"'You are a lad,' he began, 'of sudden desires, impetuous whims, a lad used to early satisfaction of your wants. Partly it is in your nature to be thus, partly it is the result of your upbringing which included too few restraints, which left you like a badly or partly broken colt, resentful of curbs. For this I am more to blame than you, though it's hard to see how I should have done other than I did. Perhaps I did not interest myself in your upbringing until too late, for by the time I began to teach you it was already clear that you were not of a ratiocinative or meditative turn of mind. Reading you found irksome, writing you hardly attempted after you had passed the abecedarian stage, and number, when you had mastered simple multiplication, you were content to leave as a mystery. Now I believe it is idle to force a young mind to accept what it cannot understand, for I believe it will reject all such forced teaching once the force is removed (whether it be the ferule of the pedant, or a Father's more tender insistence), and what is true of the teaching of knowledge is true of moral teachings too. That this is so is witnessed in the Annals of our Kind for who can deny that the generality of our race possesses no real sense of right and wrong at all? And this is because what it might have learnt by Reason is denied by its disability in reasoning, and what is taught by the rod is rejected when the rod is no longer feared.'"
--Julian Rathbone, Joseph: The life of Joseph Bosham, self-styled 3rd Viscount of Bosham, covering the years from 1790 to 1813; reprinted by Abacus Publishing; London, 1999.
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