blaming them for being sensitive, is admirably shown in Pip's training.

The revelation of the child's consciousness of the sense of injustice in the treatment of those who train it is worthy of most careful study and thought by parents and teachers. There can be no doubt that infants have a clear sense of wrongs inflicted on them, even before they can speak.

The comparison of the child's rocking-horse with the big-boned Irish hunter reveals one of the most essential lessons for adulthood: that what may appear trifling to an adult may mean much to a child. Kind but thoughtless adulthood is often most grievously unjust to childhood, because it fails to consider how things appear to the child. However kind and good such adults are, they are utterly unsympathetic with the child. Many people are very considerate for childhood who are very unsympathetic with children. Consideration can never take the place of sympathy. An ounce of true sympathy is worth a ton of consideration to a child. Adulthood has measured a child's corn in the bushel of adulthood. Mr. Gradgrind, for instance, was a good man, and he meant to be kind and helpful to his children. He was most considerate for them, and spared no money to promote their welfare and happiness. But he did it in accordance with the tastes and opinions of adulthood, and totally ignored the fact that children have opinions and tastes, and he ruined the children whom he most loved. "The rocking-horse and the big-boned Irish hunter" suggest rich mines of child psychology.

The pernicious habit of so many adults who fill the imaginations of children with bogies and terrors of an abnormal kind in order to keep them in the path of rectitude by falsehood, is exposed in Mrs. Gargery's method of stopping Pip's questions by telling him that asking questions was the first step in a career of crime. This habit leads parents insensibly into a most dishonest attitude toward their children. It leads, too, in due time, to a lack of reverence for adulthood. Falseness is certain to lead to the disrespect it deserves.

Parents who make

untruthfulness a basis for terror should not be surprised at the irreverence or the scepticism of their children.

In The Schoolboy's Story, old Cheeseman was brought to school by a woman who was always taking snuff and shaking him.

There is a great deal of pedagogical thought in Dombey and Son. At the period of its issue (1846-48) Dickens appears to have devoted more attention to the study of wrong methods of teaching than at any other time, so in Dr. Blimber, Cornelia Blimber, and Mr. Feeder he gave his best illustrations of what in his opinion should be condemned in the popular methods of teaching. But while this was evidently his chief educational purpose in writing the book, he gave a good deal of attention to wrong methods of training, especially to the most awful doctrine of the ages that children must be coerced, and repressed, and checked, and subdued. He evidently accepted as his supreme duty the responsibility for securing a free childhood for children. Mrs. Pipchin is an admirable delineation of the worst features of what was regarded as respectable child training. Her training is treated at length in Chapter XI. It is sufficient here to deal with her coerciveness, and recall the epithet "child-queller " which Dickens applied to her. No more expressive term was ever used to describe the wickedness of the coercionists. It means more than most volumes. It has new meaning every day as our reverence for the divinity in the child grows stronger, and the absolute need of the development of his selfhood by his own self-activity becomes clearer. It reveals a perfect charnel house full of dwarfed souls and blighted selfhood, and weak characters that should have been strong, and false characters that should have been true, and wailings that should have been music, and tears that should have been laughter, and darkness that should have been light, and wickedness that should have been a blessing. The one awful word "childqueller " means all of evil that can result from daring to stand between the child and God in our self-satisfied ignorance to check the free, natural output of its selfhood which God meant to be wrought out with increasing

power throughout its life. Our work is to change the direction of the outflowing selfhood when it is wrong, to direct it to new and better interest centres, but never to stop it or turn it back upon itself.

There are thousands of child-quellers teaching still. Would that they could see truly the dwarfed souls they have blighted, and the ghosts of the selfhood they have sacrificed on the altar of what they call discipline!

The term child-queller was the creation of genius.

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Mrs. Pipchin disdained the idea of reasoning with children. "Hoity-toity!" exclaimed Mrs. Pipchin, shaking out her black bombazine skirts, and plucking up all the ogress within her. If she don't like it, Mr. Dombey, she must be taught to lump it." She would "shake her head and frown down a legion of children,” and “the wild ones went home tame enough after sojourning for a few months beneath her hospitable roof." She tamed them by robbing them of their power, as Froebel's boy tamed flies by tearing off their wings and legs, and then saying, "See how tame they are."

Teachers used to boast about their ability to tame children, when their ability really meant the power to destroy the tendency to put forth effort, to substitute negativeness for positiveness.

Susan Nipper, in her usual graphic style, expressed her views regarding the coercive practices of Mrs. Pipchin and the Blimbers.

"Goodness knows," exclaimed Miss Nipper, "there's a-many we could spare instead, if numbers is a object; Mrs. Pipchin as a overseer would come cheap at her weight in gold, and if a knowledge of black slavery should be required, them Blimbers is the very people for the sitiwation."

One of Mrs. Pipchin's favourite methods of coercing, or taming, or child-quelling was to send children to bed.

"The best thing you can do is to take off your things and go to bed this minute." This was the sagacious woman's remedy for all complaints, particularly lowness of

spirits and inability to sleep; for which offence many young victims in the days of the Brighton Castle had been committed to bed at ten o'clock in the morning.

Another assault on coercion was made in Dombey and Son in the brief description of the Grinders' school.

Biler's life had been rendered weary by the costume of the Charitable Grinders. The youth of the streets could not endure it. No young vagabond could be brought to bear its contemplation for a moment without throwing himself upon the unoffending wearer and doing him a mischief. His social existence had been more like that of an early Christian than an innocent child of the nineteenth century. He had been stoned in the streets. He had been overthrown into gutters; bespattered with mud; violently flattened against posts. Entire strangers to his person had lifted his yellow cap off his head and cast it to the winds. His legs had not only undergone verbal criticism and revilings, but had been handled and pinched. That very morning he had received a perfectly unsolicited black eye on his way to the Grinders' establishment, and had been punished for it by the master: a superannuated old Grinder of savage disposition, who had been appointed schoolmaster because he didn't know anything and wasn't fit for anything, and for whose cruel cane all chubby little boys had a perfect fascination.

Poor Biler went wrong, and when he was taken to task for it by Mr. Carker he gave his theory to account for the fact that he had not done better at school.

"You're a nice young shaking his head at him. you, my fine fellow!"

gentleman!" said Mr. Carker, "There's hemp-seed sown for

"I'm sure, sir," returned the wretched Biler, blubbering again, and again having recourse to his coat cuff: “I shouldn't care, sometimes, if it was growed too. My misfortunes all began in wagging, sir, but what could I do, exceptin' wag?"

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Excepting what?" said Mr. Carker.

Wag, sir. Wagging from school."

"Do you mean pretending to go there, and not going?" said Mr. Carker.

"Yes, sir, that's wagging, sir," returned the quondam Grinder, much affected. "I was chivied through the streets, sir, when I went there, and pounded when I got there. So I wagged and hid myself, and that began it."

When Mr. Dombey, by whose act of superior grace Biler had been sent to the Charitable Grinders' school, upbraided the boy's father for his failure to turn out well, the simple father said that he hoped his son, the quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and taught, as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his place of schoolmaster with as much fitness for it as a hound, might not have been educated on quite a right plan.

Sagacious teachers and parents often blame and punish children for being what they made them.

Still another illustration of the cruel coercion practised on children is found in Dombey and Son, in the training of Alice Marwood.

"There was a child called Alice Marwood," said the daughter, with a laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself, " born among poverty and neglect, and nursed in it. Nobody taught her, nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her."

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Nobody! "echoed the mother, pointing to herself, and striking her breast.

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The only care she knew," returned the daughter, was to be beaten, and stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better without that."

The picture of George Silverman's early life is one of the most touching of all the appeals of Dickens on behalf of childhood. He lived in a cellar, and when he was removed at length he knew only the sensations of "cold, hunger, thirst, and the pain of being beaten." The poor child used to speculate on his mother's feet having a good or ill temper as she descended the stairs to their cellar home, and he watched her knees, her waist, her face, as they came into view, to learn whether he was likely to be abused or not. Many mothers realized their own cruelty by reading such descriptions of cruelty toward little children.