many hundreds a year, while I at
your age was plodding away behind a desk in my uncle Fairlie's counting house.
What should I not have done if I had had one half of your advantages? You should
become dukes, or found new empires in undiscovered countries, and even then I
doubt whether you would have done proportionately so much as I have done. No,
no, I shall see you through school and college, and then if you please you will
make your own way in the world.«
    In this way he would work himself up into such a state of virtuous
indignation that he would sometimes thrash the boys then and there upon some
pretext invented at the moment.
    And yet as children went, the young Pontifexes were fortunate; there would
be ten families of young people worse off for one better; they ate and drank
good wholesome food, slept in comfortable beds, had the best doctors to attend
them when they were ill, and the best education that could be had for money. The
want of fresh air does not seem much to affect the happiness of children in a
London alley: the greater part of them sing and play, as though they were on a
moor in Scotland. So the absence of a genial mental atmosphere is not commonly
recognised by children who have never known it. Young people have a marvelous
faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they
are unhappy - very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented
from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than
their own sinfulness.
    To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children
that they are very naughty - much naughtier than most children; point to the
young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection, and impress your own
children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns
than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral influence and it
will enable you to bounce them as much as you please; they think you know, and
they will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you are not
the unworldly, and scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to
be; nor yet will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run
away, if they fight you with persistency and judgement. You keep the dice, and
throw them, both you for your children and yourself; load them, then, for you
can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them