which take place whenever offences abound, so that the parents, or perhaps an irritated father, thinks it necessary to correct the child as it is called. Neither is it necessary to dwell upon the multiplication of these evils where the family is numerous, and confusion is consequently worse confounded. I would only add, that to all these, and more a hundred-fold, the fond mother has subjected her children, from failing to enforce the simple and pleasant duty of implicit obedience, which would have made all things comparatively easy. Not that I am visionary enough to assert that wherever authority is consistently maintained there will be at all times, and on the instant, a willing obedience, with an absence of wrong tempers, feverish ailments, and perverseness of disposition; but I am confident in asserting, that the greatest kindness we can do to a helpless ignorant, and inexperienced being, is to furnish it with a guide upon which it may safely and implicitly depend, and at this guide to a child ought to be the undisputed authority of its parents, or of those whom they may deem worthy of being deputed to act in their stead.
Then again it is prompt obedience that is required, for no other will answer the end of producing family concord, and individual satisfaction. A lingering, pleading, lengthened-out dispute, betwixt the mother and the child, even when the mother gains the mastery in the end, is the very opposite in its results to what all rational parents would desire; and the little girl who keeps her nurse waiting for her a whole hour, because she entreats her mother every ten minutes that she may stay up a little longer, has to be carried off to bed at nine o'clock, with as much screaming and opposition as there would have been at eight, and with the additional injury to her health and temper, of having suffered the loss of her natural rest; with the still worse addition of having discovered, that by pleading and coaxing she can overcome her mother's influence, and set aside her determination to enforce what is right.
Habit, which is said to be second nature with all, is almost more than that with children. Thus the habit of resisting and disputing authority, by whatever means it may be done, lets in a tide of evil consequences not to be arrested by any occasional resumption of the power which
