"2. That, if taken back to England, he should pass his life in travelling to find out boys who wanted their exercises done, and should do their exercises for nothing, and never say a word about it."

When it finally became necessary to hang the Latin master, Boldheart "impressively pointed out to him that this is what spiters come to."

There are many kinds of cram that yet pass as fairly respectable in schools and universities. When the teachers or the professors give notes to be copied by the pupils and memorized, they are cramming. When teachers are storing the memories of children with facts, tables, dates, etc., to be used at some future time, they are cramming. All memorizing by repetition of words, even if they are understood, is cram, if the pupil can work the thought into his life by repetition of process or of operation. Words can never take the place of self-activity, nor even of activity.

So long as knowledge storing is placed above character development, examinations by "examiners will retain their power for evil, and so long as such examinations are held cramming will continue.

All processes that attempt to educate from without inward, instead of from within outward, are in the last analysis cram. The selfhood must be active in going out for the new knowledge. The child must himself be originative, directive, and executive in the learning process if cram is to be avoided completely. This is the only sure way to secure perfect apperception, and without apperception the new knowledge lies dormant, if not dead, and unrelated in the memory until it disappears, as did Bitherstone's. His declensions, according to Dickens, were not likely to last out his journey from England to India.

CHAPTER VI.

FREE CHILDHOOD.

ADULTHOOD can never be truly free till childhood is free. Perfect freedom can not be developed in a soul filled with the apperceptive experiences of tyranny. No man is fully free in the freest country in the world who wishes to dominate even his child. The practice of tyranny develops the tyrant. Guiding control is entirely different from domination.

Dickens taught the doctrine of a rich, full, free childhood from the time he wrote Nicholas Nickleby in 1839.

Even the sunburned faces of gipsy children, half naked though they be, suggest a drop of comfort. It is a pleasant thing to see that the sun has been there; to know that the air and light are on them every day; to feel that they are children, and lead children's lives; that if their pillows be damp, it is with the dews of heaven, and not with tears; that the limbs of their girls are free, and that they are not crippled by distortions, imposing an unnatural and horrible penance upon their sex; that their lives are spent, from day to day, at least among the waving trees, and not in the midst of dreadful engines which make young children old before they know what childhood is, and give them the exhaustion and infirmity of age, without, like age, the privilege to die. God send that old nursery tales were true, and that gipsies stole such children by the score!

If he had written nothing but this exquisite quotation from Nicholas Nickleby he would have deserved recognition as an educator. It shows a clear insight into the great principles of physical freedom, intellectual freedom, and spiritual freedom.

In The Old Curiosity Shop he made the world sympa

thize with a child who lived with an old man. He gives the keynote to this fundamental thought of the book in the opening chapter:

It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks their confidence and simplicitytwo of the best qualities that Heaven gives them-and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments."

Little Nell had the sadness of a lonely childhood, though her grandfather lived with but the one aim of making her happy.

In Martin Chuzzlewit

Tom Pinch's sister was governess in a family, a lofty family; perhaps the wealthiest brass and copper founder's family known to mankind. They lived at Camberwell; in a house so big and fierce that its mere outside, like the outside of a giant's castle, struck terror into vulgar minds and made bold persons quail.

When Mr. Pecksniff and his daughters went to visit Miss Pinch she

was at that moment instructing her eldest pupil; to wit, a premature little woman of thirteen years old, who had already arrived at such a pitch of whalebone and education that she had nothing girlish about her, which was a source of great rejoicing to all her relations and friends.

One of the unsolved mysteries is the fact that such a large proportion of parents are so anxious to have their children grow up. The desire may be understood when poverty longs for the time when the little hands may help to win bread, but that wealthy parents should hasten the premature state of adulthood in their children is incomprehensible.

A great deal of attention is paid to the blunder of robbing children of real childhood in Dombey and Son, which is so rich in several departments of educational philosophy. Doctor Blimber regarded the young gentlemen as if they were born grown up."

Paul's life and death were intended as warnings to ambitious parents. Florence was robbed of a true childhood by her mother's death and her father's lack of sympathy. Briggs and Tozer had no childhood; they were persecuted by the ingenious and ignorantly learned adults at home during vacations, as well as by Doctor Blimber during school time; so that "Tozer said, indeed, that choosing between two evils, he would rather stay at school than go home."

Poor Bitherstone had no childhood. He was shipped away from his parents in India to the respectable hell conducted by that widely known and highly reputed child trainer Mrs. Pipchin.

Poor little Miss Pankey spent a great deal of her time in Mrs. Pipchin's "correctional dungeon." What a mercy it would be if all such unfortunate children could be stolen by the gipsies!

Mrs. Pipchin's theory taught "that it was wrong to encourage a child's mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by force like an oyster."

When Doctor Blimber asked Paul, six-year-old Paul, "if he would like them to make a man of him," the child replied:

"I had rather be a child."

One of Dickens's most successful hits at the common philosophy, that the desired adult characteristics must be developed in childhood in their adult forms, was made in describing Mrs. Tozer's effort to qualify Tozer for the position of a clergyman by making him wear a stiff, starched necktie while he was a boy.

When Edith upbraided her mother for practically compelling her to marry Mr. Dombey, her mother asked angrily:

"What do you mean? Haven't you from a child"A child!" said Edith, looking at her; "when was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman-artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men-before I knew myself or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learned. You

gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride to-night."

"You talk strangely to-night, Edith, to your own mother."

"It seems so to me; stranger to me than to you,” said Edith. "But my education was completed long ago. I am too old now and have fallen too low, by degrees, to take a new course, and to stop yours, and to help myself. The germ of all that purifies a woman's breast, and makes it true and good, has never stirred in mine, and I have nothing else to sustain me when I despise myself."

Later, on the night before she was to marry Mr. Dombey, she said:

66

Oh, mother, mother, if you had but left me to my natural heart when I too was a girl-a younger girl than Florence-how different I might have been!"

Bleak House gives Dickens's most striking picture of the deterioration resulting from giving no real childhood to children for a series of generations.

During the whole time consumed th slow growth of this family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go to business and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks, fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it, and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.

There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several generations. Little old men and women there have been, but no child, until Mr. Smallweed's grandmother, now living, became weak in her intellect, and fell (for the first time) into a childish state. With such infantine graces as a total want of observation, memory, understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition to fall asleep over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed's grandmother has undoubtedly brightened the family.

There could be no more awful picture than that of a family in which for a series of generations the children had been, through heredity and training, made "little