ed possession, not
only suffers a keenly-felt consequence, but gains a knowledge of
causation: both the one and the other being just like those which adult
life will bring. Whereas a child who in such cases receives a reprimand,
or some factitious penalty, not only experiences a consequence for which
it often cares very little, but misses that instruction respecting the
essential natures of good and evil conduct, which it would else have
gathered. It is a vice of the common system of artificial rewards and
punishments, long since noticed by the clear-sighted, that by
substituting for the natural results of misbehaviour certain tasks or
castigations, it produces a radically wrong moral standard. Having
throughout infancy and boyhood always regarded parental or tutorial
displeasure as the chief result of a forbidden action, the youth has
gained an established association of ideas between such action and such
displeasure, as cause and effect. Hence when parents and tutors have
abdicated, and their displeasure is not to be feared, the restraints on
forbidden actions are in great measure removed: the true restraints, the
natural reactions, having yet to be learnt by sad experience. As writes
one who has had personal knowledge of this short-sighted system:--"Young
men let loose from school, particularly those whose parents have
neglected to exert their influence, plunge into every description of
extravagance; they know no rule of action--they are ignorant of the
reasons for moral conduct--they have no foundation to rest upon--and
until they have been severely disciplined by the world are extremely
dangerous members of society."

Another great advantage of this natural discipline is, that it is a
discipline of pure justice; and will be recognised as such by every
child. Whoso suffers nothing more than the evil which in the order of
nature results from his own misbehaviour, is much less likely to think
himself wrongly treated than if he suffers an artificially inflicted
evil; and this will hold of children as of men. Take the case of a boy
who is habitually reckless of his clothes--scrambles through hedges
without caution, or is utterly regardless of mud. If he is beaten, or
sent to bed, he is apt to consider himself ill-used; and is more likely
to brood over his injuries than to repent of his transgressions. But
suppose he is required to rectify as far as possible the harm he has
done--to clean off the mud with which he has co