Page:The Mothers of England.djvu/168

Rh to exercise despotism, or to yield to it. Young men so nurtured under the paternal roof, when, for the first time, they encounter the rude wilfulness and the selfish violence of vulgar spirits in the open world, may perhaps recoil, and be tempted to leave the field in disgust; but they presently (if not naturally feeble-minded) recover their self-possession, and place their foot firmly in the path where what is just and good is to be maintained against insolent power.

"The substantial liberties of a community involve much more than the bare protection of persons and chattels; for there is a liberty of thought and of speech which may be curtailed, or almost destroyed, in countries that are the loudest in boasting their freedom. There is a liberty, moral and intellectual — the true glory of a people — which consists in, and demands the unrestrained expansion of all faculties, the exercise of all talents, and the spontaneous expression of all diversities of taste and of all forms of individuality. But this high liberty of mind, forfeited often in the very struggle of nations to secure or to extend political liberty, must assuredly be favored by whatever cherishes distinctness of character; and it must as certainly be endangered by whatever breaks down individuality, and tends to impose uniformity upon the whole.

"In this view, a systematic Home Education may fairly claim no trivial importance, as a means of sending forth among the school-bred majority, those with whose habits of mind there is mingled a firm and modest sentiment of self-respect — not cynical, but yet unconquerable — resting, as it will, upon the steady basis of personal wisdom and virtue. It is men of this stamp who will be the true conservators of their country's freedom."