ot to be
escaped. No threats; but a silent, rigorous performance. If a child runs
a pin into its finger, pain follows. If it does it again, there is again
the same result: and so on perpetually. In all its dealing with
inorganic Nature it finds this unswerving persistence, which listens to
no excuse, and from which there is no appeal; and very soon recognising
this stern though beneficent discipline, it becomes extremely careful
not to transgress.

Still more significant will these general truths appear, when we
remember that they hold throughout adult life as well as throughout
infantine life. It is by an experimentally-gained knowledge of the
natural consequences, that men and women are checked when they go wrong.
After home-education has ceased, and when there are no longer parents
and teachers to forbid this or that kind of conduct, there comes into
play a discipline like that by which the young child is trained to
self-guidance. If the youth entering on the business of life idles away
his time and fulfils slowly or unskilfully the duties entrusted to him,
there by and by follows the natural penalty: he is discharged, and left
to suffer for awhile the evils of a relative poverty. On the unpunctual
man, ever missing his appointments of business and pleasure, there
continually fall the consequent inconveniences, losses, and
deprivations. The tradesmen who charges too high a rate of profit, loses
his customers, and so is checked in his greediness. Diminishing practice
teaches the inattentive doctor to bestow more trouble on his patients.
The too credulous creditor and the over-sanguine speculator, alike learn
by the difficulties which rashness entails on them, the necessity of
being more cautious in their engagements. And so throughout the life of
every citizen. In the quotation so often made _apropos_ of such
cases--"The burnt child dreads the fire"--we see not only that the
analogy between this social discipline and Nature's early discipline of
infants is universally recognised; but we also see an implied conviction
that this discipline is of the most efficient kind. Nay indeed, this
conviction is more than implied; it is distinctly stated. Every one has
heard others confess that only by "dearly bought experience" had they
been induced to give up some bad or foolish course of conduct formerly
pursued. Every one has heard, in the criticism passed on the doings of
this spendthrift or the other schemer, the remark that