Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/87

 is in prospect. With the children of the lower classes, if they can be snatched by any means, from utter neglect, it is "now or never," in whatever relates either to their moral or intellectual training. To-morrow, those whom we are wishing to reclaim, may be torn from us, never again to come within the precincts of knowledge or virtue. But in our own families, what imaginable motive can there be for attempting this year, what we shall better be able to effect the next? Under ordinary circumstances, the years of infancy are at our command, and so will be the years of childhood when they come, and so the years of ado-lescence.

Moreover, it should be remembered, that the pernicious effects of a hurried and stimulating system of culture, as well upon the moral sentiments as the intellect, are likely to disappear in the case of children with whom the entire process of instruction is early brought to a close, and who, even if they may have sustained some mental or bodily injury, quickly lose every trace of it under the toils of the factory, or the field, where they too soon relapse into apathy and ignorance. Schooling completed at ten or twelve, the animal energy gets ahead of the mind, and as firm an insensibility is acquired as if there had been no infant-school development.

But with children of the upper classes, fully educated, we can calculate upon no pause in the operations of mental culture; on the contrary, one process of excitement is immediately to succeed another: and each, as it comes, is to be more strenuous than that which it displaces: and then, and without an interval, the emulations and the powerful influences of a college course, or of active life, are to follow, with their always increasing demands upon the re-sources of the body and the mind; and thus the latter is constantly kept in advance of the former.

It can hardly be necessary to use arguments in support