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SELF-EDUCATION.

CHAPTER I.

WHAT IS SELF-EDUCATION?

BEFORE all things let us clearly understand what we are about;-What is Education? while I write in my quiet village I am almost within sound of the hammer and the anvil of my neighbour the blacksmith. How rapidly the hammer ascends, how swiftly fly the sparks! I feel that my arm would be very powerless there, that it would be very hard work indeed to make a horse-shoe, and that the horse-shoe would be very badly shaped when made; and yonder from my study window I am looking at my old neighbour Watson, the gardener, and feel quite ashamed to confess the difference between his method of handling the spade and mine: but then I suspect that if my neighbours were set down with me on the road to walk for thirty or thirty-five miles, I should soon

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distance them, and while I should perhaps be fresh at the thirtieth, the probability is that I should leave them exhausted at the twelfth. What makes this difference between men? this muscular difference? is it not education? the arm is better educated than the leg, or the leg is better educated than the arm; upon this hint we may speak out upon the whole of life, the difference between men and men is for the most part a difference of education; the mind and the body are the residence of strong faculties, which exist in many uneducated and therefore undeveloped. The strength of the body and the powers of the mind depend as much upon pupilage and training for their success, as the curvetting of the steed, or the command of the rider. Education may not be said to create Faculties; -but without education those faculties slumber uselessly, or if developed, they exist so untrained and uncurbed that they rather complete the confusion of their possessor than add at all to his benefit or to his well-being.

Discipline, Trial, Endeavour, are all parts of Education and Man, and the world in which he abides are constructed evidently upon the design of developement by these agents. Man is not created to be passive to the influences around him, he is trained by resistance. Altogether another world would have been needed for a passive character, or if not another world, how different the

class of feelings and of powers which have fitted man for the present. How helplessly he lies upon the kind maternal bosom! Who by the strongest flight of the imagination could ever identify that poor little weakling with the strong controller of armies and senates? who could fancy in him the forest render, the sea king, and the iron conqueror? how long is the period during which he demands the utmost extension of the parental guardianship? and in childhood, and in manhood, he is destitute of all those tools and instruments and arms for the purpose of supplying the necessities of life, or of depredation and attack or defence with which other animals are endowed. Yet, there is a difference, and in the difference resides the source of his power, but for the difference he would be of course the most helpless creature in the world; he would be the prey to every other; as it is, he is the undisputed monarch and lord of the creation of this visible world; every kingdom of nature yields up to him its product as his lawful spoil; sea, air, land, the distant desert sand, the wild and all but impenetrable forest wild, the depths of the ocean, all are placed beneath the sceptre of his authority; and the animate and the inanimate are alike made to pay tribute to his lordship. Man too, the inferior race, the inferior in skill and in education, is made to pay tribute to his superior. The lower type of humanity is the beast of burden

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