they have the moral sense-an instinct already largely developed in the average young of our race-we need have very little fear concerning love-disappointments in early life. the period of frequent change of feeling, and if useful activities take the place of lassitude and idleness in suffering, each trial of the kind will lift the individual in the scale of being, and enlarge and widen character; whilst we shall cease, in great measure at all events, to be surrounded by hysterical girls and reckless lads.

There exists, however, an altruistic as well as an egoistic reason for regulating human emotions. If friendships between. men and women are to be freely formed, it is clear that these relations will cross and intersect the closer ties, and that the latter must be carefully respected. An ardent, warm-hearted girl enters into friendship with a married man who reciprocates her affection. Here, besides respect for social order and for mutual gratification, the happiness of a third individual is an element in the position, that makes right conduct depend upon intelligence and a sympathetic understanding of the feelings of others. I have already pointed out that the great movement towards equality of sex will advance rapidly or slowly according to our success or non-success in divesting ourselves of the anti-social passion of jealousy. But jealousy is a word of wide import, and I do not mean only the fierce passion that raged in the bosom of Othello, but all the petty jealousies, the mean, silly grudgings of another's superiority or happiness, that simmer in the breast of a narrow-minded, perhaps malicious, woman.

In proportion to the repression and gradual disappearance of the anti-social feelings small and great, including petty jealousies of every kind, will general happiness be built upon the giving of greater and greater freedom to the expression of every social feeling that humanity possesses or will in time develop. And if right training regarding these emotions is carefully bestowed upon the young, it would, I am convinced, give an enormous impetus to progress by teaching them to literally kill the germs from which the anti-social passions spring, grow up, and are ultimately reproduced. Parents forget their own long past experience, and perhaps few are aware at how early an age a child may feel and keenly suffer from jealousy. Mrs. Jamieson, the well-known writer, gives in her Commonplace Book" some particulars of her childhood. In reference to this subject she says: "I was not more than six years old when I suffered, from the fear of not being loved

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THE EMOTION OF JEALOUSY.

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where I had attached myself, and from the idea that another was preferred before me, such anguish as had nearly killed me! Whether those around me regarded it as a fit of illtemper or a fit of illness I do not know. I could not then

have given a name to the pang that fevered me. I knew not the cause, but never forgot the suffering. It left a deeper impression than childish passions usually do, and the recollection was so far salutary that in after life I guarded myself against the approaches of that hateful, deformed, agonizing thing which men call jealousy, as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera. If such self-knowledge has not saved me from the pain, at least it has saved me from the demoralizing effects of the passion, by a wholesome terror and even a sort of disgust.”

No doubt this self-protection was to Mrs. Jamieson a great gain; but I hold that even a wholesome terror or disgust of the passion may cause a girl to make mistakes in reference to jealousy, unless her mind has clear ideas on the subject. And here I will quote a case in point exactly as I know it to have occurred. Two girls became strongly attached to one another. They worked together, studied together, and for a time the friendship made the very sunshine of their lives. After some years one married, and, of course, outwardly, conditions somewhat altered. But inwardly they altered too, and without the same necessity, as it afterwards appeared. The girl who did not marry felt herself forsaken. She suffered from jealousy, and imagining that if she kept her hold upon her friend the husband would suffer similarly she set herself to loosen the bond between them, for this she deemed her duty. A husband's right was in her view a monopoly of a wife's affection, and for an old friend to make a claim was possibly to cause a breach in married happiness! She strove to cool her own affection, and she hid her misery from her friend, lest it should dash her newly found joy. The sentiments were generous and the action was brave, but from the want of an intellectual understanding of the true position the whole thing was a mistake. A few short years of married life and then the wife spoke from her death-bed to her former friend: "Why did you separate yourself from me? What made you think my love for you would change? I have been happy in my husband and my child, but love never narrowed me; it widened all my nature, and there was room enough for friendship too. I have sorely missed my friend, and felt that her loss has thrown a shadow over my married life."

Now, clearly in this instance wrong action simply arose from ignorance, and not from any want of earnest desire to do right. The girl was thoughtful and meditative, and the only direct lessons she had ever received upon personal conduct were from religious teachers. The general drift of these lessons had been that self-sacrifice is always right, and that in every crisis, where how to act seems to present a puzzle, the safest rule is to choose the most difficult path, and look upon it as the path of duty. This rule the girl had acted on, at great selfsacrifice, and the result was, that besides the immediate pain to herself, she had hurt the happiness of the very friend she would have died to serve, and brought upon her own future a cloud of mingled self-reproach and grief that shrouded her life for years. This fact alone speaks volumes as to the necessity and propriety of giving lessons to the young upon the guidance of their conduct in reference to the emotional part of human nature from a purely secular standpoint. It is a significant fact, that one of the professorships of Harvard University in America, was founded by a woman, who proposed to call it "A professorship of the heart;" nevertheless, at this moment the chair goes by the name of a "professorship of Christian morals."* The truth is this the scientific aspect of ethics is waiting still for man's consideration, and the field of education in this direction has never as yet been entered. Mrs. Charles Bray, however, has written a small educational work upon the true lines; † and when a rational public opinion calls for the effort, there are plenty of minds capable of producing such manuals as may be required in the practical work of instructing children.

The French Revolution was, as we have seen, a cataclysm, a pulling down of system before intellectual ideas were ripe for building up a nobler, simpler, purer form of social life upon the right foundation, viz. knowledge of human nature. The British race avoids French error, and that, partly at least, through absence of French enthusiasm. Both in political and educational reform the work we do is never radical. As new light comes to us, we alter or add a little here and there, but as a rule we do not pull down and sweep away. The bulk or structure of our system remains as before. As a consequence of this our politicians are overweighted and frightfully encumbered by the load of lumber from the past, which they carry with * "Common Sense about Women," Thomas Higginson. + "Elements of Morality."

KNOWLEDGE AND GUIDANCE OF LIFE.

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them in every progressive step; and our children are burdened by an education which prematurely exhausts the brain, and leaves them, after all, without the really necessary subjective requirements of social life.

These requirements embrace some knowledge of bodily structure that is correct and solid, not superficial—an understanding of the dignity of the animal appetites and instincts, but at the same time the necessity for wholly subjecting these to the still higher requirements of social man; an apprehension of the delicacy and beauty of the emotional part of human nature, and the extreme importance of regulating it by development and exercise of the intellectual faculties, and a definite conception of moral principles that will guide to right action in social life, without reference to disputed theories of the universe, and subjects which young minds have not the power to judge of, or comprehend.

CHAPTER XII.

INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS.

"Eccentricity has always abounded where strength of character has abounded. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time."-JOHN STUART MILL.

"Do you think it worth while for people to make themselves disagreeable by resenting every trifling aggression?" an American asked Mr. Herbert Spencer, adding: “We Americans think it involves too much loss of time and temper, and doesn't pay." The tenor of Mr. Spencer's reply was, that the political corruption, the decay of the free institutions of America, springs from the habit in individuals of "easy-going readiness to permit small trespasses, because it would be troublesome, profitless, or unpopular, to oppose them;" and he quoted to the questioner words spoken by one of their own early statesmen : "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." Free institutions, said Mr. Spencer, can only be properly worked by men, each of whom is jealous of his own rights, and sympathetically jealous of the rights of others--who will neither himself aggress on his neighbour in small things or great, nor tolerate aggression on them by others.

I have hitherto condemned jealousy, but my reader will readily perceive that what Mr. Spencer here indicates is an emotion of a different nature, spoken of under the same term. Evolution in thought goes on so rapidly that evolution in language does not keep pace with it. The jealousy I have condemned is anti-social, an emotion in entire antagonism and opposition to general happiness; whilst the sympathetic jealousy which Mr. Spencer commends and approves is in perfect conformity with general happiness.