the state derives its highest and truest ideas of education from that divinely instituted and most perfect form of government-that of the family. For those very habits and qualities which make home pure and tranquil and happy, being continued and transferred from the child to the citizen, insure an orderly, virtuous, and peaceful state. Indeed, the family is the smallest organized subdivision of the state, and the aims of public education are substantially accomplished when the lessons of duty to the former are simply expanded so as to comprehend the latter. If the individual families are well governed and virtuous, the commonwealth can not be turbulent and vicious; for the members of such families will recognize their obligations to the state, as its political children, not less cordially than their obligations to their parents. This view so simplifies our problem that we have now but to inquire what is essential to the welfare of the family, what it is to be in the largest sense a good child, and we shall know, very nearly, what is essential to the welfare of the state, what it is to be a good citizen. Without any argument on this point, it will be conceded that obedience to the parental authority is a primary attribute of the good child. Even so, cordial submission to lawful authority is a primary attri bute of good citizenship.

Time need not be consumed upon this as an abstract proposition. Its truth is founded in the essential nature of all civil compacts. There can be no such thing as government without it. We all know that it is the very

cement of the body politic, without which its symmetrical frame-work would part asunder in a day, and anarchy rise upon the ruins of order.

But obedience to justly constituted authority may be voluntary or involuntary. It may be cheerfully accorded from an intelligent conviction that it is reasonable and right; or it may be extorted by an arbitrary will, armed with irresponsible power. The former is the boast of our republican freedom; the latter is the essence of despotism. The one is born of a grateful and joyous allegiance to the benignant power whose strong arm is ever extended to protect and bless, never to oppress and wrong; the other is sullenly conceded, through fear of the bayonet and bastile. But however antagonistic in theory and in their ordinary modes of action, there is a maxim which all governments must of necessity hold in common. It is this: coercion, in the last resort; force, when all other means fail. First, the olive-branch, and, if that will not avail, then the sword. When incorrigible iniquity and crime have finished their course, inexorable justice demands that her uplifted ax shall fall. No human government ever did or can exist upon any other hypothesis. Its ministers must be clothed with the means of enforcing the claims of justice. The majesty of the law must be vindicated. It requires absolute and unequivocal obedience; it can require no less. When guilt and crime force the issue, from the folds of her peaceful ermine leaps forth the naked sword; the soft hand that writes the verdict must be mailed with steel

for its execution.

none.

There is no alternative; there can be The mandate must be obeyed or the government dies. In civil governments, since the world began, the doctrine of "moral suasion only" belongs to Utopia, not to history.

And is it not time that this dangerous fallacy were banished from our educational policy also? Can that doctrine be safe for the school which is fatal to the state? Is it the way to make good citizens to instill principles in the school-room which are at war with the cardinal ideas of civil government? Do we not need a truer and sterner philosophy on this subject? Are not the times upon which we have fallen fearfully suggestive? This matter is of so fundamental a character, and so serious in its bearings upon the present and future of our schools and of our country, that it demands an earnest examination. By many good men and eminent teachers the rod is wholly excluded from the precincts of the school-room; force is never to be resorted to; the ordeal of physical suffering is peremptorily denied a place in the catalogue of allowable disciplinary school agencies. The vicious youths whom the state gathers into its schools to make good citizens of, it humors awhile, and then, finding them unwilling, without coercion, to submit to the proper and necessary training, it turns them adrift again, and lets them grow up in their obstinacy, fit subjects for crime and rebellion. Now, why is this? Is it founded in a really sounder and deeper philosophy of human nature; or is it a mere

Utopian theory, a morbid sentimentalism? Have the organic tendencies of the race changed, or have we drifted from the moorings of God and nature out upon the shoreless sea of experiment, in pursuit of the everreceding phantom of human perfectibility?

OBEDIENCE is the law of God's universe-the inexorable decree of his providence. And evermore in the background of his love and mercy to the docile and penitent hangs the cloud of destruction to the incorrigibly guilty. Retribution waits upon invitation. Behind all Jehovah's dealings with angels, men, and devils, there lingers an immutable, inexorable, eternal MUST. Obey and live, refuse and perish, is the epitome of God's natural and spiritual economy. It rules in the moral and material worlds; in the destinies of individuals, of nations, and of the race.

The unsupported body falls, is the lesson slowly and gently taught in the nursery, as the little childs steps falteringly from father to mother, from chair to chair. Once learned, the law must be obeyed-death lurks at every precipice. Thus, one by one, kindly, imperceptibly almost, God teaches us his physical laws; and ever after, by sea and land, through all the realms of nature, the inexorable decree, "Obey or die!" attends our footsteps. It is heard in the howl of the tempest; in the thunders of Niagara; it speaks to us in the earthquake and the avalanche; its fiery letters gleam in the stormcloud; it sounds forth from the caverns and smoke of Vesuvius. We can not escape from this omnipresent,

eternal must in the natural world.

It is God's tremen

dous barrier, erected everywhere, to turn us from destruction-erected not in anger, but in love. It is inex. orable, because else it would cease to be effective. Some must perish that many may live. We must obey the laws of health. The penalty of taking poison is death; the penalty of breathing foul air, sooner or later, is death; the penalty of intemperance is misery, decay, and death.

The same unchangeable decree follows us in the moral world. We must obey the moral law or suffer, physically as well as mentally. Here, too, God has no scruples about enforcing his commands by the ordeal of pain. He does not stop with "moral suasion" merely. He not only pleads with divine tenderness, but he chastises with divine uncompromising firmness and severity. Sin and suffering are indissoluble. In the cup of every forbidden pleasure there lurks a viper, which sooner or later will sting both soul and body. No tortures of the body can compare with the agonies of the spirit; but, in due time, for every infraction of the moral code, the former are superadded to the latter. "Thou shalt not kill!" is the sententious decree which epitomizes the divine regard for human life. Not, "It is not best to be a murderer; it is not right; you will be far happier if you do not; you should respect the rights and happiness of others; do not, I beseech you, do not be a murderer;" but, ringing through the earth, the terse mandate of God falls loud and clear upon the race, Thou