ill follow specified acts, follow with like uniformity,
he will soon come to respect your laws as he does those of Nature. And
this respect once established, will prevent endless domestic evils. Of
errors in education one of the worst is inconsistency. As in a
community, crimes multiply when there is no certain administration of
justice; so in a family, an immense increase of transgressions results
from a hesitating or irregular infliction of punishments. A weak mother,
who perpetually threatens and rarely performs--who makes rules in haste
and repents of them at leisure--who treats the same offence now with
severity and now with leniency, as the passing humour dictates, is
laying up miseries for herself and her children. She is making herself
contemptible in their eyes; she is setting them an example of
uncontrolled feelings; she is encouraging them to transgress by the
prospect of probable impunity: she is entailing endless squabbles and
accompanying damage to her own temper and the tempers of her little
ones; she is reducing their minds to a moral chaos, which after years of
bitter experience will with difficulty bring into order. Better even a
barbarous form of domestic government carried out consistently, than a
humane one inconsistently carried out. Again we say, avoid coercive
measures whenever it is possible to do so; but when you find despotism
really necessary, be despotic in good earnest.

Remember that the aim of your discipline should be to produce a
_self-governing_ being; not to produce a being to be _governed by
others_. Were your children fated to pass their lives as slaves, you
could not too much accustom them to slavery during their childhood; but
as they are by and by to be free men, with no one to control their daily
conduct, you cannot too much accustom them to self-control while they
are still under your eye. This it is which makes the system of
discipline by natural consequences so especially appropriate to the
social state which we in England have now reached. In feudal times, when
one of the chief evils the citizen had to fear was the anger of his
superiors, it was well that during childhood, parental vengeance should
be a chief means of government. But now that the citizen has little to
fear from any one--now that the good or evil which he experiences is
mainly that which in the order of things results from his own conduct,
he should from his first years begin to learn, experimentally, the good