or evil consequences which naturally follow this or that conduct. Aim,
therefore, to diminish the parental government, as fast as you can
substitute for it in your child's mind that self-government arising from
a foresight of results. During infancy a considerable amount of
absolutism is necessary. A three-year old urchin playing with an open
razor, cannot be allowed to learn by this discipline of consequences;
for the consequences may be too serious. But as intelligence increases,
the number of peremptory interferences may be, and should be,
diminished, with the view of gradually ending them as maturity is
approached. All transitions are dangerous; and the most dangerous is the
transition from the restraint of the family circle to the non-restraint
of the world. Hence the importance of pursuing the policy we advocate;
which, by cultivating a boy's faculty of self-restraint, by continually
increasing the degree in which he is left to his self-restraint, and by
so bringing him, step by step, to a state of unaided self-restraint,
obliterates the ordinary sudden and hazardous change from
externally-governed youth to internally-governed maturity. Let the
history of your domestic rule typify, in little, the history of our
political rule: at the outset, autocratic control, where control is
really needful; by and by an incipient constitutionalism, in which the
liberty of the subject gains some express recognition; successive
extensions of this liberty of the subject; gradually ending in parental
abdication.

Do not regret the display of considerable self-will on the part of your
children. It is the correlative of that diminished coerciveness so
conspicuous in modern education. The greater tendency to assert freedom
of action on the one side, corresponds to the smaller tendency to
tyrannise on the other. They both indicate an approach to the system of
discipline we contend for, under which children will be more and more
led to rule themselves by the experience of natural consequences; and
they are both accompaniments of our more advanced social state. The
independent English boy is the father of the independent English man;
and you cannot have the last without the first. German teachers say that
they had rather manage a dozen German boys than one English one. Shall
we, therefore, wish that our boys had the manageableness of German ones,
and with it the submissiveness and political serfdom of adult Germans?
Or shall we not rat