knowledge_, is
totally false with respect to evil _impulses_; as half an hour's
observation in the nursery will prove to any one. Boys when left to
themselves, as at public schools, treat each other more brutally than
men do; and were they left to themselves at an earlier age their
brutality would be still more conspicuous.

Not only is it unwise to set up a high standard of good conduct for
children, but it is even unwise to use very urgent incitements to good
conduct. Already most people recognise the detrimental results of
intellectual precocity; but there remains to be recognised the fact that
_moral precocity_ also has detrimental results. Our higher moral
faculties, like our higher intellectual ones, are comparatively complex.
By consequence, both are comparatively late in their evolution. And with
the one as with the other, an early activity produced by stimulation
will be at the expense of the future character. Hence the not uncommon
anomaly that those who during childhood were models of juvenile
goodness, by and by undergo a seemingly inexplicable change for the
worse, and end by being not above but below par; while relatively
exemplary men are often the issue of a childhood by no means promising.

Be content, therefore, with moderate measures and moderate results. Bear
in mind that a higher morality, like a higher intelligence, must be
reached by slow growth; and you will then have patience with those
imperfections which your child hourly displays. You will be less prone
to that constant scolding, and threatening, and forbidding, by which
many parents induce a chronic domestic irritation, in the foolish hope
that they will thus make their children what they should be.

This liberal form of domestic government, which does not seek
despotically to regulate all the details of a child's conduct,
necessarily results from the system we advocate. Satisfy yourself with
seeing that your child always suffers the natural consequences of his
actions, and you will avoid that excess of control in which so many
parents err. Leave him wherever you can to the discipline of experience,
and you will save him from that hot-house virtue which over-regulation
produces in yielding natures, or that demoralising antagonism which it
produces in independent ones.

By aiming in all cases to insure the natural reactions to your child's
actions, you will put an advantageous check on your own temper. The
method of moral education pursue