ture. As Pip so truly said: "It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter."

Adulthood needs to learn no lesson more than that childhood lives a life of its own, that that life should not be tested by the scales and tape lines of adulthood, and that within its range of action its choice should be respected, and its opinions treated with reverent consid

eration.

Mrs. Lirriper said that when she used to read the Bible to Mrs. Edson, when that lady was dying, "though she took to all I read to her, I used to fancy that next to what was taught upon the Mount she took most of all to his gentle compassion for us poor women, and to his young life, and to how his mother was proud of him, and treasured his sayings in her heart."

The divinity in any child will grow more rapidly if his mother "treasures his sayings in her heart." We need more reverence for the child.

Dickens tried to make parents regard the child as a sacred thing, which should always be the richest joy of his parents..

Speaking of Mrs. Darnay, in The Tale of Two Cities, he says:

The time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among the advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they would, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear those coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny with a child's laugh, and the divine Friend of children, to whom in her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take her child in his arms, as he took the child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.

Dickens had profound faith in children whose true development had not been arrested.

Doctor Strong had a simple faith in him that might have touched the stone hearts of the very urns upon the

...

wall. . . . He appealed in everything to the honour and good faith of the boys, and relied on their possession of those qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy.

Reliance begets reliance. Faith increases the qualities that merit faith.

David said the doctor's reliance on the boys “worked wonders." No wonder it worked wonders. We can help a boy to grow no higher than our faith in him can reach.

CHAPTER XI.

BAD TRAINING.

In addition to the bad training found in so many of his best-known schools, to show the evils of coercion in all forms, of the child depravity ideal, of the loss of a free, real, rich childhood, of the dwarfing of individuality, of the deadening of the imagination, and other similar evils, Dickens's books, from Oliver Twist to Edwin Drood, contain many illustrations of utterly wrong methods of training children.

The mean and cruel way in which children used to be treated by the managers of institutions is described in Oliver Twist. Dickens said that when Oliver was born he cried lustily.

If he could have known that he was an orphan, left to the tender mercies of church wardens and overseers, perhaps he would have cried the louder.

"Bow to the board," said Bumble, when he was brought before that august body. Oliver brushed away two or three tears that were lingering in his eyes, and seeing no board but the table, fortunately bowed to that. "What's your name, boy?" said the gentleman in the high chair.

Oliver was frightened at the sight of so many gentlemen, which made him tremble; and the beadle gave him another tap behind, which made him cry. These two causes made him answer in a very low and hesitating voice; whereupon a gentleman in a white waistcoat said he was a fool. Which was a capital way of raising his spirits and putting him quite at his ease.

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Boy," said the gentleman in the high chair, "listen to me. You know you're an orphan, I suppose?

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What's that, sir?" inquired poor Oliver.

"The boy is a fool-I thought he was," said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.

"Hush!" said the gentleman who had spoken first. "You know you've got no father or mother, and that you were brought up by the parish, don't you?

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'Yes, sir,” replied Oliver, weeping bitterly.

'What are you crying for?" inquired the gentleman in the white waistcoat. And, to be sure, it was very extraordinary. What could the boy be crying for?

"I hope you say your prayers every night,” said another gentleman in a gruff voice, and pray for the people who feed and take care of you-like a Christian."

"Yes, sir," stammered the boy. The gentleman who spoke last was unconsciously right. It would have been very like a Christian, and a marvellously good Christian, too, if Oliver had prayed for the people who fed and took care of him.

The dreadful practices of first making children selfconscious and apparently dull by abuse and formalism, and then calling them "fools," or stupid," or dunces," are happily not so common now.

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In Barnaby Rudge he makes Edward Chester complain to his father about the way he had been educated.

From my childhood I have been accustomed to luxury and idleness, and have been bred as though my fortune were large and my expectations almost without a limit. The idea of wealth has been familiarized to me from my cradle. I have been taught to look upon those means by which men raise themselves to riches and distinction as being beyond my breeding and beneath my care. I have been, as the phrase is, liberally educated, and am fit for nothing.

Dickens was in terrible earnest to kill all the giants that preyed on the lifeblood of the joy, the hope, the freedom, the selfhood, and the imagination of childhood. He waged unceasing warfare against the system which he described as

The excellent and thoughtful old system, hallowed by long prescription, which has usually picked out from the rest of mankind the most dreary and uncomfortable

people that could possibly be laid hold of, to act as instructors of youth.

The selfish and mercenary ideal and its consequences are dealt with in the training of Jonas Chuzzlewit:

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The education of Mr. Jonas had been conducted from his cradle on the strictest principles of the main chance. The very first word he learned to spell was 'gain," and the second one (when he got into two syllables) " money." But for two results, which were not clearly foreseen perhaps by his watchful parent in the beginning, his training may be said to have been unexceptionable. One of these flaws was, that having been long taught by his father to overreach everybody, he had imperceptibly acquired a love of overreaching that venerable monitor himself. The other, that from his early habits of considering everything as a question of property, he had gradually come to look with impatience on his parent as a certain amount of personal estate which had no right whatever to be going at large, but ought to be secured in that particular description of iron safe which is commonly called a coffin, and banked in the grave.

When Charity Pecksniff reproved Jonas for speaking irreverently of her father, he said:

"Ecod, you may say what you like of my father, then, and so I give you leave," said Jonas. "I think it's liquid aggravation that circulates through his veins, and not regular blood. How old should you think my father was, cousin?"

“Old, no doubt,” replied Miss Charity; "but a fine old gentleman."

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"A fine old gentleman! repeated Jonas, giving the "Ah! crown of his hat an angry knock. It's time he was

thinking of being drawn out a little finer, too.

'Is he, indeed?" said the young lady.

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Why, he's

"And ecod," cried Jonas, now he's gone so far without giving in, I don't see much to prevent his being ninety; no, nor even a hundred. Why, a man with any feeling ought to be ashamed of being eighty, let alone more. Where's his religion, I should like to know, when he goes flying in the face of the Bible like that? Threescore and ten's the