his life's career.

Nothing is spared in the education of the future man and mother of men.
In the child is seen the parent of other generations, one who, as he is
well or ill-directed, will strengthen or weaken the great work of human
happiness, bearing with him a blessing or a curse for the community.
Therefore whatever may be the pains or expenditure required in the cure
of incipient faults, as of incipient disease, we know that society will
be repaid more than a thousand-fold in the happiness of its members, in
evil prevented and good propagated, in the numbers of men of talent and
genius whose works, teeming with great results, will be thus saved to
the State.

But for the character-divers the services of numbers of men of
extraordinary genius would have been lost to the State, and our world's
progress in science, inventions, and happiness retarded for centuries.
Nay, perhaps the then comparative civilization would have been thrown
back into barbarism, through the destructive play of bad passions and
disappointed hopes.

Numbers who, if their early faults had grown into confirmed vices, would
later have led a life of crime, and become inhabitants of dungeons and
emissaries of evil, now grew into men of great eminence. The germ of
evil propensities was destroyed, the exuberant motive power of their
nature regulated and turned to good, by means which the character-divers
thoroughly understood.

Amongst faults, the germs of which occupied the attention of the Djarke,
are the following:

Untruthfulness, dishonesty, discontent, pride, vanity, boasting,
cunning, envy, deceit, whether prejudice, self-deceit, or the wish to
deceive others; nervousness or fear, inducing reticence and concealment
of faults, excess of modesty or the occasional tendency of persons of
genius to underrate their own powers, inattention to studies, want of
application, power to learn too easily, lack of retentive memory,
exaggeration and boldness, bad temper, sullenness, disposition to
quarrel, cowardice, cruelty, caprice as distinct from versatility,
selfishness, greediness, laziness, a