STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 167 



loving and happy one, the situation becomes exceedingly painful. 

 The pride and obstinacy notwithstanding, the culprit feels that 

 he is cut off from more than one half of his life, that his beautiful 

 world is laid in ruins. The same little boy who said, " I'd be a 

 worser mother," when four years and nine months old remarked 

 to his mother that if he could say what he liked to God 'twould 

 be, " Love me when I'm naughty." I think one can hardly con- 

 ceive of a more eloquent testimony to the suffering of the child in 

 the lonesome, loveless state of punishment. 



Is there any analogue of our sense of remorse in this early suf- 

 fering ? The question of an instinctive moral sense in children 

 is a perplexing one, and I do not propose to discuss it now. I 

 would only venture to suggest that in these poignant griefs of 

 child-life there seem to be signs of a consciousness of violated 

 instincts. This is, no doubt, in part the smarting of a loving 

 heart on remembering its unloving action. But there may be 

 more than this. A child of four or five is, I conceive, quite capa- 

 ble of reflecting at such a time that in his fit of naughtiness he 

 has broken with his normal orderly self, that he has set at defi- 

 ance that which he customarily honors and obeys. 



What, it may be asked, are these instincts ? In their earliest 

 discernible form they seem to me to be respect for rule, for a 

 regular manner of proceeding as opposed to an irregular. A 

 child, so I understand the little sphinx, is at once the subject of 

 ever-changing caprices whence the delight in playful defiance of 

 all rule and order and the reverer of custom, precedent, rule. 

 And, as I conceive, this reverence for precedent and rule is the 

 deeper and stronger, holding full sway in his serious moments. 



If this view is correct, the suffering of naughty children is 

 not, as has been said by some, wholly the result of the externals 

 of discipline, punishment, and the loss of the agreeable things 

 which follow good behavior, though this is commonly an ele- 

 ment ; nor is it merely the sense of loneliness and lovelessness 

 though that is probably a large slice of it ; but it contains the 

 germ of something nearer a true remorse, viz., a sense of normal 

 feelings and dispositions set at naught and contradicted. 



And now we may ask what evidence there is for the existence 

 of this respect for order and regularity other than that afforded 

 by the childish protests against apparent inconsistencies in the 

 administration of discipline. 



Mr. Walter Bagehot tells us that the great initial difficulty in 

 the formation of communities was the fixing of custom. How- 

 ever this be in the case of primitive communities, it seems to me 

 indisputable that in the case of a child brought up in normal sur- 

 roundings there is a clearly observable instinct to fall in with a 

 common mode of behavior. 



