All government includes some necessary hardness.
General rules will bear hard on particular cases.' This last maxim my father seemed to consider a settler in most alleged cases of cruelty.
After he had said _that_, he commonly drew up his feet on the sofa, like a man that has disposed of a business, and betook himself to a nap, or the newspaper, as the case might be.
"The fact is my father showed the exact sort of talent for a statesman.
He could have divided Poland as easily as an orange, or trod on Ireland as quietly and systematically as any man living.

At last my mother gave up, in despair.

It never will be known, till the last account, what noble and sensitive natures like hers have felt, cast, utterly helpless, into what seems to them an abyss of injustice and cruelty, and which seems so to nobody about them.

It has been an age of long sorrow of such natures, in such a hell-begotten sort of world as ours.

What remained for her, but to train her children in her own views and sentiments?
Well, after all you say about training, children will grow up substantially what they _are_ by nature, and only that.