STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 177 



worse example is that recorded by Ruskin : When a child, he was 

 expected to come down to dessert and crack nuts for the grand 

 older folk while peremptorily forbidden to eat any. Such refined 

 cruelties of government deserve to be defeated in their objects. 

 Much of our ill success in governing children would probably 

 turn out to be attributable to unwisdom in assigning tasks, and 

 more particularly in making exactions which wound that sensi- 

 tive fiber of a child's heart, the sense of justice. 



Parents are, I fear, apt to forget that generosity and the other 

 liberal virtues owe their worth to their spontaneity. They may 

 be suggested and encouraged but can not be exacted. On the 

 other hand, a parent can not be more foolish than to discourage a 

 spontaneous out-going of good impulse, as if nothing were good 

 but what emanated from a spirit of obedience. In a pretty and 

 touching little American work, Beckonings from Little Hands, the 

 writer describes the remorse of a father who after his child's 

 death recalled the little fellow's first crude endeavor to help him 

 by bringing fuel, an endeavor which, alas ! he had met with some- 

 thing like a rebuff. 



The right method of training which develops and strengthens 

 by bracing exercise the instinct of obedience can not easily be 

 summarized, for it is the outcome of the highest wisdom. I 

 may, however, be permitted to indicate one or two of its main 

 features. 



Informed at the outset by a fine moral feeling and a practical 

 tact as to what ought to be expected, the wise mother is concerned 

 before everything to make her laws appear as much a matter of 

 course as the daily sequences of the home life, as unquestionable 

 axioms of behavior; and this not by a foolish vehemence of 

 inculcation, but by a quiet, skillful inweaving of them into the 

 order of the child's world. To expect the right thing, as though 

 the wrong thing were an impossibility, rather than to be always 

 pointing out the wrong thing and threatening consequences ; to 

 make all her words and all her own actions support this view of 

 the inevitableness of law ; to meet any indications of a disobedient 

 spirit first with misunderstanding and later with amazement 

 this is surely the first and fundamental matter. 



The effectiveness of this discipline depends on the simple 

 psychological principle that difficult actions tend to realize them- 

 selves in the measure in which the ideas of them become clear 

 and persistent. Get a child steadily to follow out in thought an 

 act to which he is disinclined and you have more than half 

 mastered the disinclination. The quiet daily insistence of the 

 wise rule of the nursery proceeds by setting up and maintaining 

 the ideas of dutiful actions, and so excluding the thought of dis- 

 obedient actions. 



TOL. XLVIII. 13 



