Page:Vindication Women's Rights (Wollstonecraft).djvu/338

332 mind! So that to break the pirit, allowed to become vicious at home, a child is ent to chool; and the methods taken there, which mut be taken to keep a number of children in order, catter the eeds of almot every vice in the oil thus forcibly torn up.

I have ometimes compared the truggles of thee poor children who ought never, to have felt retraint, nor would, had they been always held in with an even hand, to the depairing plunges of a pirited filly, which I have een breaking on a trand: its feet inking deeper and deeper in the and every time it endeavoured to throw its rider, till at lat it ullenly ubmitted.

I have always found hores, an animal I am attached to, very tractable when treated with humanity and teadines, o that I doubt whether the violent methods taken to break them, do not eentially injure them; I am, however, certain that a child hould never be thus forcibly tamed after it has injudiciouly been allowed to run wild; for every violation of jutice and reaon, in the treatment of children, weakens their reaon. And, o early do they catch a character, that the bae of the moral character, experience leads me to infer, is fixed before their eventh year, the period during which women are allowed the ole management of children. Afterwards it too often happens that half the buines of education is to correct, and very imperfectly is it done, if done hatily, the faults, which they would never have acquired if their mothers had had more undertanding. One&ensp;