l, is good conduct;
while conduct whose total results, immediate and remote, are injurious,
is bad conduct. The _ultimate_ standards by which all men judge of
behaviour, are the resulting happiness or misery. We consider
drunkenness wrong because of the physical degeneracy and accompanying
moral evils entailed on the drunkard and his dependents. Did theft give
pleasure both to taker and loser, we should not find it in our catalogue
of sins. Were it conceivable that kind actions multiplied human
sufferings, we should condemn them--should not consider them kind. It
needs but to read the first newspaper-leader, or listen to any
conversation on social affairs, to see that acts of parliament,
political movements, philanthropic agitations, in common with the doings
of individuals are judged by their anticipated results in augmenting the
pleasures or pains of men. And if on analysing all secondary
superinduced ideas, we find these to be our final tests of right and
wrong, we cannot refuse to class bodily conduct as right or wrong
according to the beneficial or detrimental results produced.

Note, in the second place, the character of the punishments by which
these physical transgressions are prevented. Punishments, we call them,
in the absence of a better word; for they are not punishments in the
literal sense. They are not artificial and unnecessary inflictions of
pain; but are simply the beneficent checks to actions that are
essentially at variance with bodily welfare--checks in the absence of
which life would be quickly destroyed by bodily injuries. It is the
peculiarity of these penalties, if we must so call them, that they are
simply the _unavoidable consequences_ of the deeds which they follow:
they are nothing more than the _inevitable reactions_ entailed by the
child's actions.

Let it be further borne in mind that these painful reactions are
proportionate to the transgressions. A slight accident brings a slight
pain; a more serious one, a severer pain. It is not ordained that an
urchin who tumbles over the doorstep, shall suffer in excess of the
amount necessary; with the view of making it still more cautious than
the necessary suffering will make it. But from its daily experience it
is left to learn the greater or less penalties of greater or less
errors; and to behave accordingly.

And then mark, lastly, that these natural reactions which follow the
child's wrong actions, are constant, direct, unhesitating, and n